Catégorie : EN

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Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing

Author : Guillaume Cabanac

Research articles disseminate the knowledge produced by the scientific community. Access to this literature is crucial for researchers and the general public. Apparently, “bibliogifts” are available online for free from text-sharing platforms.

However, little is known about such platforms. What is the size of the underlying digital libraries? What are the topics covered? Where do these documents originally come from? This article reports on a study of the Library Genesis platform (LibGen).

The 25 million documents (42 terabytes) it hosts and distributes for free are mostly research articles, textbooks, and books in English. The article collection stems from isolated, but massive, article uploads (71%) in line with a “biblioleaks” scenario, as well as from daily crowdsourcing (29%) by worldwide users of platforms such as Reddit Scholar and Sci-Hub.

By relating the DOIs registered at CrossRef and those cached at LibGen, this study reveals that 36% of all DOI articles are available for free at LibGen. This figure is even higher (68%) for three major publishers: Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. More research is needed to understand to what extent researchers and the general public have recourse to such text-sharing platforms and why.

URL : http://www.irit.fr/publis/SIG/2015_JASIST_C.pdf

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Research Data Explored II: the Anatomy and Reception of figshare

This is the second paper in a series of bibliometric studies of research data. In this paper, we present an analysis of figshare, one of the largest multidisciplinary repositories for research materials to date.

We analysed the structure of items archived in figshare, their usage, and their reception in two altmetrics sources (PlumX and ImpactStory). We found that figshare acts as a platform for newly published research materials, and as an archive for PLOS.

Depending on the function, we found different bibliometric characteristics. Items archived from PLOS tend to be coming from the natural sciences and are often unviewed and non-downloaded. Self-archived items, however, come from a variety of disciplines and exhibit some patterns of higher usage.

In the altmetrics analysis, we found that Twitter was the social media service where research data gained most attention; generally, research data published in 2014 were most popular across social media services.

PlumX detects considerably more items in social media and also finds higher altmetric scores than ImpactStory.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01298

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Indian research going global: A study on the status of open access publishing

Aims to measure quantitatively the scholarly journals which were produced with full immediate open access (OA) from 2003 to 2013. Focuses on the amount of India’s contribution to scholarly literature through the repositories of their institutions, amount of literature produced in various disciplines and the open source software’s (OSS) used for it.

Aims to know the current status of open access publishing in India. A survey of the open access journals indexed in the Directory of Open access Journals (DOAJ) and the repositories indexed in the Open DOAR is followed for this study. India started making its journals open access in 2003 with about 13 journals in a year and has reached about 197 journals till September 2013, which shows a growth of 15 fold of the open access journal output within a year.

The percentage of the multidisciplinary repositories is highest with 43% and the repositories of the disciplines such as Technology, Chemistry and Chemical Technology and Physics and Astronomy are 18%, 15% and 14% respectively among the 64 repositories listed in OpenDOAR.

With about 650 open access journals and about 64 open access directories, India has made important contributions towards the growth of Open access publishing.

URL : http://www.spoars.org/journal/v3n4p4

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EN

Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject.

We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced.

We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.

URL : Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

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An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development

The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors.

URL : http://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/journal.pone.0115069.pdf

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115069

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Issues in the development of open access to research data

This paper explores key issues in the development of open access to research data. The use of digital means for developing, storing and manipulating data is creating a focus on ‘data-driven science’. One aspect of this focus is the development of ‘open access’ to research data.

Open access to research data refers to the way in which various types of data are openly available to public and private stakeholders, user communities and citizens. Open access to research data, however, involves more than simply providing easier and wider access to data for potential user groups. The development of open access requires attention to the ways data are considered in different areas of research.

We identify how open access is being unevenly developed across the research environment and the consequences this has in terms of generating data gaps. Data gaps refer to the way data becomes detached from published conclusions. To address these issues, we examine four main areas in developing open access to research data: stakeholder roles and values; technological requirements for managing and sharing data; legal and ethical regulations and procedures; institutional roles and policy frameworks.

We conclude that problems of variability and consistency across the open access ecosystem need to be addressed within and between these areas to ensure that risks surrounding a data gap are managed in open access.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2014.956505

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The big picture: scholarly publishing trends 2014

It is important for journal editors to keep up to date with the changes happening in the international journal environment to ensure that their own publications remain current and meet international expectations. Dramatic changes have taken place in the journals environment during the last two decades, frequently driven by technology but also by increased global participation in scholarly and scientific research and concern about the commercial influence on dissemination of knowledge. Technical solutions have attempted to address the growth in research but have sometimes added to the tsunami of information and increased the need to manage quality.

To this end experiments with the traditional quality control and dissemination systems have been attempted, but news of improvements are frequently overshadowed by alarms about ethical problems. There is particular concern about some of the new publishers who are not adhering to established quality control and ethical practices. Within a potentially fragmenting system, however, there are also emerging collaborative projects helping to knit together the different elements of the publishing landscape to improve quality, linkages and access.

URL : The big picture: scholarly publishing trends 2014

Alternative URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.6087/kcse.2014.1.52