Supporting Digital Scholarship Bibliographic Control Library Cooperatives and…

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Supporting Digital Scholarship: Bibliographic Control, Library Cooperatives and Open Access Repositories :

“Research libraries have entered an era of discontinuous change—a time when the cumulated assets of the past do not guarantee future success. Bibliographic control, cooperative cataloguing systems and library catalogues have been key assets in the research library service framework for supporting scholarship. This chapter examines these assets in the context of changing library collections, new metadata sources and methods, open access repositories, digital scholarship and the purposes of research libraries. Advocating a fundamental rethinking of the research library service framework, the chapter concludes with a call for research libraries to collectively consider new approaches that could strengthen their roles as essential contributors to emergent, network-level scholarly research infrastructures.”

URL : http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/16084/

Scientists who engage with society perform better academically…

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Scientists who engage with society perform better academically :

“Most scientific institutions acknowledge the importance of opening the so-called ‘ivory tower’ of academic research through popularization, industrial collaboration or teaching. However, little is known about the actual openness of scientific institutions and how their proclaimed priorities translate into concrete measures. This paper gives an idea of some actual practices by studying three key points: the proportion of researchers who are active in wider dissemination, the academic productivity of these scientists, and the institutional recognition of their wider dissemination activities in terms of their careers. We analyze extensive data about the academic production, career recognition and teaching or public/industrial outreach of several thousand of scientists, from many disciplines, from France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. We find that, contrary to what is often suggested, scientists active in wider dissemination are also more active academically. However, their dissemination activities have almost no impact (positive or negative) on their careers.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4672

Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth…

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Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline :

“Most refereed journal articles today are published in subscription journals, accessible only to subscribing institutions, hence losing considerable research impact. Making articles freely accessible online (“Open Access,” OA) maximizes their impact. Articles can be made OA in two ways: by self-archiving them on the web (“Green OA”) or by publishing them in OA journals (“Gold OA”). We compared the percent and growth rate of Green and Gold OA for 14 disciplines in two random samples of 1300 articles per discipline out of the 12,500 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI using a robot that trawled the web for OA full-texts. We sampled in 2009 and 2011 for publication year ranges 1998-2006 and 2005-2010, respectively. Green OA (21.4%) exceeds Gold OA (2.4%) in proportion and growth rate in all but the biomedical disciplines, probably because it can be provided for all journals articles and does not require paying extra Gold OA publication fees. The spontaneous overall OA growth rate is still very slow (about 1% per year). If institutions make Green OA self-archiving mandatory, however, it triples percent Green OA as well as accelerating its growth rate.”

URL : http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/

Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International…

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Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International Scholarly Communication :

“Japan has achieved social and economic growth through its strengths in science and technology. However, in the face of globalisation, various factors, including the continued appreciation of the yen, the emerging economic powers, and a declining birth rate combined with an aging population have weakened Japan’s competitiveness in the world and resulted in a prevalent sense of stagnation in society.

Intellectual assets are among such important resources for Japan, which is a country with limited material resources, that greater efforts on the promotion of science and technology, and the promotion of creative and forward-looking scientific research, in particular, have to be taken than ever in order to enhance Japan’s international competitiveness.

To promote scientific research, it is essential that timely and wide access to information be guaranteed to those who need it. At the same time, it is important to promptly publish and distribute outstanding research results domestically and internationally, and to make use of them in society. Doing so will increase Japan’s intellectual presence and attract excellent researchers from around the world, leading to further development of science in Japan and stimulation of society as a whole.”

URL : http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/10/25/1323890_4_2.pdf

The Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability…

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The Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability (2012) :

“In the past few years, Open Access repositories and their associated services have become an increasingly important component of the global e-Research infrastructure. The real value of repositories is their potential to be connected in order to develop a network of repositories which enables unified access to an open, aggregated mass of scholarship and related materials that machines and researchers can work with in new ways.

However, this potential to create a unified body of scholarly materials is entirely reliant on interoperability – specifically, that repositories follow consistent guidelines, protocols, and standards for interoperability which allow them to communicate with each other; connect with other systems; and transfer information, metadata, and digital objects between each other. The repository infrastructure is still relatively new, leading to an evolving interoperability landscape that at first sight may appear chaotic, confusing, and complex.

This report is designed to be the first stage of a multi-phase process aiming to establish the COAR Roadmap for Interoperability. The second phase is planned to be completed with the release of a follow-up report: Future Directions for Interoperability. The follow-up report will address emerging issues and current research & development efforts.”

URL : http://www.coar-repositories.org/files/COAR-The-Current-State-of-Open-Access-Repository-Interoperability.pdf

Open Access in Biomedical Research This Science…

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Open Access in Biomedical Research :

“This Science Policy Briefing aims to accelerate the adoption of open access to research articles in the biomedical sciences. Open access refers to the free availability on the public Internet of scholarly articles published in an electronic format, permitting any user to read and re-use the
content provided only that the author is properly acknowledged and cited. We consider open access to be crucial for the free flow of information between researchers and within society as a whole, and the digital revolution of recent years provides an opportunity that has not yet been fully realised to transform access to scholarly publications.”

URL : http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/esf-emrc-science-policy-briefing.pdf

Anatomy of open access publishing a study of…

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Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure :

Background : Open access (OA) is a revolutionary way of providing access to the scholarly journal literature made possible by the Internet. The primary aim of this study was to measure the volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals from 2000 to 2011, while observing longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of OA publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types and relative distribution among scientific disciplines. The secondary aim was to measure the share of OA articles of all journal articles, including articles made OA by publishers with a delay and individual author-paid OA articles in subscription journals (hybrid OA), as these subsets of OA publishing have mostly been ignored in previous studies.

Methods : Stratified random sampling of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (n = 787) was performed. The annual publication volumes spanning 2000 to 2011 were retrieved from major publication indexes and through manual data collection.

Results : An estimated 340,000 articles were published by 6,713 full immediate OA journals during 2011. OA journals requiring article-processing charges have become increasingly common, publishing 166,700 articles in 2011 (49% of all OA articles). This growth is related to the growth of commercial publishers, who, despite only a marginal presence a decade ago, have grown to become key actors on the OA scene, responsible for 120,000 of the articles published in 2011. Publication volume has grown within all major scientific disciplines, however, biomedicine has seen a particularly rapid 16-fold growth between 2000 (7,400 articles) and 2011 (120,900 articles). Over the past decade, OA journal publishing has steadily increased its relative share of all scholarly journal articles by about 1% annually. Approximately 17% of the 1.66 million articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers, most articles immediately (12%) but some within 12 months of publication (5%).

Conclusions : OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, having rapidly grown in relative annual share of published journal articles during the last decade.”

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124