Do Download Reports Reliably Measure Journal Usage? Trusting the Fox to Count Your Hens?

Authors : Alex Wood-Doughty, Ted Bergstrom, Douglas G. Steigerwald

Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users.

If reported download rates accurately measure local usage, there is a strong case for using them to compare the cost-effectiveness of journal subscriptions. We examine data for nearly 8,000 journals downloaded at the ten universities in the University of California system during a period of six years.

We find that controlling for number of articles, publisher, and year of download, the ratio of downloads to citations differs substantially among academic disciplines.

After adding academic disciplines to the control variables, there remain substantial “publisher effects”, with some publishers reporting significantly more downloads than would be predicted by the characteristics of their journals.

These cross-publisher differences suggest that the currently available download statistics, which are supplied by publishers, are not sufficiently reliable to allow libraries to make subscription decisions based on price and reported downloads, at least without making an adjustment for publisher effects in download reports.

URL : Do Download Reports Reliably Measure Journal Usage? Trusting the Fox to Count Your Hens?

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.80.5.694

Roles and jobs in the open research scholarly communications environment: analysing job descriptions to predict future trends

Author : Nancy Pontika

During the past two-decades academic libraries updated current staff job responsibilities or created brand new roles. This allowed them to adapt to scholarly communication developments and consequently enabled them to offer efficient services to their users.

The global calls for openly accessible research results has shifted the institutional, national and international focus and their constant evolvement has required the creation of new research positions in academic libraries.

This study reports on the findings of an analysis of job descriptions in the open research services as advertised by UK academic libraries.

METHOD

From March 2015 to March 2017, job advertisements relating to open access, repositories and research data management were collected.

RESULTS

The analysis of the data showed that the primary responsibilities of the open research support staff were: to ensure and facilitate compliance with funders’ open access policies, maintain the tools that enable compliance, create reports and collect statistics that measure compliance rates and commit to continuous liaising activities with research stakeholders.

DISCUSSION

It is clear that the open research services is a complex environment, requiring a variety of general and subject specific skill sets, while often a role may involve more than one area of expertise.

CONCLUSION

The results of this study could benefit prospective employees and universities that wish to embed open research skills in their curriculum.

URL : Roles and jobs in the open research scholarly communications environment: analysing job descriptions to predict future trends

Alternative location : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10282/

Motivations for textbook and learning resource publishing: Do academics want to publish OA textbooks?

Authors : Ellen Collins, Graham Stone

The affordability of textbooks and unsustainable commercial models are issues that many libraries face. As an alternative, there is a growing movement in the United States around open and affordable textbooks.

However, to date there has been less activity in the UK despite the introduction of a range of policies that encourage or mandate open access publication of research outputs such as journal articles or monographs.

These policy changes have affected academics’ attitudes to open access, but it is not yet clear whether the opportunity to publish in open access would affect researchers’ propensity to create non-research outputs such as textbooks and learning materials.

In 2017, Jisc Collections proposed a study into author incentives for textbook publishing in order to understand whether open access would motivate authors to publish learning materials and thereby support a transition to open access for e-textbooks.

The study consisted of a survey, focus groups and interviews. This article discusses the results of the research and provides several key insights and future opportunities for those wishing to explore open and affordable textbooks.

URL : Motivations for textbook and learning resource publishing: Do academics want to publish OA textbooks?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10266

The Development of the Journal Evaluation Tool to Evaluate the Credibility of Publication Venues

Authors : Nataly Blas, Shilpa Rele, Marie R. Kennedy

INTRODUCTION

A shared concern among librarians who work in an academic environment is finding effective mechanisms to help faculty identify suitable publication venues. Determining the suitability is now also complicated by the need to determine the credibility of the venue itself, to ensure that faculty select a venue that is held in esteem.

DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT

At Loyola Marymount University (LMU), a medium-sized, private institution in the United States, three librarians developed a tool to assist faculty in determining the credibility of a publication venue, specifically for open access journals.

This article outlines the development of a tool to evaluate journals, the pilot testing process, and some of the measures taken for the promotion, outreach, and implementation of the tool. The goal of the tool is to inform publishing decisions using an objective measure of credibility and to empower authors to make publishing decisions for themselves.

NEXT STEPS

The authors have released the tool with a Creative Commons CC-BY license in order to enable the broad dissemination, use, and enhancement of it by anyone interested in using or developing the tool further.

It will be valuable to understand the adapted use cases of the tool and learn about experiences from other librarians using this tool at their institutions.

