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Exploring the Value of Academic Librarians’ Participation in Journal Clubs

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Megan Fitzgibbons, Lorie Kloda, Andrea Miller-Nesbitt

Journal clubs are meetings where participants engage in discussion or appraisal of professional literature and research. This study investigates the perceived value of librarians’ participation in journal clubs.

Using a hermeneutic dialectic process, we built a construction of the value of journal club participation based on interviews with academic librarians.

In the construction, we demonstrate that librarians and their organizations benefit from the informal professional learning that takes place in journal clubs, by developing professional knowledge, building and strengthening communities of practice, increasing research capacity, and closing the research-to-practice gap.

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2016/08/22/crl16-965.short

EN

End of Publication? Open access and a new scholarly communication technology

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sergey Parinov, Victoria Antonova

At this time, developers of research information systems are experimenting with new tools for research outputs usage that can expand the open access to research. These tools allow researchers to record research as annotations, nanopublications or other micro research outputs and link them by scientific relationships.

If these micro outputs and relationships are shared by their creators publicly, these actions can initiate direct scholarly communication between the creators and the authors of the used research outputs. Such direct communication takes place while researchers are manipulating and organising their research results, e.g. as manuscripts.

Thus, researchers come to communication before the manuscripts become traditional publications. In this paper, we discuss how this pre-publication communication can affect existing research practice.

It can have important consequences for the research community like the end of publication as a communication instrument, the higher level of transparency in research, changes for the Open Access movement, academic publishers, peer-reviewing and research assessment systems.

We analyse a background that exists in the economics discipline for experiments with the pre-publication communication. We propose a set of experiments with already existed and new tools, which can help with exploring the end of publication possible impacts on the research community.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05505

EN

Sharing of Knowledge among Faculty in a Mega Open University

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sujata Santosh, Santosh Panda

Developments in ICTs and knowledge societies have revolutionized the traditional paradigms of education. There is a lot of emphasis on a culture of sharing and collaboration in the education scenario of today though educators have certain inhibitions about sharing of knowledge, ideas and resources.

The present study was undertaken to explore the sharing behaviour of the faculty of the National Open University in India. Data was collected through a structured questionnaire on knowledge sharing behaviour and barriers to sharing from 62 faculty members belonging to various disciplines.

The findings suggested that sharing was less preferred voluntarily and in networks; publishing was most preferred knowledge sharing mechanism; sharing of learning materials was more encouraged in the institution; and borrowing from Internet was more preferred.

The important perceived barriers included lack of recognition and absence of organizational knowledge sharing culture. The findings have been discussed in relation to related research and the existing institutional context.

URL : Sharing of Knowledge among Faculty in a Mega Open University

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.8.3.317

EN

Business process costs of implementing “gold” and “green” open access in institutional and national contexts

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Robert Johnson, Stephen Pinfield, Mattia Fosci

As open access (OA) publication of research outputs becomes increasingly common and is mandated by institutions and research funders, it is important to understand different aspects of the costs involved.

This paper provides an early review of administrative costs incurred by universities in making research outputs OA, either via publication in journals (“Gold” OA), involving payment of article-processing charges (APCs), or via deposit in repositories (“Green” OA).

Using data from 29 UK institutions, it finds that the administrative time, as well as the cost incurred by universities, to make an article OA using the Gold route is over 2.5 times higher than Green. Costs are then modeled at a national level using recent UK policy initiatives from Research Councils UK and the Higher Education Funding Councils’ Research Excellence Framework as case studies.

The study also demonstrates that the costs of complying with research funders’ OA policies are considerably higher than where an OA publication is left entirely to authors’ discretion.

Key target areas for future efficiencies in the business processes are identified and potential cost savings calculated. The analysis is designed to inform ongoing policy development at the institutional and national levels.

URL : Business process costs of implementing “gold” and “green” open access in institutional and national contexts

Alternative location : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23545/full

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Pirates in the Library – An Inquiry into the Guerilla Open Access Movement

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Balazs Bodo

2016 is the year when piracy finally became an unavoidable topic in the domain of scholarly communications.

The public exposure of Sci-Hub, a copyright infringing site that provides free access to paywalled journal databases, electrified the decade old debates about the role of scholars, (commercial) publishers, libraries, and copyright in creating an environment, where results of scholarly inquiry are equally accessible for all.

This article gives insight into the Guerilla Open Access (GOA) movement, which is responsible for the creation and maintenance of massive, copyright infringing, freely accessible online shadow libraries of scholarly works: journal articles, monographs, textbooks.

It reconstructs the developments in the western and global academia and scholarly publishing which led to the birth of the movement, and identifies some of the factors its ongoing existence depends on.

The article discusses several aspects of the GOA movement: the alliance of scholars in the global centers and at the global peripheries, the alliance of public and clandestine operations, and its relationship with, and its differences from the Open Access (OA) approach, which aims to facilitate the accessibility of scholarly communications through legal means.

The goal of this article is to contribute to the discussions of the future of scholarly communications through the description of a phenomenon which poses the single greatest challenge to the scholarly publishing status quo in recent history.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2816925

EN

Research impact of paywalled versus open access papers

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Éric Archambault, Grégoire Côté, Brooke Struck, Matthieu Voorons

This note presents data from the 1science oaIndx on the average of relative citations (ARC) for 3.3 million papers published from 2007 to 2009 and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS).

These data show a decidedly large citation advantage for open access (OA) papers, despite them suffering from a lag in availability compared to paywalled papers.

URL : http://www.1science.com/oanumbr.html

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The Circulation of Scientific Articles in the Sphere of Web-Based Media: Citation Practices, Communities of Interests and Local Ties

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Muriel Lefebvre, Julie Renard

On 5th December 2012, a scientific article reviewing a change in the feeding behaviour of the European catfish, one of the largest freshwater fish, was published in the American scientific journal, PLOS ONE, an open access journal, which also allows the mass publication of pictures and videos.

Within a few days following the publication of this article, it was relayed by numerous web sites and generated a media craze. In this paper, we analyse the circulation of this scientific information in the sphere of Web-based media during the two months following its publication, by revealing the citation mechanisms of the original article and the logic of the Internet users participating in its diffusion.

In addition, since the circulation of its informational content travelled beyond linguistic and geographical boundaries, we chose to compare the citation modalities and intertextual relationships of documents in the three countries where the article spread the most widely, namely: France, the United States and Great Britain.

Even though our study shows that the media circulation of scientific papers operates in a traditional way, the intertextual analysis underlines the grand variety of participants (such as journalists, non-scientists, fishermen, technology enthusiasts and Internet users) involved in the diffusion of this information, each of them mobilizing different intertextual strategies, according to their various targets.

They all transformed, reformulated and appropriated the scientific information according to their own, unique interests.

This study also emphasizes the importance of journalistic websites as opinion relays. They were the first diffusers involved in spreading the information but this role was rarely acknowledged by the Internet users – through citations, for example.

In contrast, we observed that amateurs’ communities (communities of practices and communities of interest of fishermen or of buzz fans), which only became involved in a second temporal phase of the spreading, preferred to build up their credibility through citations of the original article.

Finally, this research helps to rethink the mechanisms of the circulation of scientific information in the Web-based media, highlighting both the variety and the inventiveness of the interactions between the academic and public spheres.

URL : The Circulation of Scientific Articles in the Sphere of Web-Based Media: Citation Practices, Communities of Interests and Local Ties

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158393