Catégorie : EN

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Are Opinions Based on Science: Modelling Social Response to Scientific Facts

As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through various channels of media, i.e. newspapers, television, radio, internet, and web.

It is thought that this is mainly due to the conflicting information on the mass media and to the individual attitude (formed by cultural, educational and environmental factors), that is, one external factor and another personal factor.

In this paper we will investigate the dynamical development of opinion in a small population of agents by means of a computational model of opinion formation in a co-evolving network of socially linked agents.

The personal and external factors are taken into account by assigning an individual attitude parameter to each agent, and by subjecting all to an external but homogeneous field to simulate the effect of the media.

We then adjust the field strength in the model by using actual data on scientific perception surveys carried out in two different populations, which allow us to compare two different societies.

We interpret the model findings with the aid of simple mean field calculations. Our results suggest that scientifically sound concepts are more difficult to acquire than concepts not validated by science, since opposing individuals organize themselves in close communities that prevent opinion consensus.”

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0042122

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Tracing scientists’ research trends realtimely

In this research, we propose a method to trace scientists’ research trends realtimely. By monitoring the downloads of scientific articles in the journal of Scientometrics for 744 hours, namely one month, we investigate the download statistics.

Then we aggregate the keywords in these downloaded research papers, and analyze the trends of article downloading and keyword downloading. Furthermore, taking both the download of keywords and publication of articles into consideration, we design a method to detect the emerging research trends.

We find that in scientometrics field, social media, new indices to quantify scientific productivity (g-index), webometrics, semantic, text mining, open access are emerging fields that information scientists are focusing on.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.1349

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Federated Search Service for OAI-compliant, Open-Access Repositories in India

Many of the research institutions and universities across the world are facilitating open-access (OA) to their intellectual outputs through their respective OA institutional repositories (IRs) or through the centralized subject-based repositories. The registry of open access repositories (ROAR) lists more than 2850 such repositories across the world. The awareness about the benefits of OA to scholarly literature and OA publishing is picking up in India, too. As per the ROAR statistics, to date, there are more than 90 OA repositories in the country. India is doing particularly well in publishing open-access journals (OAJ). As per the directory of open-access journals (DOAJ), to date, India with 390 OAJs, is ranked 5th in the world in terms of numbers of OAJs being published.

Much of the research done in India is reported in the journals published from India. These journals have limited readership and many of them are not being indexed by Web of Science, Scopus or other leading international abstracting and indexing databases. Consequently, research done in the country gets hidden not only from the fellow countrymen, but also from the international community. This situation can be easily overcome if all the researchers facilitate OA to their publications.

One of the easiest ways to facilitate OA to scientific literature is through the institutional repositories. If every research institution and university in India set up an open-access IR and ensure that copies of the final accepted versions of all the research publications are uploaded in the IRs, then the research done in India will get far better visibility. The federation of metadata from all the distributed, interoperable OA repositories in the country will serve as a window to the research done across the country.

Federation of metadata from the distributed OAI-compliant repositories can be easily achieved by setting up harvesting software like the PKP Harvester. In this paper, we share our experience in setting up a prototype metadata harvesting service using the PKP harvesting software for the OAI-compliant repositories in India.

URL : http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/43176/

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Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

Authors : Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon

Background

In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk.

Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model.

Methods

The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model.

Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich’s periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal.

A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data.

Results

Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996.

OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/73

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Use of Web Resources for Scholarly Research in Language and Literature: A Study among Research Scholars in Aligarh Muslim University, India

This paper assesses the level of awareness and use of web resources by the research scholars of languages and literature in Aligarh Muslim University, India. Further the paper aims to highlight the problems faced by research scholars while accessing web resources, their opinion about the features and usefulness of the e-resources. The study was conducted through a well structured questionnaire administered among the research scholars in the department of English, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Modern Indian Languages and Comparative literature and Culture.

A random sample of 250 respondents collected during the months of June to August 2011 has been taken for analysis. This paper restricts the study exclusively to use of web resources by research scholars of Language and Literature in Aligarh Muslim University. The scope of the study can be extended to other Indian Universities also.

The study reveals that web resources have became an essential part of the research works in AMU. Almost all the services and resources available on Web are utilized by the researchers and Google is the widely used search engine in the University. Many attempts have been made to study the use of e-resources by research scholars in various universities in India, but this is the first of its kind among the researchers of Language and Literature with some suggestions for improvement of web resources and services.

URL : http://irjlis.com/use-web-resources-scholarly-research-language-literature/

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Multi-Stage Open Peer Review: Scientific Evaluation Integrating the Strengths of Traditional Peer Review with the Virtues of Transparency and Self-Regulation

The traditional forms of scientific publishing and peer review do not live up to all demands of efficient communication and quality assurance in today’s highly diverse and rapidly evolving world of science.

They need to be advanced and complemented by interactive and transparent forms of review, publication, and discussion that are open to the scientific community and to the public.

The advantages of open access, public peer review, and interactive discussion can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional scientific peer review. Since 2001 the benefits and viability of this approach are clearly demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP, www.atmos-chem-phys.net) and a growing number of sister journals launched and operated by the European Geosciences Union (EGU, www.egu.eu) and the open access publisher Copernicus (www.copernicus.org).

The interactive open access journals are practicing an integrative multi-stage process of publication and peer review combined with interactive public discussion, which effectively resolves the dilemma between rapid scientific exchange and thorough quality assurance.

Key features and achievements of this approach are: top quality and impact, efficient self-regulation and low rejection rates, high attractivity and rapid growth, low costs, and financial sustainability.

In fact, ACP and the EGU interactive open access sister journals are by most if not all standards more successful than comparable scientific journals with traditional or alternative forms of peer review (editorial statistics, publication statistics, citation statistics, economic costs, and sustainability).

The high efficiency and predictive validity of multi-stage open peer review have been confirmed in a series of dedicated studies by evaluation experts from the social sciences, and the same or similar concepts have recently also been adopted in other disciplines, including the life sciences and economics.

Multi-stage open peer review can be flexibly adjusted to the needs and peculiarities of different scientific communities. Due to the flexibility and compatibility with traditional structures of scientific publishing and peer review, the multi-stage open peer review concept enables efficient evolution in scientific communication and quality assurance.

It has the potential for swift replacement of hidden peer review as the standard of scientific quality assurance, and it provides a basis for open evaluation in science.”

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3389610/