The Impact of Open Access on Teaching—How Far Have We Come?

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Authors : Elizabeth Gadd, Chris Morrison, Jane Secker

This article seeks to understand how far the United Kingdom higher education (UK HE) sector has progressed towards open access (OA) availability of the scholarly literature it requires to support courses of study.

It uses Google Scholar, Unpaywall and Open Access Button to identify OA copies of a random sample of articles copied under the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) HE Licence to support teaching. The quantitative data analysis is combined with interviews of, and a workshop with, HE practitioners to investigate four research questions.

Firstly, what is the nature of the content being used to support courses of study? Secondly, do UK HE establishments regularly incorporate searches for open access availability into their acquisition processes to support teaching? Thirdly, what proportion of content used under the CLA Licence is also available on open access and appropriately licenced? Finally, what percentage of content used by UK HEIs under the CLA Licence is written by academics and thus has the potential for being made open access had there been support in place to enable this?

Key findings include the fact that no interviewees incorporated OA searches into their acquisitions processes. Overall, 38% of articles required to support teaching were available as OA in some form but only 7% had a findable re-use licence; just 3% had licences that specifically permitted inclusion in an ‘electronic course-pack’.

Eighty-nine percent of journal content was written by academics (34% by UK-based academics). Of these, 58% were written since 2000 and thus could arguably have been made available openly had academics been supported to do so.

URL : The Impact of Open Access on Teaching—How Far Have We Come?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030056

The rising tide: Open source’s steady transformation

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Authors : Matt Germonprez, Jonathan Lipps, Sean Goggins

Open source projects are transforming. Today, work within open source projects has come to be influenced by a growing set of companies and individuals who receive financial remuneration for their engagement.

As such, there is a central focus on commoditization and commercialization of open source products, which drives a trend towards a concealment of the various inner workings that produce these products.

Within this shift, the product becomes a central aim of open source project engagement, and the means of production becomes incidental.

In this paper, we explore the HCI research and design implications of the transformation of open source projects as part of commercial work and how we can come to better understand and protect the rising tide of open source projects.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i8.9297

Acceptance rates of scholarly peer-reviewed journals: A literature survey

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Author : Bo-Christer Bjórk

The acceptance rate of scholarly journals is an important selection criterion for authors choosing where to submit their manuscripts. Unfortunately, information about the acceptance (or rejection rates) of individual journals is seldom available.

This article surveys available systematic information and studies of acceptance rates. The overall global average is around 35-40%. There are significant differences between fields of science, with biomedicine having higher acceptance rates compared to for instance the social sciences.

Open access journals usually have higher acceptance rates than subscription journals, and this is particularly true for so-called OA mega-journals, which have peer review criteria focusing on sound science only.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.07

The citation from patents to scientific output revisited: a new approach to the matching Patstat / Scopus

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Authors : Vicente P. Gerrero-Bote, Rodrigo Sánchez-Jiménez, Félix De-Moya-Anegón

Patents include citations, both to other patents and to documents that are not patents (NPL, Non-patent literature). Among the latter include citations to articles published in scientific journals.

Just as the scientific impact is studied through the citation of articles and other scientific works, the technological impact of scientific works can also be studied through the citation they receive from patents.

The NPL references included in the patents are far from being standardized, so determining which scientific article they refer to is not trivial. This paper presents a procedure for linking the NPL references of the patents collected in the Patstat database and the scientific works indexed in the Scopus bibliographic database.

This procedure consists of two phases: a broad generation of candidate couples and another phase of validation of couples. It has been implemented with reasonable good results and affordable costs.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.01

Skills, Standards, and Sapp Nelson’s Matrix: Evaluating Research Data Management Workshop Offerings

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Authors : Philip Espinola Coombs, Christine Malinowski, Amy Nurnberger

Objective

To evaluate library workshops on their coverage of data management topics.

Methods

We used a modified version of Sapp Nelson’s Competency Matrix for Data Management Skills, a matrix of learning goals organized by data management competency and complexity level, against which we compared our educational materials: slide decks and worksheets.

We examined each of the educational materials against the 333 learning objectives in our modified version of the Matrix to determine which of the learning objectives applied.

Conclusions

We found it necessary to change certain elements of the Matrix’s structure to increase its clarity and functionality: reinterpreting the “behaviors,” shifting the organization from the three domains of Bloom’s taxonomy to increasing complexity solely within the cognitive domain, as well as creating a comprehensive identifier schema.

We appreciated the Matrix for its specificity of learning objectives, its organizational structure, the comprehensive range of competencies included, and its ease of use. On the whole, the Matrix is a useful instrument for the assessment of data management programming.

URL : Skills, Standards, and Sapp Nelson’s Matrix: Evaluating Research Data Management Workshop Offerings

Alternative location : https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol8/iss1/6/

Perceptions of Educational Leadership Faculty Regarding Open Access Publishing

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Authors : Jayson W. Richardson, Scott McLeod, Todd Hurst

There is a dearth of research on the perceptions of faculty members in educational leadership regarding open access publications. This reality may exist because of a lack of funding for educational leadership research, financial obstacles, tenure demands, or reputation concerns.

It may be that there are simply fewer established open access publishers with reputable impact factors to encourage publication by members in the field.

The current study seeks to answer the following question: “What are the perceptions of educational leadership faculty members in UCEA about open access publishing?”

The results are based on responses from 180 faculty members in the field of educational leadership.

URL : Perceptions of Educational Leadership Faculty Regarding Open Access Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22230/ijepl.2019v15n5a817

Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography

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Authors: Randa El Khatib, Lindsey Seatter, Tracey El Hajj, Conrad Leibel, Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens, Caroline Winter, the ETCL and INKE Research Groups

This annotated bibliography responds to and contextualizes the growing “Open” movements and recent institutional reorientation towards social, public-facing scholarship.

The aim of this document is to present a working definition of open social scholarship through the aggregation and summation of critical resources in the field. Our work surveys foundational publications, innovative research projects, and global organizations that enact the theories and practices of open social scholarship.

The bibliography builds on the knowledge creation principles outlined in previous research by broadening the focus beyond traditional academic spaces and reinvigorating central, defining themes with recently published research.

URL : Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.58