URL : The Development of the Journal Evaluation Tool to Evaluate the Credibility of Publication Venues

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2250

Avoiding the “Axe”: Advancing Affordable and Open Education Resources at a Midsize University

Authors: Jennifer Bazeley, Carolyn Haynes, Carla S. Myers, Eric Resnis

INTRODUCTION

To address the soaring cost of textbooks, higher education institutions have launched a number of strategies to promote the adoption of affordable and open educational resources (AOER).

Although a few models for promoting and sustaining alternative and open educational resources (AOER) at higher education institutions can be found in the professional literature, additional examples are needed to assist the wide of range of universities and colleges in meeting this critical need.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

In this article, the authors describe Miami University’s ongoing efforts to reduce college textbook costs for students. These initiatives were instigated in some ways by the state legislature, but were also fueled by factual evidence regarding the impact textbook costs have on the student learning experience.

The authors (university librarians and associate provost) provide a description of the institutional context and the challenges they faced in implementing AOER initiatives and chronicle the steps that their university has taken to address the challenge of rising costs of course materials.

NEXT STEPS

Next steps for growing the programs and recommendations for other institutions looking to develop similar initiatives are also explored.

URL : Avoiding the “Axe”: Advancing Affordable and Open Education Resources at a Midsize University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2259

Embracing New Trends in Scholarly Communication: From Competency Requirements in the Workplace to LIS Curriculum Presence

Author : Jaya Raju

INTRODUCTION

Scholarly communication has undergone dramatic change in the digital era as a result of rapidly evolving digital technology. It is within this context of evolving scholarly communication that this paper reports on an inquiry into (1) the extent to which university libraries in South Africa are actively embracing new and emerging trends in scholarly communication; and (2), the extent to which LIS school curricula in South Africa are responding to new and emerging scholarly communication competencies required in university libraries.

METHODS

This qualitative study, located within an interpretivist epistemological worldview, was informed by the Operational Elements of Scientific Communication aspect of Khosrowjerdi’s (2011) Viable Scientific Communication Model.

Data was collected using summative content analysis of university library job advertisements over a four-year period; South African university libraries’ organizational organograms; and course descriptions available on the websites of South Africa’s LIS schools.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION

A review of job advertisements and organograms shows that on the whole university libraries in South Africa are embracing the new and emerging trends in scholarly communication, but some university libraries are performing better than others in adopting emerging scholarly communication services such as RDM, digital humanities, or research landscape analysis.

Course description analysis provides evidence that LIS schools’ curricula, as per global trend reported in the literature, do not seem to be keeping pace with developments in scholarly communication.

CONCLUSION

The ambivalent nature of an evolving scholarly communications field with unclear definitions and boundaries necessitates professional practitioners who are adaptable and open to change as well as an LIS education curriculum that is in constant review to seamlessly embrace an evolving field propelled by advancing digital technologies.

URL : Embracing New Trends in Scholarly Communication: From Competency Requirements in the Workplace to LIS Curriculum Presence

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2291

A Multi-match Approach to the Author Uncertainty Problem

Authors: Stephen F. Carley, Alan L. Porter, Jan L. Youtie

Purpose

The ability to identify the scholarship of individual authors is essential for performance evaluation. A number of factors hinder this endeavor. Common and similarly spelled surnames make it difficult to isolate the scholarship of individual authors indexed on large databases.

Variations in name spelling of individual scholars further complicates matters. Common family names in scientific powerhouses like China make it problematic to distinguish between authors possessing ubiquitous and/or anglicized surnames (as well as the same or similar first names).

The assignment of unique author identifiers provides a major step toward resolving these difficulties. We maintain, however, that in and of themselves, author identifiers are not sufficient to fully address the author uncertainty problem.

In this study we build on the author identifier approach by considering commonalities in fielded data between authors containing the same surname and first initial of their first name. We illustrate our approach using three case studies.

Design/methodology/approach

The approach we advance in this study is based on commonalities among fielded data in search results. We cast a broad initial net—i.e., a Web of Science (WOS) search for a given author’s last name, followed by a comma, followed by the first initial of his or her first name (e.g., a search for ‘John Doe’ would assume the form: ‘Doe, J’).

Results for this search typically contain all of the scholarship legitimately belonging to this author in the given database (i.e., all of his or her true positives), along with a large amount of noise, or scholarship not belonging to this author (i.e., a large number of false positives).

From this corpus we proceed to iteratively weed out false positives and retain true positives. Author identifiers provide a good starting point—e.g., if ‘Doe, J’ and ‘Doe, John’ share the same author identifier, this would be sufficient for us to conclude these are one and the same individual.

