Archives des auteurs : Hans Dillaerts

The impact of free access to the scientific…

Posté le par

The impact of free access to the scientific literature: a review of recent research :

“Objectives: The paper reviews recent studies that evaluate the impact of free access (open access) on the behavior of scientists as authors, readers, and citers in developed and developing nations. It also examines the extent to which the biomedical literature is used by the general public.

Method: The paper is a critical review of the literature, with systematic description of key studies.

Results: Researchers report that their access to the scientific literature is generally good and improving. For authors, the access status of a journal is not an important consideration when deciding where to publish. There is clear evidence that free access increases the number of article downloads, although its impact on article citations is not clear. Recent studies indicate that large citation advantages are simply artifacts of the failure to adequately control for confounding variables. The effect of free access on the general public’s use of the primary medical literature has not been thoroughly evaluated.

Conclusions: Recent studies provide little evidence to support the idea that there is a crisis in access to the scholarly literature. Further research is needed to investigate whether free access is making a difference in non-research contexts and to better understand the dissemination of scientific literature through peer-to-peer networks and other informal mechanisms.”

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3133904/

Who Shares Who Doesn’t Factors Associated with Openly…

Posté le par

Who Shares? Who Doesn’t? Factors Associated with Openly Archiving Raw Research Data :

“Many initiatives encourage investigators to share their raw datasets in hopes of increasing research efficiency and quality. Despite these investments of time and money, we do not have a firm grasp of who openly shares raw research data, who doesn’t, and which initiatives are correlated with high rates of data sharing. In this analysis I use bibliometric methods to identify patterns in the frequency with which investigators openly archive their raw gene expression microarray datasets after study publication.

Automated methods identified 11,603 articles published between 2000 and 2009 that describe the creation of gene expression microarray data. Associated datasets in best-practice repositories were found for 25% of these articles, increasing from less than 5% in 2001 to 30%–35% in 2007–2009. Accounting for sensitivity of the automated methods, approximately 45% of recent gene expression studies made their data publicly available.

First-order factor analysis on 124 diverse bibliometric attributes of the data creation articles revealed 15 factors describing authorship, funding, institution, publication, and domain environments. In multivariate regression, authors were most likely to share data if they had prior experience sharing or reusing data, if their study was published in an open access journal or a journal with a relatively strong data sharing policy, or if the study was funded by a large number of NIH grants. Authors of studies on cancer and human subjects were least likely to make their datasets available.

These results suggest research data sharing levels are still low and increasing only slowly, and data is least available in areas where it could make the biggest impact. Let’s learn from those with high rates of sharing to embrace the full potential of our research output.”

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018657

Widening access to serials in the developing world…

Posté le par

Widening access to serials in the developing world: the role and philosophy of INASP :

“The International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) has been working for many years with partner countries in the developing world to support all aspects of the scholarly research and communication cycle – by facilitating access to international scholarly e-journals, supporting the creation of indigenous e-journals, equipping librarians with the skills to support research, and
helping libraries to create the infrastructure to enable them to deliver services in the digital library environment and provide integrated management of digital resources.

For a philanthropic organisation such as INASP sustainability is central as without a plan for self-sufficiency all philanthropic work will ultimately fail. This paper describes our Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERii) approach to supporting sustainable availability, access and use of research that is owned by and embedded within researchers’ own institutions. PERii has been described by Chan and Costa (2005)1 as “the most comprehensive initiative of access to worldwide research” and as well as the learning and successes, this paper will also set out some of the challenges that have arisen in building capacity to enable libraries to take charge of their own futures.

These challenges are significant. There are the obvious obstacles of funding and limitations of ICT and related infrastructures, but in many ways the real sustainability challenges relate to people: how to build on existing strengths and assets and enhance local ability to solve problems; encouraging and stimulating individuals to act either alone or, more effectively, together; and understanding the country context.”

URL : http://conference.ifla.org/sites/default/files/files/papers/ifla77/164-belcher-en.pdf

Bookshare: Making Accessible Materials Available Worldwide

Posté le par

Bookshare is the largest online library of accessible copyrighted materials for readers with print disabilities. In the last three years Bookshare has built a collection of over 30,000 books available throughout the world, serving people in 28 countries that span the globe. Developed and operated by Benetech, a non-profit using technology to serve unmet social needs,

Bookshare International works with local partners to provide content in multiple languages to serve people with print disabilities. Bookshare is particularly focused on addressing the accessible “book famine” in developing countries and applies ongoing
innovation to do so in a sustainable, effective manner.

