Lib-Value: Values, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries, Phase III: ROI of the Syracuse University Library

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“This study measures the return-on-investment (ROI) of the Syracuse University library. Faculty and students at Syracuse University were surveyed using contingent valuation methodology to measure their willingness-to-pay in time and money for the services of the academic library. Their travel time and use of the online library was measured to determine the environmental value of the academic library. The economic and environmental value of the Syracuse University library show an ROI of $4.49 returned to the university for every $1.00 spent each year.”

URL : Lib-Value: Values, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries, Phase III

DOI : 10.5860/crl.76.1.63

Sustaining Domain Repositories for Digital Data A White…

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Sustaining Domain Repositories for Digital Data: A White Paper :

“The last few years have seen a growing international movement to enhance research transparency, open access to data, and data sharing across the social and natural sciences. Meanwhile, new technologies and scientific innovations are vastly increasing the amount of data produced and the resultant potential for advancing knowledge. Domain repositories — data archives with ties to specific scientific communities — have an indispensable role to play in this changing data ecosystem. With both content-area and digital curation expertise, domain repositories are uniquely capable of ensuring that data and other research products are adequately preserved, enhanced, and made available for replication, collaboration, and cumulative knowledge building. However, the systems currently in place for funding repositories in the US are inadequate for these tasks. Effective and innovative funding models are needed to ensure that research data, so vital to the scientific enterprise, will be available for the future. Funding models also need to assure equal access to data preservation and curation services regardless of the researcher’s institutional affiliation. Creating sustainable funding streams requires coordination amongst multiple stakeholders in the scientific, archival, academic, funding, and policy communities.”

URL : http://datacommunity.icpsr.umich.edu/sites/default/files/WhitePaper_ICPSR_SDRDD_121113.pdf

Back to Grey Disclosure and Concealment of Electronic…

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Back to Grey : Disclosure and Concealment of Electronic Theses and Dissertations :

“The open access principle requires that scientific information be made widely and readily available to society. Defined in 2003 as a “comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific community”, open access implies that content be openly accessible and this needs the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge. Yet, in spite of the growing success of the open access initiative, a significant part of scientific and technical information remains unavailable on the web or circulates with restrictions. Even in institutional repositories (IRs) created to provide access to the scientific output of an academic institution, more or less important sectors of the scientific production are missing. This is because of lack of awareness, embargo, deposit of metadata without full text, confidential content etc. This problem concerns in particular electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) that are disseminated with different status – some are freely available, others are under embargo, confidential, restricted to campus access (encrypted or not) or not available at all. While other papers may be available through alternative channels (journals, monographs etc.), ETDs most often are not. Our paper describes a new and unexpected effect of the development of digital libraries and open access, as a paradoxical practice of hiding information from the scientific community and society, while partly sharing it with a restricted population (campus). The study builds on a review of recent papers on ETDs in IRs and evaluates the availability of ETDs in a small panel of European and American academic IRs and networks. It provides empirical evidence on the reality of restricted access and proposes a model of independent variables affecting decisions on embargo and on-campus access, together with a table of different degrees of (non) open access to ETDs in IRs.”

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00944662

Patron Driven Acquisitions PDA of e books New…

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Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA) of e-books: New life for the library catalog? :

“This paper highlights an overview of the conceptual approach to e-resource discoverability in academic libraries with a focus on research on the assessment of library catalog performance in the Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA) model for e-book collection development. Although the published literature stresses the key role of the library catalog in the PDA model for e-book acquisitions, the findings in this paper show that, until now, there has been a lack of research on users’ e-resources searching behavior and PDA. As a conclusion, the authors think that in such a large universe of digital information on the Web, a new branded local catalog could be the way to visualize a more “tangible” experience between users and e-book collections.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/22438/

Open Access Publishing A Literature Review Within…

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Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review :

“Within the context of the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) research scope, this literature review investigates the current trends, advantages, disadvantages, problems and solutions, opportunities and barriers in Open Access Publishing (OAP), and in particular Open Access (OA) academic publishing. This study is intended to scope and evaluate current theory and practice concerning models for OAP and engage with intellectual, legal and economic perspectives on OAP. It is also aimed at mapping the field of academic publishing in the UK and abroad, drawing specifically upon the experiences of CREATe industry partners as well as other initiatives such as SSRN, open source software, and Creative Commons. As a final critical goal, this scoping study will identify any meaningful gaps in the relevant literature with a view to developing further research questions. The results of this scoping exercise will then be presented to relevant industry and academic partners at a workshop intended to assist in further developing the critical research questions pertinent to OAP.”

URL : http://www.create.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/CREATe-Working-Paper-2014-01.pdf

Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article…

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Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project :

“The ICT revolution of the last decades impacted scientific communication as it has impacted many other forms of communications, changing the way in which articles are delivered and how they can be discovered. However, the impact of ICT on the research itself has been much more profound, introducing digital tools to the way in which researchers gather data, perform analyses, and exchange results. This brought new, digital forms of research output, and disseminating those calls for changes deeply impact the core format of the scientific article.
In 2009, Elsevier introduced the “Article of the Future” project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions. First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories — such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly. We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results. The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8446

MedOANet The Copyright and OA Landscape in Mediterranean…

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MedOANet: The Copyright and OA Landscape in Mediterranean Europe :

“The aim of this paper is to analyse the current copyright framework conditioning the progress of OA in Mediterranean countries and to examine whether this copyright framework needs to be improved and by which measures. In order to do so, this paper firstly introduces MedOANet, which is an EU-funded project the aim of which is to enhance existing national policies, strategies and structures for OA and to contribute towards the implementation of new ones in Mediterranean countries, namely France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey. Secondly, this paper gives an overview of the results of a survey which has been conducted in 2012 amongst research publishers by MedOANet. Thirdly, an interpretation of the most striking results of the survey is given: research publishers based in Mediterranean countries have, on average, very OA-friendly copyright and self-archiving policies in place. Some improvements could be achieved by developing an OA-conductive campaign of awareness rising; however, OA as the default way of scholarly communication would best be supported by an OA-friendly legal environment. In the end the author of the paper therefore asks the national and European legislators to introduce an exception or limitation for a green road OA publication of any publicly funded research paper into European and national copyright law.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9126