Archives des catégories : Non classé

The Changing Publication Practices in Academia: Inherent Uses and Issues in Open Access and Online Publishing and the Rise of Fraudulent Publications

Posté le par

“Open access and online publishing present significant changes to the Australian higher education sector in a climate demanding increasing research outputs from academic staff. Today’s researchers struggle to discern credible journals from a new wave of ‘low credibility,’ counterfeit, and predatory journals. A New York Times article on the issue resulted in hundreds of anonymous posts, having a whistleblower effect. An analysis of reader posts, examined in this paper, demonstrated that fear and cynicism were dominant, and that unscrupulous publishing practices were often rewarded.

A lack of quality control measures to assist researchers to choose reputable journals and avoid fraudulent ones is becoming evident as universities’ funding and workforce development become increasingly dependent on research outputs. Online publishing is also redefining traditional notions of academic prestige. Adapting to the twenty-first century online publishing landscape requires the higher education sector to meet these challenges with a combination of academic rigour and innovative tools that support researchers, so as to maintain quality and integrity within changing academic publishing practice.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.308

Donations as a Source of Income for Open Access Journals: An Option To Consider?

Statut

“Online open access journals allow readers to view scholarly articles without a subscription or other payment barrier. However, publishing costs must still be covered. Therefore, many of these publications rely on support from a variety of sources. One source of funds not commonly discussed is donations from readers.

This study investigated the prevalence of this practice and sought to learn about the motivation of journal editors to solicit donations, and also to gather input on the effectiveness of this strategy. Results show that very few open access journals solicit donations from readers, and for those that do, donations represent only a very small portion of all support received.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.307

The Users of Library Publishing Services: Readers and Access Beyond Open

Statut

“This article analyzes the discourse of library publishing, examining how the needs of library users have (or haven’t) been framed as core concerns in key collaborative documents from the 2007 Ithaka Report to the 2014 Library Publishing Directory. Access issues, including not only open access but format options, usability, accessibility, and general user experience, have most often been absent or sidelined in this discourse. Even open access has been less central than one might expect. Moreover, even in later documents where it is more commonly trumpeted as a value of libraries, open access is often not presented as a service to readers but to authors.

For these reasons, I argue the promotion of library publishing has missed a key opportunity to promote such services as offering a holistic approach that incorporates the needs of both authors and readers by drawing on the history of user studies in libraries. The absence of the user as information seeker, and especially reader, in this discourse should concern libraries lest library publishing services replicate existing access problems with commercial publishers beyond the question of openness. The opportunity exists for organizations such as the Library Publishing Coalition to foster discussion of reader needs for digital formats and, where feasible, promote a set of best practices.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.303

Interpreting “altmetrics”: viewing acts on social media through the lens of citation and social theories

Statut

“More than 30 years after Cronin’s seminal paper on “the need for a theory of citing” (Cronin, 1981), the metrics community is once again in need of a new theory, this time one for so-called “altmetrics”. Altmetrics, short for alternative (to citation) metrics — and as such a misnomer — refers to a new group of metrics based (largely) on social media events relating to scholarly communication. As current definitions of altmetrics are shaped and limited by active platforms, technical possibilities, and business models of aggregators such as Altmetric.com, ImpactStory, PLOS, and Plum Analytics, and as such constantly changing, this work refrains from defining an umbrella term for these very heterogeneous new metrics. Instead a framework is presented that describes acts leading to (online) events on which the metrics are based. These activities occur in the context of social media, such as discussing on Twitter or saving to Mendeley, as well as downloading and citing. The framework groups various types of acts into three categories — accessing, appraising, and applying — and provides examples of actions that lead to visibility and traceability online. To improve the understanding of the acts, which result in online events from which metrics are collected, select citation and social theories are used to interpret the phenomena being measured. Citation theories are used because the new metrics based on these events are supposed to replace or complement citations as indicators of impact. Social theories, on the other hand, are discussed because there is an inherent social aspect to the measurements.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05701

Is Europe Falling Behind in Data Mining? Copyright’s Impact on Data Mining in Academic Research

Statut

“This empirical paper discusses how copyright affects data mining (DM) by academic researchers. Based on bibliometric data, we show that where DM for academic research requires the express consent of rights holders: (1) DM makes up a significantly lower share of total research output; and (2) stronger rule-of-law is associated with less DM research. To our knowledge, this is the first time that an empirical study bears out a significant negative association between copyright protection and innovation.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2608513

Revues scientifiques et droit d’auteur : la rupture de l’open access

Statut

“L’apparition du numérique a constitué pour l’édition scientifique une étape essentielle, comme pour de nombreux autres secteurs des industries dites culturelles. Ici, ce sont les auteurs eux-mêmes, c’est-à-dire les chercheurs dont les articles sont publiés dans les revues scientifiques, qui ont profité de la révolution numérique pour bouleverser les modes de transmission des oeuvres. Il faut dire que ces chercheurs sont doublement concernés par la diffusion des oeuvres scientifiques. Ils en sont les auteurs mais aussi les destinataires principaux : la recherche se nourrit de la recherche, et le chercheur est à la fois le rédacteur d’articles exposant le résultat de ses travaux et le lecteur des publications de ses collègues, qui alimentent ses propres réflexions. C’est ainsi qu’ils ont développé l’idée de l’open access, consistant notamment à assurer un accès gratuit, en ligne, aux articles des revues scientifiques. Il s’agit ici de voir comment l’apparition de ce mouvement en faveur de l’open access a constitué une rupture dans l’évolution de l’édition scientifique et le rôle tenu par le droit d’auteur dans ce contexte.”

URL : http://hal.univ-nantes.fr/halshs-01160567

Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration Patterns

Statut

“A number of new metrics based on social media platforms—grouped under the term “altmetrics”—have recently been introduced as potential indicators of research impact. Despite their current popularity, there is a lack of information regarding the determinants of these metrics. Using publication and citation data from 1.3 million papers published in 2012 and covered in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science as well as social media counts from Altmetric.com, this paper analyses the main patterns of five social media metrics as a function of document characteristics (i.e., discipline, document type, title length, number of pages and references) and collaborative practices and compares them to patterns known for citations. Results show that the presence of papers on social media is low, with 21.5% of papers receiving at least one tweet, 4.7% being shared on Facebook, 1.9% mentioned on blogs, 0.8% found on Google+ and 0.7% discussed in mainstream media. By contrast, 66.8% of papers have received at least one citation. Our findings show that both citations and social media metrics increase with the extent of collaboration and the length of the references list. On the other hand, while editorials and news items are seldom cited, it is these types of document that are the most popular on Twitter. Similarly, while longer papers typically attract more citations, an opposite trend is seen on social media platforms. Finally, contrary to what is observed for citations, it is papers in the Social Sciences and humanities that are the most often found on social media platforms. On the whole, these findings suggest that factors driving social media and citations are different. Therefore, social media metrics cannot actually be seen as alternatives to citations; at most, they may function as complements to other type of indicators.”

URL : Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0120495