URL : http://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2011/148-beaumon-en.pdf

Analysis of Chemists and Economists survey on Open…

Posté le par

Analysis of Chemists and Economists survey on Open Access :

“The data presented here should be approached with due caution. We are dealing with a relatively small number of academics from a selection of higher education institutions (HEIs), so extrapolating these findings to academia as a whole would not be advisable. There are few non-participants in open access (OA) in the sample, so if there is a bias in the sample, it is towards those who already engage with OA. We can therefore feel more confident about the data regarding why academics do use OA as opposed to why they do not. There were however a large number of participants who did not always make their work OA. From them we should gain some insight into the barriers that currently exist to making work OA.

We know that three institutions from which the academics in this study were drawn have a policy or mandate requiring academic staff to make their work open access. Of those that did have an institutional policy (54 academics), only seven were confident of this. A similar picture existed with funder mandates. Of those that did have a funder mandate (65 academics) only 14 reported that they did. The majority of the academics in the study are engaged with open access, so we can conclude that these policies have had little impact on the uptake of OA. HEIs have failed to get the message of these mandates over to these engaged academics, so we can surmise that the message has also not got over to the less engaged.

The motivations for engaging with open access given by these academics tend to be internal, personal reasons, especially altruistic ones. Both chemists and economists see themselves as working for the wider public benefit. However, economists especially also give more selfish reasons, where OA is seen as conferring a personal benefit. External forces that attempt to push academics towards engagement with OA feature less prominently. One academic commented that the existence of an institutional mandate would make him feel less inclined to engage. However, these are academics who are already engaged, and may be enthusiastic, early adopters of OA. It may take more “push” to bring the others on board.

Quality is a concern for both chemists and economists. The need to publish in high-impact journals and the peer-review process are major concerns of academics when they choose not to participate in OA. These are however issues that would affect any new journal, in any medium. Reputation and the perception of quality take time to develop. However open-access journals need to ensure that they have adequate quality procedures in place with regard to issues like plagiarism and peer review.

The use of an open access option from a traditional journal was the least popular means of making work open access. This is in spite of this option offering a solution to the problem of quality. Cost was a major issue for academics when they choose not to make work open access. Most of these same academics reported that institutional support for payment of open access fees would encourage them to participate in future.”

URL : http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/rcs/Chemists&Economists_Analysis-Steve_Davies.pdf

A further exploration of the views of chemists…

Posté le par

A further exploration of the views of chemists and economists on Open Access issues in the UK :

“Most UK researchers are attached to academic institutions. Although there are variations in the breadth of the subscription base of institutional libraries, most scholars have smooth and seamless access to most of the scholarly research outputs that they require, for most of the time. Their world is largely an open one. For this reason, the policy discourse about openness in general, and Open Access in particular has had little influence on most academics. Their world is dominated less by issues of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and public good, than by the motivations in relation to scholarly publishing that exist within their own field. The focus of this study is on the latter, that is, on culture and the reasons behind researchers’ attitude to Open Access.

It is worth noting that ‘ Open Access’ is not a term whose nuances and implications are widely understood. For most people the key distinction is – ‘is it free or do I have to pay for it?’ The organisation and arrangements that go on behind the scenes to make that ‘free’ stuff possible is and will probably always be only a concern for a tiny minority of people. But having the free access is a concern for everyone. In a similar way: everyone wants to use Google to find things but how many people get involved in discussing search algorithms, ranking and indexing?”

URL : http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/rcs/Chemists&EconomistsViews_on_OA.pdf

The Impact of Open Access Contributions Developed and…

Posté le par

The Impact of Open Access Contributions: Developed and Developing World Perspectives :

“The study explores the research impact of ‘Open Access research articles’ across the globe with a view to test the hypothesis that “OA research contributions emanating from developing countries receive equal citations (subsequently resultant research impact) as those from the developed world”. The study covers 5639 research articles from 50 Open Access DOAJ based Medical Sciences journals covering the period from 2005 to 2006. The research impact of OA research publications measured by the citation counts varies from journal to journal and from country to country. Statistically significant difference is noted between the research impact of the developed and the developing world for OA research articles. The research articles from the developed countries receive higher number of citations (subsequently resultant research impact) compared to those of the developing world. The study may help and pave way for framing policies and strategies to increase the impact of research in the developing world.”

URL : http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?107_elpub2011