Developing a Sustainable Financial Model in Higher Education for Open Educational Resources

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Financial issues regarding the sustainable production, dissemination, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education are reviewed and proposed solutions critiqued. Use of OER produce demonstrable cost savings for students. Yet OER development continues to rely almost completely on government and philanthropic funding.

This indicates that a mismatch exists between the financial interests of students and those of higher education institutions. Before OER will be broadly adopted, changes to government policy are required to align institutional objectives with faculty motivations and student needs.

URL : Developing a Sustainable Financial Model in Higher Education for Open Educational Resources

Alternative location : http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2133

Prominent but Less Productive: The Impact of Interdisciplinarity on Scientists’ Research

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Inter-disciplinary research (IDR) is being promoted by federal agencies and universities nationwide because it presumably spurs transformative, innovative science. In this paper we bring empirical data to assess whether IDR is indeed beneficial, and whether costs accompany potential benefits. Existing research highlights this tension: whereas the innovation literature suggests that spanning disciplines is beneficial because it allows scientists to see connections across fields, the categories literature suggests that spanning disciplines is penalized, because the resulting research may be lower quality or confusing to place.

To investigate this, we empirically distinguish production and reception effects and we highlight a new production penalty: cognitive and collaborative challenges associated with IDR may result in slower progress, hurdles during peer review, and lower productivity (though not necessarily lower quality).

We compile and analyze data on almost 900 research center-based scientists and their 32,000 published articles. Using an innovative measure of IDR that considers the similarity of the disciplines spanned, we document both penalties (fewer papers published) and benefits (increased visibility) associated with IDR, and show that it is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. These costs and benefits depend on characteristics of the field and a scientist’s place in it.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.06802

Beyond Open Access to Open Publication and Open Scholarship

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This article explores a moment of opportunity to imagine a new humanities scholarship based on radical openness, beyond the level of access to scholarly content that the open access movement has so far championed, to a culture of transformation that can actively include the public(s) beyond the community of scholars. The possibilities for enhancing scholarly and research practices are intriguing, but even greater may be the generative opportunity to engage audiences beyond the scholarly community – particularly online, where the humanities connects to broader cultural currents.

URL : Beyond Open Access to Open Publication and Open Scholarship

Alternative location : http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/202

Wikipedia and the ecosystem of knowledge

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Thanks to a vibrant community united by a few core principles, plus detailed policies and safeguards against trolls and vandalism, Wikipedia has already become a piece of the knowledge ecosystem. Like science, its aim is to propose a synthesis of existing knowledge and conflicting interpretations of reality. It also changes the way people interact with knowledge thanks to its extensive use of hyperlinks, portals, and categories.

As a consequence, I suggest academics contribute to articles in their field. They could also use Wikipedia as a course assignment and make sure that the topics related to their discipline are fairly presented in this encyclopedia.

URL : Wikipedia and the ecosystem of knowledge

Alternative location : http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/201

Implementing Institutional Repository in Nigerian Universities : Status, Challenges, Prospects, and the Role of Librarians & Libraries

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This is a report of the study carried out in late 2013. In this paper, the authors identify the extent of adoption of Institutional Repository (IR) in various universities through an online survey. Concepts of institutional repository (IR) and institutional memory (IM) are clarified. It lays down the findings from the survey.

The paper also explains the essential elements of IR, Service Model of IR, prospects and challenges of IR in Nigerian universities, IR implementation strategies; including the role of the libraries and librarians.

Findings reveal that as at the time of study world IR presence numbers 3479. Nigeria has only nine (9) Universities representing just 0.23% of the world IR. But some African countries’ universities have more. South Africa alone had 40, which amounts to 1.15% of the world Institutional Repositories as at then. The paper concludes with recommendations on the ways Nigerian universities could overcome the barrier in IR implementation.

URL : http://www.jatlim.org/Volumes/Vol.1%20No.1/Jonathan.pdf

Published Librarian Research, 2008 through 2012: Analyses and Perspectives

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This research paper reviews published library science literature from 2008 through 2012 using a purposive sample of 13 Library and Information Science (LIS) journals. The texts of 1,778 LIS articles were analyzed and classified as research versus non-research. Of these articles, 769 (43.1%) determined as research were examined in order to collect data on numerous variables including authorship, topic, type of research, data collection, and data analysis techniques.

The selected LIS journals draw a representative sample of practitioner research with 438 (57%) research articles solely written by practitioners, 110 (14.3%) research articles written collaboratively by at least one practitioner and one academic. The overall authorship pattern was widely multi-authored with 64.5% of the research articles written by two or more authors. It is hoped that the results of this investigation will provide insight for more extensive collaborative librarianship research in the future.

URL : Published Librarian Research, 2008 through 2012: Analyses and Perspectives

Alternative location : http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/320

The Scaling Relationship between Citation-Based Performance and Scientific Collaboration in Natural Sciences

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The aim of this paper is to extend our knowledge about the power-law relationship between citation-based performance and collaboration patterns for papers of the Natural Sciences domain. We analyzed 829,924 articles that received 16,490,346 citations. The number of articles published through collaboration account for 89%. The citation-based performance and collaboration patterns exhibit a power-law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.20, SD=0.07. We found that the Matthew effect is stronger for collaborated papers than for single-authored.

This means that the citations to a field research areas articles increase 2.30 times each time it doubles the number of collaborative papers. The scaling exponent for the power-law relationship for single-authored papers was 0.85, SD=0.11. The citations to a field research area single-authored articles increase 1.89 times each time the research area doubles the number of non-collaborative papers.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05266