We find email addresses similarly adequate—e.g., if two author names which share the same surname and same first initial have an email address in common, we conclude these authors are the same person.

Author identifier and email address data is not always available, however. When this occurs, other fields are used to address the author uncertainty problem.

Commonalities among author data other than unique identifiers and email addresses is less conclusive for name consolidation purposes. For example, if ‘Doe, John’ and ‘Doe, J’ have an affiliation in common, do we conclude that these names belong the same person?

They may or may not; affiliations have employed two or more faculty members sharing the same last and first initial. Similarly, it’s conceivable that two individuals with the same last name and first initial publish in the same journal, publish with the same co-authors, and/or cite the same references.

Should we then ignore commonalities among these fields and conclude they’re too imprecise for name consolidation purposes? It is our position that such commonalities are indeed valuable for addressing the author uncertainty problem, but more so when used in combination.

Our approach makes use of automation as well as manual inspection, relying initially on author identifiers, then commonalities among fielded data other than author identifiers, and finally manual verification.

To achieve name consolidation independent of author identifier matches, we have developed a procedure that is used with bibliometric software called VantagePoint (see www.thevantagepoint.com) While the application of our technique does not exclusively depend on VantagePoint, it is the software we find most efficient in this study.

The script we developed to implement this procedure is designed to implement our name disambiguation procedure in a way that significantly reduces manual effort on the user’s part.

Those who seek to replicate our procedure independent of VantagePoint can do so by manually following the method we outline, but we note that the manual application of our procedure takes a significant amount of time and effort, especially when working with larger datasets.

Our script begins by prompting the user for a surname and a first initial (for any author of interest). It then prompts the user to select a WOS field on which to consolidate author names.

After this the user is prompted to point to the name of the authors field, and finally asked to identify a specific author name (referred to by the script as the primary author) within this field whom the user knows to be a true positive (a suggested approach is to point to an author name associated with one of the records that has the author’s ORCID iD or email address attached to it).

The script proceeds to identify and combine all author names sharing the primary author’s surname and first initial of his or her first name who share commonalities in the WOS field on which the user was prompted to consolidate author names. T

his typically results in significant reduction in the initial dataset size. After the procedure completes the user is usually left with a much smaller (and more manageable) dataset to manually inspect (and/or apply additional name disambiguation techniques to).

Research limitations

Match field coverage can be an issue. When field coverage is paltry dataset reduction is not as significant, which results in more manual inspection on the user’s part. Our procedure doesn’t lend itself to scholars who have had a legal family name change (after marriage, for example).

Moreover, the technique we advance is (sometimes, but not always) likely to have a difficult time dealing with scholars who have changed careers or fields dramatically, as well as scholars whose work is highly interdisciplinary.

Practical implications

The procedure we advance has the ability to save a significant amount of time and effort for individuals engaged in name disambiguation research, especially when the name under consideration is a more common family name. It is more effective when match field coverage is high and a number of match fields exist.

Originality/value

Once again, the procedure we advance has the ability to save a significant amount of time and effort for individuals engaged in name disambiguation research. It combines preexisting with more recent approaches, harnessing the benefits of both.

Findings

Our study applies the name disambiguation procedure we advance to three case studies. Ideal match fields are not the same for each of our case studies. We find that match field effectiveness is in large part a function of field coverage. Comparing original dataset size, the timeframe analyzed for each case study is not the same, nor are the subject areas in which they publish.

Our procedure is more effective when applied to our third case study, both in terms of list reduction and 100% retention of true positives. We attribute this to excellent match field coverage, and especially in more specific match fields, as well as having a more modest/manageable number of publications.

While machine learning is considered authoritative by many, we do not see it as practical or replicable. The procedure advanced herein is both practical, replicable and relatively user friendly.

It might be categorized into a space between ORCID and machine learning. Machine learning approaches typically look for commonalities among citation data, which is not always available, structured or easy to work with.

The procedure we advance is intended to be applied across numerous fields in a dataset of interest (e.g. emails, coauthors, affiliations, etc.), resulting in multiple rounds of reduction. Results indicate that effective match fields include author identifiers, emails, source titles, co-authors and ISSNs.

While the script we present is not likely to result in a dataset consisting solely of true positives (at least for more common surnames), it does significantly reduce manual effort on the user’s part. Dataset reduction (after our procedure is applied) is in large part a function of (a) field availability and (b) field coverage.

URL : A Multi-match Approach to the Author Uncertainty Problem

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2019-0006