Social media: A guide for researchers : …

Social media: A guide for researchers :

“Social media is an important technological trend that has big implications for how researchers (and people in general) communicate and collaborate. Researchers have a huge amount to gain from engaging with social media in various aspects of their work.

This guide has been produced by the International Centre for Guidance Studies, and aims to provide the information needed to make an informed decision about using social media and select from the vast range of tools that are available.

One of the most important things that researchers do is to find, use and disseminate information, and social media offers a range of tools which can facilitate this. The guide discusses the use of social media for research and academic purposes and will not be examining the many other uses that social media is put to across society.

Social media can change the way in which you undertake research, and can also open up new forms of communication and dissemination. It has the power to enable researchers to engage in a wide range of dissemination in a highly efficient way.”

URL : http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/social-media-guide-researchers

Creative Commons and Public Sector Infor…

Creative Commons and Public Sector Information: Flexible tools to support PSI creators and re-users :

“Public sector information (PSI) is meant for wide re-use, but this information will only achieve maximum possible impact if users understand how they may use it. Creative Commons tools, which signify availability for re-use to users and require attribution to the releasing authority, are ideal tools for the sharing of public sector information. There is also increasing interest in open licenses and other tools to share publicly funded information, data, and content, including various kinds of cultural resources, educational materials, and research findings; Creative Commons tools are applicable here and recommended for these purposes too.”

URL : http://www.epsiplus.net/topic_reports/creative_commons_and_public_sector_information_flexible_tools_to_support_psi_creators_and_re_users

Support for gold open access publishing …

Support for gold open access publishing strategies at QUT :

INTRODUCTION : Since the introduction of its QUT ePrints institutional repository of published research outputs, together with the world’s first mandate for author contributions to an institutional repository, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has been a leader in support of green road open access. With QUT ePrints providing our mechanism for supporting the green road to open access, QUT has since then also continued to expand its secondary open access strategy supporting gold road open access, which is also designed to assist QUT researchers to maximise the accessibility and so impact of their research.

METHODS : QUT Library has adopted the position of selectively supporting true gold road open access publishing by using the Library Resource Allocation budget to pay the author publication fees for QUT authors wishing to publish in the open access journals of a range of publishers including BioMed Central, Public Library of Science and Hindawi. QUT Library has been careful to support only true open access publishers and not those open access publishers with hybrid models which “double dip” by charging authors publication fees and libraries subscription fees for the same journal content. QUT Library has maintained a watch on the growing number of open access journals available from gold road open access publishers and their increased rate of success as measured by publication impact.

RESULTS : This paper reports on the successes and challenges of QUT’s efforts to support true gold road open access publishers and promote these publishing strategy options to researchers at QUT. The number and spread of QUT papers submitted and published in the journals of each publisher is provided. Citation counts for papers and authors are also presented and analysed, with the intention of identifying the benefits to accessibility and research impact for early career and established researchers.

CONCLUSIONS : QUT Library is eager to continue and further develop support for this publishing strategy, and makes a number of recommendations to other research institutions, on how they can best achieve success with this strategy.”

URL : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/39416/

Public access to publicly funded researc…

Public access to publicly funded research: how and why mandatory policies by funders? :

“This contribution is aimed at presenting the principles upon which rely the mandatory Open Access policies of over 40 funding organizations worldwide. Most of them are in the biomedical field. Policies require that outputs of research publicly funded must be publicly available by self-archiving in an Open Archive. One of the latest funders to adopt such a policy is Telethon Foundation. The European Union also mandates Open Access for researches granted within the 7 Framework Program.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15338

A Feedback System on Institutional Repos…

A Feedback System on Institutional Repository :

“Repositories are playing an important role in the idea of open access to scholarly information. To increase the number of repositories and the contents in each repository, the effectoveness of repositories should be clear for researchers, that is, providers of the contents. This paper proposes a system which analyzes the access log to the contents in an institutional repository and returns the result to the authors as a feedback from readers. However, the results of detailed analyses with respect to a particular researcher tend to include individual data, therefore the accesses to the results must be controlled. The proposed system solves the problem by connecting with the researcher database in the institution.”

URL : https://qir.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dspace/handle/2324/18911/

Implementation of open content licenses …

Implementation of open content licenses :

“Open access is free of charge and free of most usage restrictions online access to research literature. Open content licenses or some explicit statement attached to the article when it is published in an open access journal or deposited in an open access repository help to refer to a specific type of libre open access. These licenses / statements make it clear to the reusers what they are permitted to do with published and deposited articles (including data). An organization’s or journal’s licensing policy (including policy on re-use and redistribution) shall be clearly stated and visible on the web site.

The survey attempted to gather information from a broad spectrum of research institutions in developing and transition countries in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the implementation of open content licenses. We looked at the web sites of 2,489 open access journals and 357 open access repositories from EIFL network countries1. And this report highlights the best practices in using open content licenses by open access journals and open access repositories in developing and transition countries […]

The first version of the report was released on July 7, 2010 with request for comments and a call for more case studies on using open content licenses by open access journals and open access repositories in developing and transition countries. The second revised version of the report with more case studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland (provided by Bożena Bednarek-Michalska, Torun University Library), South Africa, Ukraine and Latin America (CLASCO case study provided by Dr. Dominique Babini) was released on September 7, 2010.

This is the third version with updated case studies from China, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine and new case studies from Ghana, Lithuania, Thailand, Kenya and Slovenia.

The report was produced in the frames of EIFL-OA advocacy program supported by Open Society Institute and the Wellcome Trust.”

URL : http://www.eifl.net/news/implementation-open-content-licenses