Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational Culture :
“Research libraries will continue to be affected by rapid and transformative changes in information technology and the networked environment for the foreseeable future. The pace and direction of these changes will profoundly challenge libraries and their staffs to respond effectively. This paper presents the results of a survey that was designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in these times of precipitous change. The study finds that future leaders of academic libraries perceive a significant gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures and that current organizational cultures limit their effectiveness.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18915/
Archives des auteurs : Hans Dillaerts
Wisconsin Distance Education Conference …
What are your information needs? Three u…
What are your information needs? Three user studies about research information in the Netherlands, with an emphasis on the NARCIS portal :
“The NARCIS portal (www.narcis.info) provides access to science information (information about research, researchers and research institutions) and scientific information [(full‐text) publications and datasets]. The portal is very popular, with 1.2 million users annually. NARCIS is also an important supplier of information to international services such as Google/Google Scholar, WorldWideScience.org and DRIVER.
In 2009 the KNAW conducted a three‐part user survey, with two online surveys and a series of semi‐
structured interviews. The aim was to learn more about the people who use the portal, why they use it and their ideas and wishes for improvements to the portal. Another purpose of the survey was to identify changes that could be made to improve the match between the services provided by NARCIS and the needs of existing and potential users.
The surveys showed that more than half of the users of NARCIS are from universities, research institutions or universities of applied science. Most searches conducted on NARCIS are for dissertations. The existence of a single gateway to different types of information is regarded as very useful. The most frequently mentioned improvement in the service would be to provide access to information from other countries as well. Respondents also mentioned the provision of tools for performing complex analyses of the information available via NARCIS as a worthwhile option for enhancing the service.
The interviews revealed, among other things, the need for the presentation of information in context and that senior officials are often confronted with information overload.
The user survey has led to a series of proposals for modifications or improvements in the service; some of them may be implemented immediately, while others will require consultation at national or international level.”
URL : http://depot.knaw.nl/5662/2/What_are_your_information_needs_Elpub_2010.pdf
Anthologize : “Use the power of WordPre…
Anthologize :
“Use the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.”
URL : http://anthologize.org/
Copyright and Open Access for Academic W…
Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works :
“In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds.”
URL : http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24095/
Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) provided support for a feasibility study, to outline one possible approach to measuring the impacts of the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) on returns to public investment in R&D. The aim is to define and scope the data collection requirements and further model developments necessary for a more robust estimate of the likely impacts of the proposed FRPAA open archiving mandate.
Preliminary modeling suggests that over a transitional period of 30 years from implementation, the potential incremental benefits of the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be worth between 4 and 24 times the costs. Perhaps two-thirds of these benefits would accrue within the US, with the remainder spilling over to other countries. Hence, the US national benefits arising from the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be of the order of 16 times the costs.
Exploring sensitivities in the model we find that the benefits exceed the costs over a wide range of values. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any plausible values for the input data and model parameters that would lead to a fundamentally different answer.
These preliminary estimates are based on the information available to us at the time of writing. They are released in conjunction with an online model, which enables others to explore their own preferred values for the various parameters.
Report on Best Practices and Recommendat…
Report on Best Practices and Recommendations :
“This report is the third in a series of studies conducted by OAPEN on digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The first report focused on the needs of users and stakeholders, and the second looked at the existing (and developing) publishing and business models. The aim of this report is to provide the different players—publishers, funders, librarians, readers, scholars and politicians—with a set of recommendations concerning the strategic issues in Open Access book publishing. For those already in the process of developing an Open Access policy, this report maps out the issues and decisions they may confront.”
URL : http://www.oapen.org/images/D316_OAPEN_Best_practice_public_report.pdf