Challenges in the study of Cuban scienti…

Challenges in the study of Cuban scientific output :
Cuban scientific output at macro level has not been frequently studied in the literature on scientometrics. The current paper explores the different metric approaches to the Cuban scientific activity carried out by national and international authors. Also, the article develops a scientometric study of the Cuban scientific production as included in Scopus during the period 1996-2007, using socio-economic indicators combined with bibliometric indicators supported by the SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Web of Science and Scopus are compared as information sources. Results confirm the possibility to use Scopus to obtain an objective picture of the Cuban science behaviour during the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the XXI century. The SCImago Journal & Country Rank, in this case, offers an important set of indicators. The combination of these indicators with those related to socio-economic aspects of activities in Science and Technology, allow the authors to show a perspective of the Cuban science system evolution during the period analyzed. The inclusion in Scopus of less-cited journals published in Spanish language and its impact on productivity and citation-based indicators is also discussed. Our investigation found an increasing growth of the Cuban scientific production during the whole period, which is in correspondence to the country efforts and expenditures in Research and Development activities.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18598/

Mapping the structure and evolution of e…

Mapping the structure and evolution of electronic publishing as a research field using co-citation analysis :
Electronic publishing can be defined as making full-texts of journal articles and books available through the network. Although e-publishing has been in existence for over 30 years in various forms such as CD-ROMs, it owes much of its current level of development to the Internet and the Web. This paper attempts to chart the evolution of e-publishing as a research field over the last 31 years using CiteSpace, an information visualization tool. It maps the intellectual structure of e-publishing based on 493 articles that appeared in professional literature on the subject between 1979 and 2009. Document co-citation and author co-citation patterns and patterns of noun phrases and keywords of papers on e-publishing are visualized through a number of co-citation maps. Maps show the major research strands and hot topics in e-publishing such as “open access” and would improve our understanding of
the e-publishing as a research field.

URL : http://bit.ly/adHgKU

Authentication and Authorization: Securi…

Authentication and Authorization: Security Issues for Institutional Digital Repositories :
In this digital age and the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) many organizations have realized the benefits of sharing information within the organization as well within the community and globally. These organizations may be corporate company, research organization or academic institutions. In the academic institutions with the higher education, information capturing, dissemination and sharing is practiced most. In spite of Open Source Drive , in the highly competitive environment, many university or colleges raise a paradox between allowing information and knowledge to flow freely, and the need to keep certain information very secure. In restricted or closed-information environment secured information channel, authorization and authentication of both users and digital contents are a burning issue today. Digital contents are managed and stored in repository to share. Repository of an institution can support research, learning, and administrative processes as well as purposes. Standards are followed for the repositories which ensure that the contents contain is accessible in that and it can be searched and retrieved for later use. A wide variety of contents may be included in the digital repositories for the multiplicity of purposes and users. It is the technical ability and administrative policy decision that what kind of materials goes into a repository (Jones, et al 2006). A proper digital repository not only requires an organized collection of digitized content, it also requires that the content be accessed and distributed as widely as possible to legitimate users around the globe. Access management and control is one of the major concerns for content-providers on the Internet. Without a proper access management mechanism confidentiality and integrity of information cannot be guaranteed. Different conventional methods are practiced by the content-providers but not a single method is sufficient for access management (Ray and Chakraborty, 2006). However, the administrators of the digital content-providers mostly expect their preferences for the technology or the procedure to be available which may be best practiced globally.
URL : http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/shoeb-sobhan.htm

CRIS and Institutional Repositories : CR…

CRIS and Institutional Repositories :
CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) provide researchers, research managers, innovators, and others with a view over the research activity of a domain. IRs (institutional repositories) provide a mechanism for an organisation to showcase through OA (open access) its intellectual property. Increasingly, organizations are mandating that their employed researchers deposit peer-reviewed published material in the IR. Research funders are increasingly mandating that publications be deposited in an open access repository: some mandate a central (or subject-based) repository, some an IR. In parallel, publishers are offering OA but replacing subscription-based access with author (or author institution) payment for publishing. However, many OA repositories have metadata based on DC (Dublin Core) which is inadequate; a CERIF (Common-European Research Information Format) CRIS provides metadata describing publications with formal syntax and declared semantics thus facilitating interoperation or homogeneous access over heterogeneous sources. The formality is essential for research output metrics, which are increasingly being used to determine future funding for research organizations.
URL : http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/dsj/advpub/0/advpub_1004290223/_article

Using a CRIS for E-Infrastructure: E-Inf…

Using a CRIS for E-Infrastructure: E-Infrastructure for Scholarly Publications :
Scholarly publications are a major part of the research infrastructure. One way to make output available is to store the publications in Open Access Repositories (OAR). A Current Research Information System (CRIS) that conforms to the standard CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) could be a key component in the e-infrastructure. A CRIS provides the structure and makes it possible to interoperate the CRIS metadata at every stage of the research cycle. The international DRIVER projects are creating a European repository infrastructure. Knowledge Exchange has launched a project to develop a metadata exchange format for publications between CRIS and OAR systems.
URL : http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/dsj/advpub/0/advpub_1004300224/_article