EN

The Surge in New University Presses and Academic- Led Publishing: An Overview of a Changing Publishing Ecology in the UK

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Janneke Adema, Graham Stone

This article outlines the rise and development of New University Presses and Academic-Led Presses in the UK or publishing for the UK market. Based on the Jisc research project, Changing publishing ecologies: a landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing, commonalities between these two types of presses are identified to better assess their future needs and requirements.

Based on this analysis, the article argues for the development of a publishing toolkit, for further research into the creation of a typology of presses and publishing initiatives, and for support with community building to help these initiatives grow and develop further, whilst promoting a more diverse publishing ecology.

URL : The Surge in New University Presses and Academic- Led Publishing: An Overview of a Changing Publishing Ecology in the UK

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10210

EN

Scientific data from and for the citizen

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sven Schade, Chrisa Tsinaraki, Elena Roglia

Powered by advances of technology, today’s Citizen Science projects cover a wide range of thematic areas and are carried out from local to global levels. This wealth of activities creates an abundance of data, for example, in the forms of observations submitted by mobile phones; readings of low-cost sensors; or more general information about peoples’ activities.

The management and possible sharing of this data has become a research topic in its own right. We conducted a survey in the summer of 2015 in order to collectively analyze the state of play in Citizen Science.

This paper summarizes our main findings related to data access, standardization and data preservation. We provide examples of good practices in each of these areas and outline actions to address identified challenges.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7842

EN

Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Teresa Schultz

The open access movement seeks to encourage all researchers to make their works openly available and free of paywalls so more people can access their knowledge. Yet some researchers who study open access (OA) continue to publish their work in paywalled journals and fail to make it open.

This project set out to study just how many published research articles about OA fall into this category, how many are being made open (whether by being published in a gold OA or hybrid journal or through open deposit), and how library and information science authors compare to other disciplines researching this field.

Because of the growth of tools available to help researchers find open versions of articles, this study also sought to compare how these new tools compare to Google Scholar in their ability to disseminating OA research.

From a sample collected from Web of Science of articles published since 2010, the study found that although a majority of research articles about OA are open in some form, a little more than a quarter are not.

A smaller rate of library science researchers made their work open compared to non-library science researchers. In looking at the copyright of these articles published in hybrid and open journals, authors were more likely to retain copyright ownership if they printed in an open journal compared to authors in hybrid journals.

Articles were more likely to be published with a Creative Commons license if published in an open journal compared to those published in hybrid journals.

URL : Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/YBDR8

 

EN

Extracting Core Claims from Scientific Articles

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Tom Jansen, Tobias Kuhn

The number of scientific articles has grown rapidly over the years and there are no signs that this growth will slow down in the near future. Because of this, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest developments in a scientific field.

To address this problem, we present here an approach to help researchers learn about the latest developments and findings by extracting in a normalized form core claims from scientific articles.

This normalized representation is a controlled natural language of English sentences called AIDA, which has been proposed in previous work as a method to formally structure and organize scientific findings and discourse.

We show how such AIDA sentences can be automatically extracted by detecting the core claim of an article, checking for AIDA compliance, and – if necessary – transforming it into a compliant sentence.

While our algorithm is still far from perfect, our results indicate that the different steps are feasible and they support the claim that AIDA sentences might be a promising approach to improve scientific communication in the future.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07678

EN

Against capital

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Stuart Lawson

The ways in which scholars exchange and share their work have evolved through pragmatic responses to the political and economic contexts in which they are embedded.

So rather than being designed to fulfil their function in an optimal way, our methods of scholarly communication have been distorted by the interests of capital and by neoliberal logic.

If these two interlinked political forces – that suffuse all aspects of our lives – are the reason for the mess we are currently in, then surely any alternative scholarly communication system we create should be working against them, not with them. The influence of capital in scholarly publishing, and the overwhelming force of neoliberalism in our working practices, is the problem.

So when the new ‘innovative disrupters’ are fully aligned with the political forces that need to be dismantled, it is questionable that the new way of doing things is a significant improvement.

URL : http://stuartlawson.org/2017/07/against-capital/

 

FR

Valoriser les ressources numériques alternatives dans les bibliothèques publiques : un vecteur d’opportunités pour le développement des biens communs

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Hans Dillaerts

Les ressources numériques alternatives peuvent être définies comme des ressources relevant du domaine public ou des ressources numériques diffusées sous la forme d’une licence libre. La place qu’occupent ces ressources dans les bibliothèques publiques est encore marginale.

Force est de constater que les politiques documentaires des bibliothèques publiques s’articulent prioritairement autour de l’offre commerciale portée par les éditeurs. Alors qu’il paraît évident que l’intégration et la valorisation de ces ressources libres au cœur des politiques documentaires permettraient non seulement aux bibliothèques de proposer une offre plus riche et plus diversifiée, mais aussi de valoriser la richesse littéraire, culturelle et artistique qui se développe sur le Web en dehors de la sphère marchande.

Quelles sont ces ressources numériques alternatives ? Comment opérer et construire une offre documentaire complémentaire des ressources physiques ? Quels enjeux pour les bibliothèques, le métier et les missions des bibliothécaires?

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01561437