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Barriers to Open Access uptake for researchers in Africa

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Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of visibility of researchers in African countries, in the Open Access (OA) arena and aims to identify main causes of reduced uptake in OA in Africa.

Design/methodology/approach

 Extent of visibility is explored by quantitative analysis of institutional repository and OA journals data sets followed by qualitative analysis of OA foundation documents and literature on OA in Africa published mainly between 2003 and 2013.

 Findings

 Visibility in institutional repositories or OA journals for African researchers remains low. Causes include insufficient educational support for librarians and administrators in required new roles; inability of national, organisational and technological infrastructures to support OA; impracticality of western-based and costly publishing models; and disincentives relating to intellectual property and researcher perceptions.

Complex language and literacy issues also inhibit engagement. Recommendations include strong OA advocacy, development of support initiatives, integration of international knowledge for local conditions and vice versa, sensitive preservation of indigenous knowledge and development of mechanisms of funding and research assessment mechanisms, which are economically and technically viable.

Originality/value

 Earlier attempts were made to raise awareness about the lack of uptake of OA in Africa. This paper shows that the situation has hardly changed and now requires urgent attention. Otherwise OA will not “become the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and country” by 2022 (BOAI, 2012).

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2015-0147

Open Access publishing and scholarly communications in non-scientific disciplines

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Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the current state of debates surrounding Open Access (OA) in non-STEM disciplines.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses a selective literature review and discussion methodology to give a representative summary of the state of the art.

Findings

Non-STEM disciplines persistently lag behind scientific disciplines in their approach to OA, if the teleology towards open dissemination is accepted. This can be attributed to a variety of economic and cultural factors that centre on the problem of resource allocation with respect to quality.

Originality/value

This paper will be of value to policymakers, funders, academics and publishers. The original aspect of the paper pertains to the identification of an anxiety of irrelevance in the humanities disciplines and a focus on “quality” in Open-Access publishing debates.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2015-0103

Opening Access to collections: the making and using of open digitised cultural content

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Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to situate the activity of digitisation to increase access to cultural and heritage content alongside the objectives of the Open Access Movement (OAM). It demonstrates that increasingly open licensing of digital cultural heritage content is creating opportunities for researchers in the arts and humanities for both access to and analysis of cultural heritage materials.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is primarily a literature and scoping review of the current digitisation licensing climate, using and embedding examples from ongoing research projects and recent writings on Open Access (OA) and digitisation to highlight both opportunities and barriers to the creation and use of digital heritage content from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM).

Findings

The digital information environment in which digitised content is created and delivered has changed phenomenally, allowing the sharing and reuse of digital data and encouraging new advances in research across the sector, although issues of licensing persist.

There remain further opportunities for understanding how to: study use and users of openly available cultural and heritage content; disseminate and encourage the uptake of open cultural data; persuade other institutions to contribute their data into the commons in an open and accessible manner; build aggregation and search facilities to link across information sources to allow resource discovery; and how best to use high-performance computing facilities to analyse and process the large amounts of data the author is now seeing being made available throughout the sector.

Research limitations/implications

It is hoped that by pulling together this discussion, the benefits to making material openly available have been made clear, encouraging others in the GLAM sector to consider making their collections openly available for reuse and repurposing.

Practical implications

This paper will encourage others in the GLAM sector to consider licensing their collections in an open and reusable fashion. By spelling out the range of opportunities for researchers in using open cultural and heritage materials it makes a contribution to the discussion in this area.

Social implications

Increasing the quantity of high-quality OA resources in the cultural heritage sector will lead to a richer research environment which will increase the understanding of history, culture and society.

Originality/value

This paper has pulled together, for the first time, an overview of the current state of affairs of digitisation in the cultural and heritage sector seen through the context of the OAM. It has highlighted opportunities for researchers in the arts, humanities and social and historical sciences in the embedding of open cultural data into both their research and teaching, whilst scoping the wave of cultural heritage content which is being created from institutional repositories which are now available for research and use.

As such, it is a position paper that encourages the open data agenda within the cultural and heritage sector, showing the potentials that exists for the study of culture and society when data are made open.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2015-0193

 

Open Access Publishing, academic research and scholarly communication

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Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the difference between Open Access and accessibility, to argue that accessibility is the most crucial feature, and to suggest some ways in which Open Access militates against accessibility.

Design/methodology/approach

Analysis of best practice by journals and monograph publishers is used to highlight the degree to which accessibility is enhanced by input from readers and editors. The expense of this, both real and hidden, is shown to be compatible only with difficulty with publishing methods where keeping costs low is essential, and Open Access alternatives that make available manuscripts “as submitted” are shown to make available less accessible scholarship.

Findings

Scholarship is markedly improved by referees and editors; the emphasis needs to be put on making available the most accessible scholarship, not on making more scholarship available.

Practical implications

Journals and publishers should concentrate on, and research councils and similar bodies insist upon, ensuring high quality critical review and editing, not cost-free access.

Originality/value

The debate on Open Access has put its emphasis in the wrong place. Rather than easier access to more scholarship, increased resource devoted to pre-publication review, revision and editing is the most important development to ensure the greatest advances in research and scholarship.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2015-0083

Risk of Bias in Reports of In Vivo Research: A Focus for Improvement

Statut

The reliability of experimental findings depends on the rigour of experimental design. Here we show limited reporting of measures to reduce the risk of bias in a random sample of life sciences publications, significantly lower reporting of randomisation in work published in journals of high impact, and very limited reporting of measures to reduce the risk of bias in publications from leading United Kingdom institutions. Ascertainment of differences between institutions might serve both as a measure of research quality and as a tool for institutional efforts to improve research quality.

URL : Risk of Bias in Reports of In Vivo Research: A Focus for Improvement

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002273

Regional and Global Science: Latin American and Caribbean publications in the SciELO Citation Index and the Web of Science

Statut

We compare the visibility and performance of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) publications in the Core collection indexes included in the Web of Science (WoS) — Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index — and the Scielo Citation Index (SciELO CI) which was integrated into the larger WoS platform in 2014.

The purpose of this comparison is to contribute to our understanding of the communication of scientific knowledge produced in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to provide some reflections on the potential benefits of the articulation of regional indexing exercises into WoS for a better understanding of geographic and disciplinary contributions.

How is the regional level of ScieLO CI related to the global one of WoS? In WoS, LAC authors are integrated at the global level in international networks; for example, as postdocs. In SciELO CI, south-south collaboration is more central, and the focus is shifted towards social problems. The articulation of SciELO into WoS may improve the international standardization (for example, of referencing) in the regional journals, but comes at the price of losing independence of the journal inclusion criteria.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02453

Does Quantity Make a Difference? The importance of publishing many papers

Statut

Do highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers? Or does the increased productivity in science only result in a sea of irrelevant papers as a perverse effect of competition and the increased use of indicators for research evaluation and accountability focus? We use a Swedish author disambiguated data set consisting of 48,000 researchers and their WoS-publications during the period of 2008 2011 with citations until 2014 to investigate the relation between productivity and production of highly cited papers. As the analysis shows, quantity does make a difference.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01871