A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

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“Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws” of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05462

Issues in Open Research Data

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“In 2010 the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science were published. These principles were founded upon the idea that ‘Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge’ (http://pantonprinciples.org) and they provide a succinct list of the fundamentals to observe when making your data open. Intended for a broad audience of academics, publishers and librarians, Issues in Research Data explores the implications of the Panton Principles through a number of perspectives on open research data in the sciences and beyond.

The book features chapters by open data experts in a range of academic disciplines, covering practical information on licensing, ethics, and advice for data curators, alongside more theoretical issues surrounding the adoption of open data. As the book is open access, each chapter can stand alone from the main volume so that communities can host, distribute, build upon and remix the content that is relevant to them.”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/moore2014.pdf

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ban

Knowledge Unlatched: A Global Library Consortium Model for Funding Open Access Scholarly Books

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“This special issue of Cultural Science Journal is devoted to the report of a groundbreaking experiment in re-coordinating global markets for specialist scholarly books and enabling the knowledge commons: the Knowledge Unlatched proof-of-concept pilot. The pilot took place between January 2012 and September 2014. It involved libraries, publishers, authors, readers and research funders in the process of developing and testing a global library consortium model for supporting Open Access books. The experiment established that authors, librarians, publishers and research funding agencies can work together in powerful new ways to enable open access; that doing so is cost effective; and that a global library consortium model has the potential dramatically to widen access to the knowledge and ideas contained in book-length scholarly works.”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/96-625-1-PB.pdf

Alternative URL : http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/view/96

Incentives and motivations for sharing research data: researcher’s perspectives

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“This study, commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, has gathered evidence, examples and opinions on current and future incentives for research data sharing from the researcher’s point of view, in order to provide recommendations for policy and practice development on how best to incentivise data access and reuse. Whilst most researchers appreciate the benefits of sharing research data, on an individual basis they may be reluctant to share their own data. This study is based on qualitative interviews with 22 selected researchers of five research teams that have established data sharing cultures, in the partner countries of Knowledge Exchange: Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The five case studies span various academic disciplines: arts and humanities, social sciences, biomedicine, chemistry and biology.”

URL : Incentives and motivations for sharing research data: researcher’s perspectives

Alternative URL : http://knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=733

Monographs and Open Access : A report to HEFCE

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“This report examines, and seeks to clarify, the range of issues that emerge when we think about the relationship between open access and monographs (including under this latter term other long scholarly publications). It arises from the immediate need of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and its sister funding councils in the UK, to examine the issues for open access in relation to books in a context where both funding and research councils in the UK have already established open-access requirements for publications in journals and conference proceedings, but the issues are much greater than those of defining the practicalities of mandates and the sustainability of open-access models. Furthermore, although the principal focus of the report is defined by the culture and policy preoccupations of higher education in this country, the international character of research, publishing, and academic careers has to be acknowledged.”

URL : http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2015/monographsandopenaccess/2014_monographs.pdf

Availability and accessibility in an open access institutional repository: a case study

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Introduction. This study explores the extent to which an institutional repository (IR) makes papers available and accessible on the open web by using 170 journal articles housed in DigiNole Commons, the IR at Florida State University.

Method. To analyze the IR’s impact on availability and accessibility, we conducted independent known-item title searches on both Google and Google Scholar (GS) to search for faculty publications housed in DigiNole Commons.

Analysis. The extent to which the IR makes articles available and accessible was measured quantitatively, and the findings that cannot be summarized with numbers were analyzed qualitatively.

Results. Google and GS searches provided links to DigiNole metadata for a total of 145 (85.3%) of 170 items, and to full texts for 96 (96%) of 100 items. With one exception, access to either metadata or full text required no more than three clicks.

Conclusions. Overall, the results confirm the contribution of the IR in making papers available and accessible. The results also reveal some impediments to the success of OA: including impediments linked to contractual arrangements between authors and publishers, impediments linked to policies, practices, and technologies governing the IR itself, and the low level of faculty participation in the IR.”

URL : http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/slis_faculty_publications/27/

Data without Peer: Examples of Data Peer Review in the Earth Sciences

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“Peer review of data is an important process if data is to take its place as a first class research output. Much has been written about the theoretical aspects of peer review, but not as much about the actual process of doing it. This paper takes an experimental view, and selects seven datasets, all from the Earth Sciences and with DOIs from DataCite, and attempts to review them, with varying levels of success. Key issues identified from these case studies include the necessity of human readable metadata, accessibility of datasets, and permanence of links to and accessibility of metadata stored in other locations.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january15/callaghan/01callaghan.html