Archives des catégories : status

Access, Readership, Citations: A Randomi…

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Access, Readership, Citations: A Randomized Controlled Trial Of Scientific Journal Publishing :

“This dissertation explores the relationship of Open Access publishing with subsequent readership and citations. It reports the findings of a randomized controlled trial involving 36 academic journals produced by seven publishers in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Between January, 2007 and February, 2008, 712 articles were randomly assigned free access status upon publication from the publisher’s websites (the treatment), leaving 2,533 control articles that were accessible by subscription (the control). Article usage data was gathered from the publishers’ websites and article citations were gathered from ISI’s Web of Knowledge. At the time of this writing, all articles have aged at least two years. Articles receiving the Open Access treatment received significantly more readership (as measured by article downloads) and reached a broader audience (as measured by unique visitors), yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles. A pronounced increase in article downloads with no commensurate increase in citations to Open Access treatment articles may be explained through social stratification, a process which concentrates scientific authors at elite, resource-rich institutions with excellent access to the scientific literature. For this community, access is essentially a non-issue. The real beneficiaries of Open Access are the communities that consume, but do not contribute to, the scientific literature. The focus on information consumers requires us to advance the theory of the attention economy. The linear transmission model, where information flows from the sender to the receiver is rejected for a two-sided market model, with authors on one side, readers on the other and journals fulfilling the role of the intermediary agent. The primary purpose of the journal-agent is to transmit quality signals to potential readers. I argue that this model is able to explain both author and reader behaviors as well as the persistent role of journals in an information environment that decouples certification from dissemination.”

URL : http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/17788

The Anatomy of an Electronic Discussion …

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The Anatomy of an Electronic Discussion List for Librarians, KUTUP-L: Bibliometric and Content Analyses of Postings :

“Electronic discussion lists are widely used as a professional and scientific communication tool since late 1980s. Analysis of messages sent to discussion lists provides useful information on professional as well as scientific communication patterns. In this paper, we present the findings of a bibliometric analysis of some 20,000 messages sent to KUTUP‐L, an electronic discussion list for Turkish librarians, between 1994 and 2008. We test if the distributions of messages and their authors conform to Pareto, Price and Lotka laws. We then analyze the contents of 977 messages based on a stratified sample. Findings indicate that the number of messages sent to KUTUP‐L has increased over the years along with the number of authors. Two thirds (1,232) of about 1,900 list members posted at least one message to the list while the rest preferred to be so called “lurkers”. Some 35 authors posted almost half (49%) the messages while 20% of the authors posted 83% of all messages. The distribution of messages to authors conform to Price (“the square root of all authors would post half the messages”) and Pareto laws (so called “80/20 rule”), respectively. Of the 1,232 authors, one third (as opposed to 60% predicted by Lotka’s Law) sent only one message to the list. Results of content analysis show that 40% of messages sent to the list were off‐topic. Issues about or related with information management services (32%), library and information science (23%) and professional and scientific communication (19%) were discussed more often in the list. The intent analysis of the postings shows that three quarters of the messages were initiatory while the rest were reflexive. That’s to say that the majority of messages posted on KUTUP‐L to initiate a discussion did not seem to generate enough interest for others to reflect upon them by sending follow up messages, suggesting that professional and scientific communication taking place on KUTUP‐L on certain subjects can be characterized as more of a one‐way communication than a participatory one.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18727/

Analysis of Research Support Services at…

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Analysis of Research Support Services at international Best Practice Institutions :

“The following analysis aims to provide an overview and status of the research support services available to university researchers – with a focus on the services provided by university libraries – as well as to propose a strategy for CULIS with respect to research support of researchers at the University of Copenhagen. The analysis starts by defining the term research support service. This definition is used to categorize the national services and is iterated before moving on to the international institutions. We have described the services at 11 international and 8 national university libraries and identified the services that define the best practice institutions. We have found that research support services are often developing more or less organically, and service contents are moving toward becoming more tool-oriented, i.e. with less focus on the traditional information objects, books, journals, manuscripts. E.g. in scholarly publishing the focus is moving from acquiring, cataloging and local dissemination to facilitating the production and publication of books and journals, to supporting the authors on legal issues and to disseminating globally. Competences related to metadata structuring are potentially of great value to the growing field of data-archiving by researchers. The recommendations to CULIS are to conduct a new quantitative survey of researchers’ needs similar to the project “Ph.D. students’ information seeking behavior” in order to paint a clearer picture of what the researchers of The University of Copenhagen needs. Assessment could be made of whether the focus on physical student environments should be matched for researchers. It is a general recommendation to formulate a strategy for the area of providing research support services, formulate clear goals for the institution as well as for the individual services, dedicate resources for running services, dedicate resources to developing services, coordinate existing services, provide overview of goals and services (internally and externally), participate in networking and user activities, position university libraries as part of the research infrastructure. When developing new services, it is our recommendation that special focus be put on primary research data and accompanying metadata – dataverses, environments for generating and sharing research content – VREs, dedicated support of individual researchers, research groups and dedicated information for researchers – researcher information hubs.”

