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Science 2.0 Repositories: Time for a Change in Scholarly Communication

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“Information and communication technology (ICT) advances in research infrastructures are continuously changing the way research and scientific communication are performed. Scientists, funders, and organizations are moving the paradigm of “research publishing” well beyond traditional articles. The aim is to pursue an holistic approach where publishing includes any product (e.g. publications, datasets, experiments, software, web sites, blogs) resulting from a research activity and relevant to the interpretation, evaluation, and reuse of the activity or part of it. The implementation of this vision is today mainly inspired by literature scientific communication workflows, which separate the “where” research is conducted from the “where” research is published and shared. In this paper we claim that this model cannot fit well with scientific communication practice envisaged in Science 2.0 settings. We present the idea of Science 2.0 Repositories (SciRepos), which meet publishing requirements arising in Science 2.0 by blurring the distinction between research life-cycle and research publishing. SciRepos interface with the ICT services of research infrastructures to intercept and publish research products while providing researchers with social networking tools for discovery, notification, sharing, discussion, and assessment of research products.”

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

Making open access work for authors, institutions and publishers

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“This report arises from a roundtable event hosted by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) at University College London on 6 October 2014. The roundtable brought together representatives from academic institutions, publishers and vendors to discuss the challenge of “making open access work”.

Recent policy changes in the United Kingdom are driving a rapid increase in the number of article processing charges, or APCs, being paid to publishers in order to make articles open access. The attendees gathered to discuss the challenges faced by their organizations as APC volumes rise, and to explore the role that third-party vendors such as CCC can play in helping to address these. Discussions during the course of the day covered a wide range of issues. Institutions and publishers offered a range of different perspectives, but there was a striking commonality in the challenges faced, and a high degree of consensus on what is needed to address them:
Author engagement – Author engagement is crucial to the success of open access, but the complexity of the process at present means many need support at an early stage. This requires a fundamental shift from a two-way relationship between author and publisher, to a three- or four-way relationship that also involves the institution and potentially an external funder.
Streamlining the APC process – Workflows for handling APCs remain unstable, with institutions and publishers both grappling with the need to constantly adapt processes and systems as volumes rise. Greater consistency and automation is needed if efficiencies are to be achieved.
Copyright and licensing – Authors lack familiarity with the range of licensing options available and the licensing requirements of funders. Direct engagement between publishers and institutional  administrators can help address this in the short term, but in the long term authors must be equipped to make informed licensing choices that take account of funder mandates.
Management and billing of APCs – The payment of individual APC invoices is not a sustainable solution for either institutions or publishers, but some institutions have concerns over a loss of transparency where alternative models are used. The complex relationships among APC pricing, subscription revenues, licensing, and embargo periods remain a subject for debate.
Standards and interoperability – The need to improve sharing of information through development of common vocabularies and data standards was universally agreed. Identification of suitable persistent identifiers is part of the solution, but even where these exist low levels of uptake remain a concern.
Reporting and compliance – Achieving compliance with funder requirements places a significant burden on institutional administrators, and results in growing demands for information from publishers.”

URL : http://www.copyright.com/content/dam/cc3/marketing/documents/pdfs/Report-Making-Open-Access-Work.pdf

Will Open Access Get Me Cited? An Analysis of the Efficacy of Open Access Publishing in Political Science

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“The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot afford. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the efficacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the efficacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We find that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096514001668

Digitization, Internet publishing and the revival of scholarly monographs: An empirical study in India

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“This research shows the growing utility of internet-based digital models in reviving the crisis-stricken traditional print monograph publishing. The rising prices of scientific journals in the past three decades forced academic and research libraries to resort to cutbacks on monograph budgets. The declining sales to libraries and rising production costs led to a significant drop in global demand for print monographs, rendering monograph publishing financially unattractive. Combining the flexibility of digitized content with the global reach of the Internet, three emerging digital models — print on demand, bundled e-books, and e-consortia — are beginning to revamp the monograph publishing business.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4932

Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

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“Background: Research is published in indexed, online scholarly journals so that published knowledge can be easily found and built upon by others. Most scholars rely on relatively few online indexing service providers to search for relevant scholarly content. It is under-appreciated that the quality of indexing can vary across different journals and that this can have an adverse effect on the quality of research.

Objective: In this short paper I compare the recall of commonly used online indexers; Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Microsoft Academic Search and Mendeley Search against a selection of over 20,000 papers published in two different high-volume journals: PLOS ONE and Zootaxa.

Results: When using Google Scholar, content in Zootaxa has low recall for search terms that are known to occur in it, significantly lower than the near-perfect recall of the same terms in PLOS ONE. All other indexers tend to have lower recall than Google Scholar except Scopus which outperformed Google Scholar for recall on Zootaxa searches. I also elaborate why Dark Research is undesirable for optimal scientific progress with some recommendations for change.

Conclusion: This research is a basic proof-of-concept which demonstrates that when searching for published scholarly content, relevant studies can remain hidden as ’Dark Research’ in poorly-indexed journals, even despite expertise-informed efforts to find the content. The technological capability to do full text indexing on all modern scholarly journal content certainly exists, it is perhaps just publisher-imposed access-restrictions on content that prevents this from happening.”

URL : Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.773v1

Ebooks in education : Realising the vision

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“Ebooks are coming of age in education, as this exciting collection commissioned by Jisc demonstrates.

Case studies, reflecting ebook success stories across the higher and further education sectors, include:

  • An innovative app to encourage ebook take-up in a Welsh college.
  • A partnership between a library and research centre to create open access monographs and midigraphs.
  • Several examples of creative negotiations with ebook publishers.

Insight chapters address hot topics in the ebook universe, including:

  • The changing world of access to scholarly digital content in the mobile environment.
  • The challenges faced by the library as online distance learning moves from margin to mainstream.
  • How ebooks have the potential to meet a wide range of accessibility needs.
  • Experimentation with ebooks as a shared service.

This collection will provide inspiration and guidance to institutions as they develop projects and services to support students and researchers and will be of interest to library practitioners, publishers, ebook vendors, information professionals, teachers, lecturers and students.”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/12-3-123-1-10-20141114.pdf

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

Annotation as a New Paradigm in Research Archiving

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“We outline a paradigm to preserve results of digital scholarship, whether they are query results, feature values, or topic assignments. This paradigm is characterized by using annotations as multifunctional carriers and making them portable. The testing grounds we have chosen are two significant enterprises, one in the history of science, and one in Hebrew scholarship. The first one (CKCC) focuses on the results of a project where a Dutch consortium of universities, research institutes, and cultural heritage institutions experimented for 4 years with language techniques and topic modeling methods with the aim to analyze the emergence of scholarly debates. The data: a complex set of about 20.000 letters. The second one (DTHB) is a multi-year effort to express the linguistic features of the Hebrew bible in a text database, which is still growing in detail and sophistication. Versions of this database are packaged in commercial bible study software. We state that the results of these forms of scholarship require new knowledge management and archive practices. Only when researchers can build efficiently on each other’s (intermediate) results, they can achieve the aggregations of quality data by which new questions can be answered, and hidden patterns visualized. Archives are required to find a balance between preserving authoritative versions of sources and supporting collaborative efforts in digital scholarship. Annotations are promising vehicles for preserving and reusing research results.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6069