Quantifying the changing role of past publications

Our current societies increasingly rely on electronic repositories of collective knowledge. An archetype of these databases is the Web of Science (WoS) that stores scientific publications. In contrast to several other forms of knowledge — e.g., Wikipedia articles — a scientific paper does not change after its « birth ».

Nonetheless, from the moment a paper is published it exists within the evolving web of other papers, thus, its actual meaning to the reader changes.

To track how scientific ideas (represented by groups of scientific papers) appear and evolve, we apply a novel combination of algorithms explicitly allowing for papers to change their groups. We (i) identify the overlapping clusters of the undirected yearly co-citation networks of the WoS (1975-2008) and (ii) match these yearly clusters (groups) to form group timelines.

After visualizing the longest lived groups of the entire data set we assign topic labels to the groups. We find that in the entire Web of Science multidisciplinarity is clearly over-represented among cutting edge ideas. In addition, we provide detailed examples for papers that (i) change their topic labels and (ii) move between groups.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.00509

French and US librarians’ Perception Regarding e-Book Reading Data Protection: A Comparative Survey

This paper tackles the e-book reading data protection issue from the library’s point of view. To identify the librarians’ awareness and perception about this topic, the results of a comparative quantitative survey, which has been conducted among the French and American information professionals, will be presented in detail.

This study was designed to provide answers to four main assumptions:

1. Librarians are favourable to users’ data protection and unanimously opposed to reading data exploitation.

2. Librarians are, for the majority of them, unaware of the e-book reading data collection and exploitation practices.

3. They consider that users do not want third parties collecting and analysing their reading data.

4. Collection managers and digital librarians have a better awareness of the topic and are against the exploitation of e-book reading data. They promote data protection more than their colleagues.

After bringing an answer to these hypotheses, this article will summarize the current librarians’ position regarding the e-book reading data protection topic. Finally, it will propose solutions to face the corresponding issues.

URL : French and US librarians’ Perception Regarding e-Book Reading Data Protection: A Comparative Survey

Alternative location : http://irjlis.com/french-and-us-librarians-perception-regarding-e-book-reading-data-protection-a-comparative-survey/

Open Access – the better access? Academic publishing and its politics

Open Access to scholarly literature seems to dominate current discussions in the academic publishing, research funding and science policy arenas. Several international initiatives have been recently started calling for a large-scale transformation of the majority of scholarly journals from subscription model to Open Access.

Such a massive transition would indeed affect not only business models and related cash flows but might be also expected to generate new inequalities in distributing resources among different regions or research fields.

Thus, the paper at hand aims to serve as an input statement for the upcoming discussion and to provide some background information on Open Access debates.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/29269/

Tackling complexity in an interdisciplinary scholarly network: Requirements for semantic publishing

Scholarly communication is complex. The clarification of concepts like “academic publication”, “document”, “semantics” and “ontology” facilitates tracking the limitations and benefits of the media of the current publishing system, as well as of a possible alternative medium.

In this paper, requirements for such a new medium of scholarly communication, labeled Scholarly Network, have been collected and a basic model has been developed. An interdisciplinary network of concepts and assertions, created with the help of Semantic Web technologies by scholars and reviewed by peers and information professionals, can provide a quick overview of the state of research.

The model picks up the concept of Nanopublications, but maps information in a more granular way. For a better understanding of which problems have to be solved by developing such a publication medium, e.g., inconsistency, theories of Radical Constructivism are of great help.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6102/5510

Revues académiques : nouvelles opportunités pour la visibilité des articles. Le cas de la diffusion des métadonnées de la Revue scientifique et technique de l’OIE

Auteur/Author : Romuald Verrier

Ce mémoire examine comment l’exploitation d’outils de gouvernance des métadonnées permet d’accroître la présence en ligne et la visibilité d’une revue académique numérique.

Après un bref aperçu des évolutions récentes dans le monde des revues académiques, l’auteur présente la façon dont la Revue scientifique et technique de l’OIE peut bénéficier de l’interopérabilité des métadonnées en s’appuyant sur son portail documentaire.

L’auteur examine l’impact des moteurs de recherche, des bases d’indexation, des bases de connaissances, des outils de citation et des réseaux sociaux professionnels, et présente la mise en oeuvre de solutions : SEO, DOI, flux XML, OAI-PMH, KBART et politique de libre accès.

Ce mémoire pourra intéresser les éditeurs, bibliothécaires, intermédiaires commerciaux et tout professionnel confronté aux métadonnées de revue académique.

URL : Revues académiques : nouvelles opportunités pour la visibilité des articles. Le cas de la diffusion des métadonnées de la Revue scientifique et technique de l’OIE

Alternative location : http://memsic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/mem_01309538

Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?

Research data publishing is intended as the release of research data to make it possible for practitioners to (re)use them according to “open science” dynamics. There are three main actors called to deal with research data publishing practices: researchers, publishers, and data repositories.

This study analyses the solutions offered by generalist scientific data repositories, i.e., repositories supporting the deposition of any type of research data. These repositories cannot make any assumption on the application domain.

They are actually called to face with the almost open ended typologies of data used in science. The current practices promoted by such repositories are analysed with respect to eight key aspects of data publishing, i.e., dataset formatting, documentation, licensing, publication costs, validation, availability, discovery and access, and citation.

From this analysis it emerges that these repositories implement well consolidated practices and pragmatic solutions for literature repositories.

These practices and solutions can not totally meet the needs of management and use of datasets resources, especially in a context where rapid technological changes continuously open new exploitation prospects.

URL : Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2016-006