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Strategies for gaining and maintaining academic support for…

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Strategies for gaining and maintaining academic support for the institutional open access repository :

“The impact of research can be measured by use or citation count. The more widely available that research outputs are; the more likely they are to be used, and the higher the impact. Making the author-manuscript version of research outputs freely available via the institutional repository greatly increases the availability of research outputs and can increase the impact.
QUT ePrints, the open access institutional repository of research outputs at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, was established in 2003 and is managed by the QUT Library. The repository now contains over 39,000 records. More than 21,000 of these records have full-text copies attached as result of continuous effort to maintain momentum and encourage academic engagement. The full-text deposit rate has continued to increase over time and, in 2012 (August, at the time of writing), 88% of the records for works published in 2012 provide access to a full-text copy.
Achieving success has required a long term approach to collaboration, open access advocacy, repository promotion, support for the deposit process, and ongoing system development. This paper discusses the various approaches adopted by QUT Library, in collaboration with other areas of the University, to achieve success.
Approaches include mainstreaming the repository via having it report to the University Research and Innovation Committee; regular provision of deposit rate data to faculties; championing key academic supporters; and holding promotional competitions and events such as during Open Access Week.
Support and training is provided via regular deposit workshops with academics and faculty research support groups and via the provision of online self-help information. Recent system developments have included the integration of citation data (from Scopus and Web of Science) and the development of a statistical reporting system which incentivise engagement.”

URL : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/59212/

L’offre des archives ouvertes dans le monde arabe : recensement et évaluation

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Cette étude dresse un état des archives ouvertes dans le monde arabe et leurs spécificités à partir d’une grille d’analyse inspirée des travaux similaires dans le monde occidental. Ce qui ressort de cette étude, c’est que l’offre des archives ouvertes arabes est très faible et l’implication des chercheurs arabes dans le dépôt dans ces archives reste limitée.

D’autant plus, le fonds de certaines archives a plus une vocation de bibliothèque numérique que d’archive ouverte. De ce fait, il serait intéressant d’améliorer la qualité et la quantité de ces archives pour contribuer à l’évolution de la recherche scientifique dans le monde arabe et à une meilleure visibilité des chercheurs et des institutions de recherche arabes.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19050/

Scientific Output from Latin America and the Caribbean…

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Scientific Output from Latin America and the Caribbean – Identification of the Main Institutions for Regional Open Access Integration Strategies :

“Latin America is a region in which two thirds of the investment in research and development are funded by State resources. It can be foreseen that in the near future governments in the region will encourage and promote, or require by law or mandates, that scientific output from the region become visible and accessible in open access repositories and portals. This paper presents the results of a survey to identify the institutions of the region with the largest volume of scientific output and most exposure of their output on the Web, in order to help make those institutions visible to national, regional and international organizations involved in open access strategies and programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. The results show a leading position by universities from Brazil; a strong presence of universities from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, and some presence of universities from Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Uruguay.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19085/

How important tasks are performed peer review …

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How important tasks are performed: peer review :

“The advancement of various fields of science depends on the actions of individual scientists via the peer review process. The referees’ work patterns and stochastic nature of decision making both relate to the particular features of refereeing and to the universal aspects of human behavior. Here, we show that the time a referee takes to write a report on a scientific manuscript depends on the final verdict. The data is compared to a model, where the review takes place in an ongoing competition of completing an important composite task with a large number of concurrent ones – a Deadline -effect. In peer review human decision making and task completion combine both long-range predictability and stochastic variation due to a large degree of ever-changing external “friction”.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.4963

Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central…

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Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central reduces journal readership–retrospective cohort analysis :

“Does PubMed Central-a government-run digital archive of biomedical articles-compete with scientific society journals? A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles (5999 treatment, 7224 control) published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals in nutrition, experimental biology, physiology, and radiology between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text hypertext markup language (HTML) article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in portable document format (PDF) article downloads from the journals’ websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles (treatment) become freely available from the PubMed Central repository. In addition, the effect of PubMed Central on reducing PDF article downloads is increasing over time, growing at a rate of 1.6% per year. There was no longitudinal effect for full-text HTML downloads. While PubMed Central may be providing complementary access to readers traditionally underserved by scientific journals, the loss of article readership from the journal website may weaken the ability of the journal to build communities of interest around research papers, impede the communication of news and events to scientific society members and journal readers, and reduce the perceived value of the journal to institutional subscribers.”

URL : http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2013/04/02/fj.13-229922.full.pdf

Comparing journals from different fields of Science and…

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Comparing journals from different fields of Science and Social Science through a JCR Subject Categories Normalized Impact Factor :

“The journal Impact Factor (IF) is not comparable among fields of Science and Social Science because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In this work, a decomposing of the field aggregate impact factor into five normally distributed variables is presented. Considering these factors, a Principal Component Analysis is employed to find the sources of the variance in the JCR subject categories of Science and Social Science. Although publication and citation behaviour differs largely across disciplines, principal components explain more than 78% of the total variance and the average number of references per paper is not the primary factor explaining the variance in impact factors across categories. The Categories Normalized Impact Factor (CNIF) based on the JCR subject category list is proposed and compared with the IF. This normalization is achieved by considering all the indexing categories of each journal. An empirical application, with one hundred journals in two or more subject categories of economics and business, shows that the gap between rankings is reduced around 32% in the journals analyzed. This gap is obtained as the maximum distance among the ranking percentiles from all categories where each journal is included.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.5107

Recent developments in Open Access

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Open Access to the world’s research literature has been an obvious development since the emergence of the Internet. To everyone, it appears clear that the costs of disseminating research could drop dramatically. Yet, progress in achieving it is strangely slow. This paper explores recent developments in open access, including:
• The recent Australian NH&MRC and ARC mandates for open access deposit in university repositories, and how universities are responding to them
• The UK’s Finch Report, and Lord Krebs’ Committee Report
• Recent USA and German developments
• Gradual growth in open access journals, and the challenge for universities and their libraries of transferring reader-side fees (subscriptions) to author-side fees (publication charges)
• The emergence of submission fees so that highly selective journals need not transfer all the costs of rejections onto successful articles
• Fake conferences and journals which exist only to extract attendance or publication fees
• Newer publishing models
• The recent emergence of a third route to open access based on social networking.

The delays in establishing an obvious developmental consequence of the Internet can largely be attributed to two factors: (a) academic apathy and inertia, and (b) publisher protection of profit margins and old business models. Neither of these can be expected to last. Of particular interest is the ‘Titanium Road’, a route to open access that is reliant on social networking.

URL : http://eprints.utas.edu.au/16321/