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Measuring, Rating, Supporting, and Strengthening Open Access Scholarly Publishing in Brazil

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This study assesses the extent and nature of open access scholarly publishing in Brazil, one of the world’s leaders in providing universal access to its research and scholarship. It utilizes Brazil’s Qualis journal evaluation system, along with other relevant data bases to address the association between scholarly quality and open access in the Brazilian context.

Through cross tabulation among these various data sets, it is possible to arrive at a reasonably accurate picture of journals, systems, ratings, and disciplines.

The study establishes reliable measures and counts of Brazilian scholarly publications, the proportion and types of open access, and journals ratings and by disciplinary field. It finds that the better the Brazilian journal, the more likely it is to be open access.

It also finds that Qualis ranks Brazilian journals lower overall than the international journals in which Brazilian authors publish, most notably in the field of the biological sciences.

The study concludes with a consideration of the policy implications for building on the country’s global leadership in open access to strengthen the quality of its global contribution to knowledge.

URL : Measuring, Rating, Supporting, and Strengthening Open Access Scholarly Publishing in Brazil

Alternative location : http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/2391

Quantifying the changing role of past publications

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Our current societies increasingly rely on electronic repositories of collective knowledge. An archetype of these databases is the Web of Science (WoS) that stores scientific publications. In contrast to several other forms of knowledge — e.g., Wikipedia articles — a scientific paper does not change after its “birth”.

Nonetheless, from the moment a paper is published it exists within the evolving web of other papers, thus, its actual meaning to the reader changes.

To track how scientific ideas (represented by groups of scientific papers) appear and evolve, we apply a novel combination of algorithms explicitly allowing for papers to change their groups. We (i) identify the overlapping clusters of the undirected yearly co-citation networks of the WoS (1975-2008) and (ii) match these yearly clusters (groups) to form group timelines.

After visualizing the longest lived groups of the entire data set we assign topic labels to the groups. We find that in the entire Web of Science multidisciplinarity is clearly over-represented among cutting edge ideas. In addition, we provide detailed examples for papers that (i) change their topic labels and (ii) move between groups.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.00509

French and US librarians’ Perception Regarding e-Book Reading Data Protection: A Comparative Survey

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This paper tackles the e-book reading data protection issue from the library’s point of view. To identify the librarians’ awareness and perception about this topic, the results of a comparative quantitative survey, which has been conducted among the French and American information professionals, will be presented in detail.

This study was designed to provide answers to four main assumptions:

1. Librarians are favourable to users’ data protection and unanimously opposed to reading data exploitation.

2. Librarians are, for the majority of them, unaware of the e-book reading data collection and exploitation practices.

3. They consider that users do not want third parties collecting and analysing their reading data.

4. Collection managers and digital librarians have a better awareness of the topic and are against the exploitation of e-book reading data. They promote data protection more than their colleagues.

After bringing an answer to these hypotheses, this article will summarize the current librarians’ position regarding the e-book reading data protection topic. Finally, it will propose solutions to face the corresponding issues.

URL : French and US librarians’ Perception Regarding e-Book Reading Data Protection: A Comparative Survey

Alternative location : http://irjlis.com/french-and-us-librarians-perception-regarding-e-book-reading-data-protection-a-comparative-survey/

Open Access – the better access? Academic publishing and its politics

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Open Access to scholarly literature seems to dominate current discussions in the academic publishing, research funding and science policy arenas. Several international initiatives have been recently started calling for a large-scale transformation of the majority of scholarly journals from subscription model to Open Access.

Such a massive transition would indeed affect not only business models and related cash flows but might be also expected to generate new inequalities in distributing resources among different regions or research fields.

Thus, the paper at hand aims to serve as an input statement for the upcoming discussion and to provide some background information on Open Access debates.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/29269/

Fifty shades of open

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Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. The word “open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much.

This essay disambiguates the many meanings of the word “open” as it is used in a wide range of contexts.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6360/5460

Tackling complexity in an interdisciplinary scholarly network: Requirements for semantic publishing

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Scholarly communication is complex. The clarification of concepts like “academic publication”, “document”, “semantics” and “ontology” facilitates tracking the limitations and benefits of the media of the current publishing system, as well as of a possible alternative medium.

In this paper, requirements for such a new medium of scholarly communication, labeled Scholarly Network, have been collected and a basic model has been developed. An interdisciplinary network of concepts and assertions, created with the help of Semantic Web technologies by scholars and reviewed by peers and information professionals, can provide a quick overview of the state of research.

The model picks up the concept of Nanopublications, but maps information in a more granular way. For a better understanding of which problems have to be solved by developing such a publication medium, e.g., inconsistency, theories of Radical Constructivism are of great help.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6102/5510

Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?

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Research data publishing is intended as the release of research data to make it possible for practitioners to (re)use them according to “open science” dynamics. There are three main actors called to deal with research data publishing practices: researchers, publishers, and data repositories.

This study analyses the solutions offered by generalist scientific data repositories, i.e., repositories supporting the deposition of any type of research data. These repositories cannot make any assumption on the application domain.

They are actually called to face with the almost open ended typologies of data used in science. The current practices promoted by such repositories are analysed with respect to eight key aspects of data publishing, i.e., dataset formatting, documentation, licensing, publication costs, validation, availability, discovery and access, and citation.

From this analysis it emerges that these repositories implement well consolidated practices and pragmatic solutions for literature repositories.

These practices and solutions can not totally meet the needs of management and use of datasets resources, especially in a context where rapid technological changes continuously open new exploitation prospects.

URL : Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2016-006