The open research value proposition: How sharing can help researchers succeed

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Open access, open data, open source, and other open scholarship practices are growing in necessity and popularity, rapidly becoming part of the integral workflow of researchers. However, widespread adoption of many of these practices has not yet been achieved. Understandably, researchers have concerns as to how sharing their work will affect their careers. Some of these concerns stem from a lack of awareness about the career benefits associated with open research.

Herein, we review literature on the open citation advantage, media attention for publicly available research, collaborative possibilities, and special funding opportunities to show how open practices can give researchers a competitive advantage.

URL : The open research value proposition: How sharing can help researchers succeed

Alternative location : https://figshare.com/articles/The_open_research_value_proposition_How_sharing_can_help_researchers_succeed/1619902

Enjeux de la numérisation des herbiers pour l’information et la communication scientifiques : de la transformation des matières documentaires à l’évolution des pratiques

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Nous appréhendons les mutations entraînées par la numérisation des collections d’histoire naturelle dans la production et la communication de l’information scientifique. Notre étude s’appuie sur une analyse des herbiers comme artefacts répondant aux besoins de la conservation et de la communication de l’information entre acteurs intervenant dans la production des savoirs mobilisant les collections.

Nous analysons le statut documentaire des images à partir de leur exploitation différentielle dans les pratiques scientifiques selon les objectifs et étapes des recherches. Malgré les limites de l’exploitation des bases de données d’images pour le travail sur les spécimens, elles sont essentielles à l’accès et à l’enrichissement des informations des collections.

URL : http://lesenjeux.u-grenoble3.fr/2015-dossier/05-Chupin/index.html

Chemical bibliographic databases: the influence of term indexing policies on topic searches

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A comparative study of the three main chemical information systems (Scifinder, Web of Science and Scopus) was performed by studying the indexing policies of titles, abstracts and keywords within selected literature articles. Various chemical expressions were introduced as topic searches to illustrate the different search tools related to term indexing. The resulting article lists were compared two-by-two by means of a script designed to identify common reference lists and specific ones to each editor.

Analyzing these specific reference lists reveals that only partial coverage areas of references should be expected when querying a single platform. The discussion covers the term and keyword indexing policies, their influence on the retrievability of references and on the retrievability of the highly cited papers.

URL : Chemical bibliographic databases: the influence of term indexing policies on topic searches

DOI: 10.1039/C5NJ01077B

Open Journal Systems and Dataverse Integration– Helping Journals to Upgrade Data Publication for Reusable Research

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This article describes the novel open source tools for open data publication in open access journal workflows. This comprises a plugin for Open Journal Systems that supports a data submission, citation, review, and publication workflow; and an extension to the Dataverse system that provides a standard deposit API.

We describe the function and design of these tools, provide examples of their use, and summarize their initial reception. We conclude by discussing future plans and potential impact.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10989

Collecting and Describing University-Generated Patents in an Institutional Repository: A Case Study from Rice University

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Providing an easy method of browsing a university’s patent output can free up valuable research time for faculty, students, and external researchers. This is especially true for Rice University’s Fondren Library, a USPTO-designated Patent and Trademark Resource Center that serves an academic community widely recognized for cutting edge science and engineering research.

In order to make Rice-generated patents easier to find in the university’s community, a team of technical and public services librarians from Fondren Library devised a method to identify, download, and upload patents to the university’s institutional repository, starting with a backlog of over 300. This article discusses the rationale behind the project, its potential benefits, and challenges as new Rice-generated patents are added to the repository on a monthly basis.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10981

The cost of reading research. A study of Computer Science publication venues

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What does the cost of academic publishing look like to the common researcher today? Our goal is to convey the current state of academic publishing, specifically in regards to the field of computer science and provide analysis and data to be used as a basis for future studies. We will focus on author and reader costs as they are the primary points of interaction within the publishing world.

In this work, we restrict our focus to only computer science in order to make the data collection more feasible (the authors are computer scientists) and hope future work can analyze and collect data across all academic fields.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00127

Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing

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“Public access to publicly funded research” has been one of the rallying calls of the global open access movement. Governments and public institutions around the world have mandated that publications supported by public funding sources should be publicly accessible. Publishers are experimenting with new models to widen access.

Yet financial flows underpinning scholarly publishing remain complex and opaque. In this paper we present work to trace and reassemble a picture of financial flows around the publication of journals in the UK in the midst of a national shift towards open access.

We contend that the current lack of financial transparency around scholarly communication is an obstacle to evidence-based policy-making – leaving researchers, decision-makers and institutions in the dark about the systemic implications of new financial models.

We conclude that obtaining a more joined up picture of financial flows is vital as a means for researchers, institutions and others to understand and shape changes to the sociotechnical systems that underpin scholarly communication.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2690570