URL : http://hprints.org/hprints-00516997/fr/

Persuading Collaboration: Analysing Part…

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Persuading Collaboration: Analysing Participation in Online Collaboration Projects :

“The growth of worldwide internet usage has given rise to the phenomenon of ‘open movements’. These are communities that evolve based around the collaborative production of common resources, to which free access is typically provided to all who choose to use it. Such communities and the resources they create have developed rapidly over the past 10-20 years and are the cause for major scholarly interest. This study takes the step of applying the lens of Persuasive Design to the study of open movements in order to show how site design can play a role in increasing participant activity and longevity. For this purpose it looks at two ‘open movement’ resources, the collaboratively edited map OpenStreetMap and The Pirate Bay, a tracker for torrents uploaded by the le-sharing community. The analysis is two-fold: first, it uses quantitative data of user participation in the systems, derived from downloads of system-generated user-histories to generate an overall picture of user-participation in each of the systems. Second, it applies a set of heuristics to evaluate the persuasive design of the systems in question. It then connects the results of the quantitative analysis with the heuristic analysis in order to see how the persuasive design of the systems impact on user participation. This thesis will primarily be of value to researchers of online collaboration, although it may also be of interest to researchers in the field of Persuasive Design.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19155/

Institutional Repositories: an Internal …

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Institutional Repositories: an Internal and External Perspective on the Value of IRs for Researchers’ Communities :

“Institutional repositories represent extremely innovative technology, but repository managers still struggle to bring together a critical mass of content and to demonstrate their overall impact on research. In this paper I propose a set of Performance Indicators (PIs) to assess institutional repositories’ success. Fourteen internal indicators are selected and inserted in the quadruple ‘balanced scorecard’ perspective. Three more indicators from an external perspective are then proposed and discussed by the author.
I hope that this study will foster the development of standard Performance Indicators for IRs in the very near future, in order to help IR managers to demonstrate their repositories’ cost-effectiveness and success.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2010-2/index.html?000503

Digital Scholarly Publishing and Archiving Services by Academic Libraries: Case Study of the University of Patras

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“During the last years, dramatic changes in the electronic publishing landscape have created new roles and changed the traditional ones. Presently, some libraries have capitalised on their experience and knowledge in information technology and electronic publishing to undertake such activities, while at the same time they spearhead the campaign for Open Access spreading within academic communities.

The Library & Information Centre (LIC) of the University of Patras (UoP), Greece, has been playing an active role in promoting Open Access (OA) in Greece. Since 2007, LIC has been experimenting with OA publishing practices and tools within the framework of various R&D projects. Two of the major results of these efforts are the ‘Pasithee’ e-publishing platform and the ‘Dexamene’ digital archive for Greek scholarly journals. Both platforms are based on OJS-Open Journal Systems e-publishing software. The two facilities were appropriately modified to meet the LIC’s publishing and archiving requirements respectively. Currently two journals are being hosted on each platform and all four are from the Humanities. The LIC is negotiating with more publishers and editorial teams to host their journals.
In this article we focus on:
1. technical and managerial key issues of the development and operation phases,
2. services and procedures,
3. the business model,
4. technological, procedural and legal issues and problems that were encountered when working together with publishers, editors and authors, and
5. future plans for improving and upgrading our e-publishing services into an integrated institutional platform to cover all kinds of publications and data types (monographs, conference proceedings, teaching material, bulletins, magazines etc.).

The article concludes with a succinct presentation of the Directory of Greek Digital Resources, a pilot infrastructure developed by the LIC which indexes and presents digital publishing initiatives in Greece and aims to become a formal registry of Greek scholarly resources in digital format.”

URL : Digital Scholarly Publishing and Archiving Services by Academic Libraries: Case Study of the University of Patras

Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/7991