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Science Dissemination using Open Access

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The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available.

The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet.

Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included. The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN (Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).

URL : https://issuu.com/sdu-ictp/docs/openaccess

Measuring the visibility of the University’s scientific production using GoogleScholar, “Publish or Perish” software and Scientometrics

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Open access to scientific information through institutional digital repositories presents today’s world information environment and the transformations imposed by information society.

The first Romanian institutional repository was implemented at Transilvania University of Brasov. As part of the undertaken research, the visibility and the impact of the university’s scientific production was measured using the scientific methods of scientometry, as a fundamental instrument for determining the international value of an university as well as for the statistical evaluation of scientific research results.

The results showed that an open access institutional repository would significantly add to the visibility of the university’s scientific production.In this article we define the scientific production and productivity and present the main indicators for the measurement of the scientific activity.

The impact of the research is analyzed and measured through scientometric indicators. The analysis of the citations represents a scientometric indicator for the evaluation of the scientific researches.

Through the number of citations we can analyse the quality of the scientific information. Google Scholar was used as a scientometric database which can be consulted free of charge on the Internet and which indexes academic papers from institutional repositories, identifying also the referenced citations.

The free “Publish or Perish” software can be used as an analysis instrument for the impact of the research, by analysing the citations through the h-index.

We present the methodology and the results of an exploratory study made at the Transilvania University of Brasov regarding the h-index of the academic staff. H-index was calculated by using “Publish or Perish” software, comparing the number of ISI indexed published articles and the number of citations from “ISI Web of Science”.

Using “Publish or Perish”, we calculated h-index, g-index, hc-index and HI norm. We analyzed the research performances achieved by Brasov academic community in 2008, as realised in their annual evaluation -number of papers, books, research contracts, etc- by comparing the four indexes of those 60 professors with the best results.

We will present correlation indicators and the importance of open access for increasing the impact of scientific research by using institutional repositories.

URL : https://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-repanovici-en.pdf

How to assess the impact of an electronic document? And what does impact mean anyway?: Reliable usage statistics in heterogeneous repository communities

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Usually the impact of research and researchers is quantified by using citation data: either by journal-centered citation data as in the case of the journal impact factor (JIF) or by author-centered citation data as in the case of the Hirsch- or h-index.This paper aims to discuss a range of impact measures, especially usage-based metrics, and to report the results of two surveys.

Design/methodology/approach – The first part of the article analyzes both citation-based and usage-based metrics.

The second part is based on the findings of the surveys: one in the form of a brainstorming session with information professionals and scientists at the OAI6 conference in Geneva, the second in the form of expert interviews, mainly with scientists.

Findings – The results of the surveys indicate an interest in the social aspects of science, like visualizations of social graphs both for persons and their publications. Furthermore, usage data are considered an appropriate measure to describe quality and coverage of scientific documents; admittedly, the consistence of usage information among repositories has to be kept in mind. The scientists who took part in the survey also asked for community services, assuming these might help to identify relevant scientific information more easily. Some of the other topics of interest were personalization or easy submission procedures.

Originality/value – This paper delineates current discussions about citation-based and usage-based metrics. Based on the results of the surveys, it depicts which functionalities could enhance repositories, what features are required by scientists and information professionals, and whether usage-based services are considered valuable. These results also outline some elements of future repository research.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18620/

Research productivity-visibility-accessibility and scholarly communication in Southern African universities

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The project for the revitalisation of Southern Africa’s higher education sector is dependent on, among other things, the capacity of the region’s universities to produce research, to communicate that research to a broad public audience and to use the research output in the process of educating future generations of graduates. Given this context, research output in the great majority of Southern African universities is barely visible.

While the introduction of new digital media may offer greater accessibility and expanded opportunities for the visibility of scholarly communication, this may be insufficient to meet the needs of the many scholars and other actors who seek to build on existing bodies of knowledge, whether to advance society or in order to create knowledge for its own sake.

This article reports the findings of two 2008 studies – The state of public science in the SADC region and Opening access to knowledge in Southern African universities. Working within a frame which understands knowledge produced in universities as a public good, this article examines the issues at play in terms of the productivity-visibility-accessibility of scholarly communications in regional higher education.

The conclusion discusses a possible approach to improve such productivity-visibility-accessibility, through the adoption of a strategic vision of open access to knowledge and through consideration of two breakthroughs pertinent to achieving a vision of revitalised higher education in the region.

URL : http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/19768?show=full

Interconnection among Academic Journal Websites: Multilateral versus Bilateral Interconnection

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Electronic academic journal websites provide new services of text and/or datamining and linking, indispensable for efficient allocation of attention among abundant sources of scienti…c information. Fully realizing the benefitt of these services requires interconnection among websites.

Motivated by CrossRef, a multilateral citation linking backbone, this paper performs a comparison between multilateral interconnection through an open platform and bilateral interconnection, and finds that publishers are fully interconnected in the former regime while they can be partially interconnected in the latter regime for exclusion or di¤erentiation motives.

Surprisingly, if partial interconnection arises for di¤erentiation motive, exclusion of small publisher(s) occurs more often under multilateral interconnection. We also find that in the case of multilateral interconnection, a for-profit platform induces less exclusion than an open platform. Various other extensions are analyzed.

URL : https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/medias/doc/wp/io/wp_io_102_2009.pdf

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web

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Authors : John W. Maxwell with Meghan MacDonald, Travis Nicholson, Jan Halpape, Sarah Taggart, and Heiko Binder

Book publishers have struggled in recent years to find ways to adopt XML-based editorial and production workflows. Complexity, unfamiliarity, and uncertainty about implementation details contribute to a kind of impasse among publishers—particularly small and medium-sized firms that lack the resources to maintain innovative IT departments that might push them into 21st-century processes.

While the benefits of XML-based processes are trumpeted widely , and the general business case for adopting and investing in XML and related technology has existed for 20 years, gathering the energy and resources to move into an XML-based environment has eluded many.

Could it be that XML-based workflows are simply too complicated to be readily adopted by smaller publishers? And if that is so, what are the implications as we move into the digital era?

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.106

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The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date

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Author : Alma Swan

This paper presents a summary of reported studies on the Open Access citation advantage. There is a brief introduction to the main issues involved in carrying out such studies, both methodological and interpretive.

The study listing provides some details of the coverage, methodological approach and main conclusions of each study.

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/