Rebooting the CS Publication Process :
Many computer science academics have been grousing about failures in our publication process. This
paper catalogs many of the specific complaints that are raised and proposes some radical new solutions
based on the assumption that, by eliminating physical paper entirely and going with a centralized system
to manage papers, we can rethink the entire process: paper submission, revision and publication. Fur-
thermore, having all of the metadata standardized and easily available, ranking algorithms can be easily
conceived to aid in tenure cases and departmental rankings.
URL : http://bit.ly/aeuLa0
Post Title
Interactive Open Access Publishing and Peer Review: The Effectiveness and Perspectives of Transparency and Self-Regulation in Scientific Communication and Evaluation :
The traditional forms of scientific publishing and peer review do not live up to the demands of efficient communication and quality assurance in today’s highly diverse and rapidly evolving world of science. They need to be advanced by interactive and transparent forms of review, publication and discussion that are open to the scientific community and to the public.
The advantages of open access, public peer review and interactive discussion can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional publishing and peer review. Since 2001 the viability of this approach is demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ( ACP) and a growing number of sister journals of the European Geosciences Union ( EGU) and Copernicus Publications.
The achievements and statistics of these journals and their publishers clearly prove both the scientific benefits and the financial sustainability of open access. Future perspectives are outlined with regard to critical rationalism, open societies and the global information commons.
URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2009-3_4/index.html?000479
Economic Implications of Alternative Pub…
Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models: Self-archiving and Repositories :
A knowledge economy has been defined as one in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge has come to play the predominant part in the creation of wealth. It is not simply about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge; it is also about the more effective use and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of economic activities. One key question is whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that might better serve researchers and more effectively communicate and disseminate research findings.
Building on previous work, this paper looks at the costs and potential benefits of alternative models for scientific and scholarly publishing, describing the approach and methods used and summarising the findings of a study undertaken for JISC in the United Kingdom. It concludes that different publishing models can make a material difference to the costs faced by and benefits realised from research communication, and it seems likely that more open access would have substantial net benefits.
URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2009-3_4/index.html?000478
Half term report: Licence to publish – p…
Half term report: Licence to publish – promoting Open Access and authors’ rights in the Nordic social sciences and humanities :
As stated in the original application to Nordbib’s Focus Area “Policy and visibility” (Work Package 1), the purpose of the project was to increase the awareness and understanding of the principles of Open Access by providing a dialogue among stakeholders on authors’ rights and Open Access principles. The Nordbib Board pledged the grant with clauses for the project framework thereby changing the project deliverables to the following: 1. Legal translation of the Knowledge Exchange “Licence to Publish” document into Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic, and disseminating these to the Nordic researchers in general. 2. Devising a strategy for substantial outreach with respect to “Licence to publish”, authors’ rights, self-archiving and the principles of Open Access, focusing on a number of cases in the Nordic social sciences and humanities but with the stipulation that the strategy be relevant and implementable to the STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) communities as well.
URL : http://www.hprints.org/hprints-00437866/fr/
Educating Europe – Exploiting the benefi…
Educating Europe – Exploiting the benefits of ICT :
This report looks at how information and communication technology (ICT) is playing a key role in the education and training of European citizens. ICT offers far more than a convenient way to deliver educational content. Today, researchers are demonstrating how ICT can actually enhance the learning process for all Europeans and make lifelong learning part of everyday activity.
URL : http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/pdf/policyreport/INF%207%200100%20IST-R%20policy%20report-education_final.pdf
Factors influencing the adoption of open…
Factors influencing the adoption of open access scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities :
Open access – a means for free availability of scholarly content via the Internet – is an emerging opportunity for wider and unlimited access to scholarly literature. Scholarly communication, through open access journals and self-arching, are the two main approaches of open access publishing. However, this mode of scholarly communication is not widely utilised in developing countries such as Tanzania. This paper discusses the factors that influence the adoption of open access for scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities based on a study conducted from 2007 to 2010. A survey questionnaire targeted 544 researchers selected through stratified random sampling from a population of 1088
university researchers at six public universities in Tanzania. In addition, 69 policy makers from the six universities were interviewed. It was evident from the findings that the majority of both the policy makers and researchers were aware of open access. However, most of the researchers accessed free online content more (62%) than they disseminated their scholarly content (20%) through open access. Researchers’ Internet usage skills and self-efficacy, social influence, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and the respondents’ general perceptions about open access were identified as the positive factors likely to facilitate open access adoption in Tanzanian public universities. The current poor research conditions and researchers’ low Internet self-efficacy such as inadequate information search skills were cited as the main hindrances for researchers to use open access outlets to access scholarly content. Additionally, inadequate online publishing skills, and the slow Internet connectivity are the
main issues that deterred researchers to disseminate the research findings through open access outlets. The paper recommends that institutional policies on scholarly communication should be revised to incorporate the use of open access publishing. Furthermore, universities should accelerate the establishment of institutional repositories, advocacy campaigns and training directed to researchers, policy makers, readers and information managers of scholarly content, and the improvement of Internet speed at universities through subscription to more bandwidth so as to meet the demand from the scholarly community.
URL : http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/138-dulle-en.pdf
Open Journal Systems: A Complete Guide t…
Open Journal Systems: A Complete Guide to Online Publishing : http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/docs/userguide/2.3.1/index.html