Catégorie : EN

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EN

Discoverability Challenges and Collaboration Opportunities within the Scholarly Communications Ecosystem: A SAGE White Paper Update

The prominence of mainstream search engines and the rise of web-scale, pre-indexed discovery services present new challenges and opportunities for publishers, librarians, vendors, and researchers. With the aim of furthering collaborative conversations, SAGE commissioned a study of opportunities for improving academic discoverability with value chain experts in the scholarly communications ecosystem.

Results were released in January 2012 as a white paper titled Improving Discoverability of Scholarly Content in the Twentieth Century: Collaboration Opportunities for Librarians, Publishers, and Vendors. Following the white paper, this article explores the implications for these findings through review of commissioned studies, research reports, journal articles, conference papers, and white papers published in the ensuing twelve months. Sidebars highlight especially promising cross-sector initiatives for enhancing researcher discoverability of the scholarly corpus at appropriate points in their workflow, including the NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) and the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID).

Concluding reflections highlight opportunities for librarians to contribute to cross-sector collaborations that support discovery of quality peer-reviewed content by improving navigation, discoverability, visibility, and usage of the scholarly corpus.

URL : http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/240

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EN

Open Access Publishing – An Opinionated, Non-Canonical Tour

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EN

A Two-Dimensional Approach to Evaluate the Scientific Production of Countries (Case Study: The Basic Sciences)

The quantity and quality of scientific output of the topmost 50 countries in the four basic sciences (agricultural and biological sciences, chemistry, mathematics, and physics and astronomy) are studied in the period of the recent 12 years (1996-2007). In order to rank the countries, a novel two-dimensional method is proposed, which is inspired by the H-index and other methods based on quality and quantity measures.

The countries data are represented in a « quantity-quality diagram », and partitioned by a conventional statistical algorithm (k-means), into three clusters, members of which are rather the same in all of the basic sciences. The results offer a new perspective on the global positions of countries with regards to their scientific output.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.2698

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EN

Creativity and Collaboration in the Digital Age

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EN

Information and Computation

In this chapter, concepts related to information and computation are reviewed in the context of human computation. A brief introduction to information theory and different types of computation is given. Two examples of human computation systems, online social networks and Wikipedia, are used to illustrate how these can be described and compared in terms of information and computation.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1428

Catégories
EN

Research Data Symposium

Research Data Symposium Panel 1: Plan and Collect

Research Data Symposium Panel 2: Assure, Describe, and Preserve

Research Data Symposium Panel 3: Integrate and Analyze

Research Data Symposium Panel 4: Discover, Share, and Impact

Catégories
EN

The ethics of open access publishing

Should those who work on ethics welcome or resist moves to open access publishing? This paper analyses arguments in favour and against the increasing requirement for open access publishing and considers their implications for bioethics research. In the context of biomedical science, major funders are increasingly mandating open access as a condition of funding and such moves are also common in other disciplines.

Whilst there has been some debate about the implications of open-access for the social sciences and humanities, there has been little if any discussion about the implications of open access for ethics. This is surprising given both the central role of public reason and critique in ethics and the fact that many of the arguments made for and against open access have been couched in moral terms.

In what follows I argue that those who work in ethics have a strong interest in supporting moves towards more open publishing approaches which have the potential both to inform and promote richer and more diverse forms of public deliberation and to be enriched by them. The importance of public deliberation in practical and applied ethics suggests that ethicists have a particular interest in the promotion of diverse and experimental forms of publication and debate and in supporting new, more creative and more participatory approaches to publication.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/14/16/abstract