Library publisher resources: Making publishing approachable, sustainable, and values-driven

Authors : Jenny Hoops, Sarah Hare

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) defines library publishing as the “creation, dissemination, and curation of scholarly, creative, and/or educational works” by college and university libraries.

While providing a publishing platform, hosting, and services for editorial teams is key to any library publishing initiative, library publishing is also centered on furthering core library values.

Thus library publishing activities are mission-driven, centered on education, and focused on finding and promoting sustainable approaches to open access publishing and building cooperative open infrastructure.

URL : Library publisher resources: Making publishing approachable, sustainable, and values-driven

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.80.2.74

Informing the Digital Archive with Altmetrics

Authors : Ashley L. Taylor, Lauren B. Collister

Altmetrics can be used to understand impact beyond citations, particularly for digitized collections.

As cultural institutions look to pursue more active engagement with communities of practice, altmetrics help archivists understand the conversations happening in real time that will allow them to provide access to the most relevant materials.

Through the use of case studies, we aim to demonstrate how applying altmetrics while considering the curation of digital collections can allow archivists to stay engaged with target communities outside traditional channels, demonstrating both the applicability of altmetrics to legacy scholarly work and the value of digitization as an access method.

URL : Informing the Digital Archive with Altmetrics

DOI : http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/35931

The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega journal

Authors : Barbara McGillivray, Mathias Astell

How does usage of an article relate to the number of citations it accrues? Does the timeframe in which an article is used (and how much that article is used) have an effect on when and how much that article is cited?

What role does an article’s subject area play in the relationship between usage and citations? This paper aims to answer these questions through an observational study of usage and citation data collected about a multidisciplinary, open access mega journal, Scientific Reports.

We find that while the direct correlation between usage and citations is only moderate at best, the relationship between how early and how much an article is used and how early it is cited is much clearer. What is more, we find that when an article is cited earlier it is also cited more often, leading to the assertion that if an article is more highly accessed early on, it is more likely to be cited earlier and more often.

As Scientific Reports is a multidisciplinary journal covering all natural and clinical sciences, this study was also able to look at the differences across subject areas and found some interesting variations when comparing the major subject areas covered by the journal (i.e. biological, Earth, physical and health sciences).

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01333

Scientific Landscape of Citizen Science Publications: Dynamics, Content and Presence in Social Media

Authors : Núria Bautista-Puig, Daniela De Filippo, Elba Mauleón, Elías Sanz-Casado

Citizen science (CS) aims primarily to create a new scientific culture able to improve upon the triple interaction between science, society, and policy in the dual pursuit of more democratic research and decision-making informed by sound evidence.

It is both an aim and an enabler of open science (OS), to which it contributes by involving citizens in research and encouraging participation in the generation of new knowledge. This study analyses scientific output on CS using bibliometric techniques and Web of Science (WoS) data.

Co-occurrence maps are formulated to define subject clusters as background for an analysis of the impact of each on social media. Four clusters are identified: HEALTH, BIO, GEO and PUBLIC. The profiles for the four clusters are observed to be fairly similar, although BIO and HEALTH are mentioned more frequently in blogposts and tweets and BIO and PUBLIC in Facebook and newsfeeds.

The findings also show that output in the area has grown since 2010, with a larger proportion of papers (66%) mentioned in social media than reported in other studies. The percentage of open access documents (30.7%) is likewise higher than the overall mean for all areas.

URL : Scientific Landscape of Citizen Science Publications: Dynamics, Content and Presence in Social Media

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010012

Open-access policy and data-sharing practice in UK academia

Author : Yimei Zhu

Data sharing can be defined as the release of research data that can be used by others. With the recent open-science movement, there has been a call for free access to data, tools and methods in academia. In recent years, subject-based and institutional repositories and data centres have emerged along with online publishing.

Many scientific records, including published articles and data, have been made available via new platforms. In the United Kingdom, most major research funders had a data policy and require researchers to include a ‘data-sharing plan’ when applying for funding.

However, there are a number of barriers to the full-scale adoption of data sharing. Those barriers are not only technical, but also psychological and social. A survey was conducted with over 1800 UK-based academics to explore the extent of support of data sharing and the characteristics and factors associated with data-sharing practice.

It found that while most academics recognised the importance of sharing research data, most of them had never shared or reused research data. There were differences in the extent of data sharing between different gender, academic disciplines, age and seniority.

It also found that the awareness of Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Open-Access (OA) policy, experience of Gold and Green OA publishing, attitudes towards the importance of data sharing and experience of using secondary data were associated with the practice of data sharing.

A small group of researchers used social media such as Twitter, blogs and Facebook to promote the research data they had shared online. Our findings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of open science and offer recommendations to academic institutions, journals and funding agencies.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551518823174

Open Research Knowledge Graph: Towards Machine Actionability in Scholarly Communication

Authors : Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Sören Auer, Manuel Prinz, Viktor Kovtun, Gábor Kismihók, Markus Stocker

Despite improved digital access to scientific publications in the last decades, the fundamental principles of scholarly communication remain unchanged and continue to be largely document-based.

The document-oriented workflows in science publication have reached the limits of adequacy as highlighted by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature, the deficiency of peer-review and the reproducibility crisis.

In this article, we present first steps towards representing scholarly knowledge semantically with knowledge graphs. We expand the currently popular RDF graph-based knowledge representation formalism to capture annotations, such as provenance information and describe how to manage such knowledge in a graph data base.

We report on the results of a first experimental evaluation of the concept and its implementations with the participants of an international conference.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.10816

A multidimensional perspective on the citation impact of scientific publications

Authors : Yi Bu, Ludo Waltman, Yong Huang

The citation impact of scientific publications is usually seen as a one-dimensional concept. We introduce a three-dimensional perspective on the citation impact of publications. In addition to the level of citation impact, quantified by the number of citations received by a publication, we also conceptualize and operationalize the depth and dependence of citation impact.

This enables us to make a distinction between publications that have a deep impact concentrated in one specific field of research and publications that have a broad impact scattered over different research fields.

It also allows us to distinguish between publications that are strongly dependent on earlier work and publications that make a more independent scientific contribution.

We present a large-scale empirical analysis of the level, depth, and dependence of the citation impact of publications. In addition, we report a case study focusing on publications in the field of scientometrics.

Our three-dimensional citation impact framework provides a more detailed understanding of the citation impact of a publication than a traditional one-dimensional perspective.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09663