Archives des catégories : EN

The persistence of open access electronic journals

Posté le par

Author : Elizabeth A. Lightfoot

Purpose

Open access (OA) electronic journals have been identified as potentially at risk of loss without more coordinated preservation efforts. The purpose of this paper is to test the current availability of OA electronic journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Design/methodology/approach

Using publicly available journal metadata downloaded from DOAJ, individual journal URLs were tested for validity and accessibility using a Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Applications macro.

Findings

Initial results showed 69.51% of the URLs tested returned a successful HTTP status code. The remainder of the URLs returned codes that indicated redirection or errors.

Originality/Value

Unlike past studies of link decay, this is not limited to cited references or a specific discipline. This study utilizes the full DOAJ metadata to analyze the persistence of OA electronic journals.

URL : http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/glworks/55/

Open supply? On the future of document supply in the world of open science

Posté le par

Author : Joachim Schöpfel

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose a personal viewpoint on the development of document supply in the context of the recent European Union (EU) decisions on open science.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper provides some elements to the usual questions of service development, about business, customers, added value, environment and objectives.

Findings

The EU goal for open science is 100 per cent available research results in 2020. To meet the challenge, document supply must change, include more and other content, serve different targets groups, apply innovative technology and provide knowledge. If not, document supply will become a marginalized library service.

Originality/value

Basically, open science is not library-friendly, and it does not offer a solution for the actual problems of document supply. But it may provide an opportunity for document supply to become a modern service able to deal with new forms of unequal access and digital divide.

URL : http://hal.univ-lille3.fr/hal-01408443

Open Access, Privacy, and Human Rights : A Case Study on Ethics in Library and Information Sciences Education

Posté le par
Author : Joachim Schöpfel

Purpose

How do students comment on ethical principles, which principles are important for their awareness of librarianship, how do they understand the relevance of human rights for their future work?

Methodology/approach

The case study presents the results of a lecture on information rights and ethics with 50 Master students in library and information sciences (LIS) at the University of Lille (France) in 2014–2015. Students were asked to comment on the core principles of the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA) Code of Ethics.

Findings

The students see the library as a privileged space of access to information, where the librarian takes on the function of a guardian of this specific individual freedom—a highly political role and task.

This opinion is part of a general commitment to open access and free flowing resources on Internet. They emphasize the social responsibility toward the society as a whole but most of all toward the individual patron as a real person, member of a cultural community, a social class or an ethnic group.

With regard to Human Rights, the students interpret the IFLA Code mainly as a code of civil, political, and critical responsibility to endorse the universal right of freedom of expression.

They see a major conflict between ethics and policy. The findings are followed by some recommendations for further development of LIS education, including internship, transversality, focus on conflicts and the students’ cognitive dissonance and teaching of social skills, in terms of work-based solidarity and collective choices.

Originality/value

The chapter is qualitative research based on empirical data from a French LIS Master program.

URL : http://hal.univ-lille3.fr/hal-01408444

Publishers’ responses to the e-book phenomenon: survey results from three ‘small language’ markets

Posté le par

Authors : T.D. Wilson, Elena Maceviciute

Introduction

This paper reports on a study of publishers’ attitudes towards e-books in the context of the global situation of e-book publishing. Comparative data are drawn from a replication of a survey carried out in Sweden, in Lithuania and in Croatia.

Method

A self-completed questionnaire survey was undertaken, offering respondents the choice of a printed questionnaire or a response through an online SurveyMonkey alternative.

Analysis

Quantitative analysis was performed using the descriptive statistics capability of SurveyMonkey.

Results

The three country survey reveals a number of similar responses from publishers on several key issues, i.e., self-publishing, the future role of bookshops, and relationships with public libraries. The results also reveal that publishers have a certain ambivalence on these issues

Conclusion

In ‘small language’ markets, the take-up of e-books represents a much smaller proportion of total sales than in the English language market. Responses to questions on publishers’ relationships with authors, booksellers and libraries show a high degree of unanimity of opinion.

URL : http://www.informationr.net/ir/21-4/paper725.html

Opportunities From the Digital Revolution : Implications for Researching, Publishing, and Consuming Qualitative Research

Posté le par

Authors : Louise Corti, Nigel Fielding

In the 1990s, the term “online” research emerged as a new and vibrant suite of methods, focused on exploitation of sources not collected by traditional social science methods. Today, at least one part of the research life cycle is likely to be carried out “online,” from data collection through to publishing.

In this article, we seek to understand emergent modes of doing and reporting qualitative research “online.” With a greater freedom now to term oneself a “researcher,” what opportunities and problems do working with online data sources bring?

We explore implications of emerging requirements to submit supporting data for social science journal articles and question whether these demands might disrupt the very nature of and identity of qualitative research.

Finally, we examine more recent forms of publishing and communicating research that support outputs where data play an integral role in elucidating context and enhancing the reading experience.

URL : Opportunities From the Digital Revolution : Implications for Researching, Publishing, and Consuming Qualitative Research

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2158244016678912

Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: a Review of Publisher Policies

Posté le par

Author : Jessica Lange

The open access movement has been growing steadily over the past twenty years. Recently, many national funding agencies in North America have been requiring recipients of grant-funding to make their articles open access.

On the surface this produces a potential conflict for management researchers; management faculty members are expected to publish in prestigious journals but the discipline views open access journals as being of lower quality (Hahn & Wyatt, 2014, p.98).

As such, the question arises if it is it possible for management researchers to comply with open access policies while still publishing in highly-ranked journals?

This article will compare publishing policies from top management journals to funding agencies’ open access requirements in order to determine which journals meet these conditions.

Journals will be drawn from several established journal lists such as the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) 24, the Financial Times (FT) Research Rankings, and Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Journal Citation Reports.

Results show that 80% of journals in the sample set are compatible with open access funding mandates. Of the journals which are compatible, 48% require an APC and 52% permit self-archiving in an acceptable time-frame.

In addition to discussing open access publishing opportunities in management, this article will highlight opportunities for management librarians to develop their services and act as resources for faculty navigating this new framework.

URL : Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: a Review of Publisher Policies

Alternative location : http://ticker.mcgill.ca/article/view/19

 

Altmetrics and Grey Literature: Perspectives and Challenges

Posté le par

Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Hélène Prost

Traditional metrics largely overlook grey literature. The new altmetrics introduced in 2010 as ” new, online scholarly tools (that allow) to make new filters ” (Altmetrics Manifesto), can include all kinds of scholarly output which makes them interesting for grey literature.

The topic of our paper is the connection between altmetrics and grey literature. Do altmetrics offer new opportunities for the development and impact of grey literature?

In particular, the paper explores how altmetrics could add value to grey literature, in particular how reference managers, repositories, academic search engines and social networks can produce altmetrics of dissertations, reports, conference papers etc.

We explore, too, how new altmetric tools incorporate grey literature as source for impact assessment, and if they do. The discussion analyses the potential but also the limits of the actual application of altmetrics to grey literatures and highlights the importance of unique identifiers, above all the DOI.

For the moment, grey literature missed the opportunity to get on board of the new movement.

However, getting grey literature into the heart of the coming mainstream adoption of altmetrics is not only essential for the future of grey literature in open science but also for academic and institutional control of research output and societal impact.This can be a special mission for academic librarians.

URL : http://hal.univ-lille3.fr/hal-01405443