Archives des auteurs : Hans Dillaerts

A longitudinal comparison of citation rates and growth…

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A longitudinal comparison of citation rates and growth among open access journals :

“The study documents the growth in the number of journals and articles along with the increase in normalized citation rates of open access (OA) journals listed in the Scopus bibliographic database between 1999 and 2010. Longitudinal statistics on growth in journals/articles and citation rates are broken down by funding model, discipline, and whether the journal was launched or had converted to OA. The data we re retrieved from the web sites of SCIMago Journal and Country Rank (journal /article counts), JournalM3trics (SNIP2 values), Scopus (journal discipline) and Director y of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (OA and funding status). OA journals/articles have grown much faster than subscription journals but still make up less that 12% of the journals in Scopus. Two-year cita tion averages for journals funded by article processing charges (APCs) have reached the same level as subscription journals. Citation averages of OA journals funded by other means continue to lag well behind OA journals funded by APCs and subscription journals. We hypothesize this is less an issue of quality than due to the fact that such journals are commonly published in languages other than English and tend to be located outside the four major publishing countries.”

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc9/acceptedversion.pdf

Fulfilling an Institutional and Public Good Mission A…

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Fulfilling an Institutional and Public Good Mission: A Case Study of Access :

“Access to higher education has been and remains a critical issue, yet research typically focuses on students and programs which may overlook the role of the faculty. Through an in-depth case study, the perspectives of tenured and tenure-track faculty at a predominately White, Midwestern land-grant, research institution are described as they relate to issues of student access to higher education. The context of the case was instrumental in understanding faculty perspectives of access and centered on the fundamental notion of education as public good and its association with institutional history and mission. The findings suggest that faculty members uphold the belief of higher education serving a greater purpose, or public good. However, faculty participants rarely saw themselves as actors in the issue of access.
The faculty held many expectations for students, some of which were reflected in the access literature and models, such as academic preparation and ability to navigate the university. Other expectations are absent in the access literature. Faculty members expect students to demonstrate a certain cultural capital and rewards students who demonstrate these skills, behaviors and knowledge. These expectations are often implicit and hidden from students. These finding suggests that some students or groups of students, especially those that face the biggest barriers to higher education, have the potential to be overlooked without advocacy and faculty buy-in. This study also advances the emerging theory of Academic Capital Formation (St. John et al., 2011) by presenting the faculty’s view of access.”

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cehsedaddiss/125/

Main basse sur la science publique : Le «coût de génie» de l’édition scientifique privée

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Imaginez un monde où les chercheurs des établissements publics de recherche et des universités seraient rétribués individuellement en fonction de leur contribution au chiffre d’affaire d’un oligopole de grands groupes privés, et où les moyens humains et financiers affectés à leurs recherches en dépendraient.

Projet d’un think-tank ultra-libéral, voire science-fiction pensez-vous ?… ou alors cas particulier de quelques fraudes liées à l’industrie du médicament ? Non, non, regardez bien autour de vous, c’est déjà le cas, dans l’ensemble du monde scientifique (sciences de la nature, médicales, agronomiques…), et ce à l’insu de la grande majorité des gens, et de trop de chercheurs ! Mais une prise de conscience est en train de s’opérer et une bataille s’engage sur tous les continents.”

URL : http://www.inra.cgt.fr/actions/revendications/Main_basse_sur_la_Science.pdf

The ethics of open access publishing

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Should those who work on ethics welcome or resist moves to open access publishing? This paper analyses arguments in favour and against the increasing requirement for open access publishing and considers their implications for bioethics research. In the context of biomedical science, major funders are increasingly mandating open access as a condition of funding and such moves are also common in other disciplines.

Whilst there has been some debate about the implications of open-access for the social sciences and humanities, there has been little if any discussion about the implications of open access for ethics. This is surprising given both the central role of public reason and critique in ethics and the fact that many of the arguments made for and against open access have been couched in moral terms.

In what follows I argue that those who work in ethics have a strong interest in supporting moves towards more open publishing approaches which have the potential both to inform and promote richer and more diverse forms of public deliberation and to be enriched by them. The importance of public deliberation in practical and applied ethics suggests that ethicists have a particular interest in the promotion of diverse and experimental forms of publication and debate and in supporting new, more creative and more participatory approaches to publication.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/14/16/abstract

La valorisation sur Internet du patrimoine scientifique étude…

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La valorisation sur Internet du patrimoine scientifique : étude des besoins. Le cas de la médiathèque scientifique de l’Institut Pasteur :

“La Médiathèque scientifique de l’Institut Pasteur vient d’initier une réflexion sur l’opportunité de mettre en place une bibliothèque numérique pour valoriser des documents patrimoniaux internes. Dans un premier temps, ce projet nous a amenés à nous interroger sur la définition, les caractéristiques et les enjeux du patrimoine scientifique en France. Nous avons ensuite effectué une étude des besoins de l’Institut Pasteur afin de mettre en relief différents objectifs possibles et par conséquent plusieurs scénarios de valorisation sur Internet. Une méthodologie d’étude des besoins et de faisabilité est présentée.”

URL : http://memsic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/mem_00803701

Open Access versus Traditional Journal Pricing Using a…

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Open Access versus Traditional Journal Pricing: Using a Simple “Platform Market” Model to Understand Which Will Win (and Which Should) :

“Economists have built a theory to understand markets in which, rather than selling directly to buyers, suppliers sell through a platform, which controls prices on both sides. The theory has been applied to understand markets ranging from telephony, to credit cards, to media. In this paper, we apply the theory to the market for scholarly journals, with the journal functioning as the platform between submitting authors and subscribing readers. Our goal is to understand the conditions under which a journal would prefer open access to traditional pricing and under which open access would be better for the scholarly community. Our new model captures much of the richness of the existing economic literature on journal pricing, and indeed adds some fresh insights, yet is simple enough to be accessible to a broad audience.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.035

Open Access Initiatives in Africa — Structure, Incentives and Disincentives

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Building open access in Africa is imperative not only for African scholars and researchers doing scientific research but also for the expansion of the global science and technology knowledgebase. This paper examines the structure of homegrown initiatives, and observes very low level of awareness prevailing in the higher educational institutions and research institutes, organizations and governments.

Increasing penetration of internet as well as growing proficiency in its use account for any evidence of OA movement in the region. The absence of interest and willingness of governments and policy makers to take a role in building the movement in the region makes any observed progress a fragmented one.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.024