Indian research going global: A study on the status of open access publishing

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Aims to measure quantitatively the scholarly journals which were produced with full immediate open access (OA) from 2003 to 2013. Focuses on the amount of India’s contribution to scholarly literature through the repositories of their institutions, amount of literature produced in various disciplines and the open source software’s (OSS) used for it.

Aims to know the current status of open access publishing in India. A survey of the open access journals indexed in the Directory of Open access Journals (DOAJ) and the repositories indexed in the Open DOAR is followed for this study. India started making its journals open access in 2003 with about 13 journals in a year and has reached about 197 journals till September 2013, which shows a growth of 15 fold of the open access journal output within a year.

The percentage of the multidisciplinary repositories is highest with 43% and the repositories of the disciplines such as Technology, Chemistry and Chemical Technology and Physics and Astronomy are 18%, 15% and 14% respectively among the 64 repositories listed in OpenDOAR.

With about 650 open access journals and about 64 open access directories, India has made important contributions towards the growth of Open access publishing.

URL : http://www.spoars.org/journal/v3n4p4

Digitization, Internet publishing and the revival of scholarly monographs: An empirical study in India

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“This research shows the growing utility of internet-based digital models in reviving the crisis-stricken traditional print monograph publishing. The rising prices of scientific journals in the past three decades forced academic and research libraries to resort to cutbacks on monograph budgets. The declining sales to libraries and rising production costs led to a significant drop in global demand for print monographs, rendering monograph publishing financially unattractive. Combining the flexibility of digitized content with the global reach of the Internet, three emerging digital models — print on demand, bundled e-books, and e-consortia — are beginning to revamp the monograph publishing business.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4932

Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

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“Background: Research is published in indexed, online scholarly journals so that published knowledge can be easily found and built upon by others. Most scholars rely on relatively few online indexing service providers to search for relevant scholarly content. It is under-appreciated that the quality of indexing can vary across different journals and that this can have an adverse effect on the quality of research.

Objective: In this short paper I compare the recall of commonly used online indexers; Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Microsoft Academic Search and Mendeley Search against a selection of over 20,000 papers published in two different high-volume journals: PLOS ONE and Zootaxa.

Results: When using Google Scholar, content in Zootaxa has low recall for search terms that are known to occur in it, significantly lower than the near-perfect recall of the same terms in PLOS ONE. All other indexers tend to have lower recall than Google Scholar except Scopus which outperformed Google Scholar for recall on Zootaxa searches. I also elaborate why Dark Research is undesirable for optimal scientific progress with some recommendations for change.

Conclusion: This research is a basic proof-of-concept which demonstrates that when searching for published scholarly content, relevant studies can remain hidden as ’Dark Research’ in poorly-indexed journals, even despite expertise-informed efforts to find the content. The technological capability to do full text indexing on all modern scholarly journal content certainly exists, it is perhaps just publisher-imposed access-restrictions on content that prevents this from happening.”

URL : Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.773v1

Ebooks in education : Realising the vision

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“Ebooks are coming of age in education, as this exciting collection commissioned by Jisc demonstrates.

Case studies, reflecting ebook success stories across the higher and further education sectors, include:

  • An innovative app to encourage ebook take-up in a Welsh college.
  • A partnership between a library and research centre to create open access monographs and midigraphs.
  • Several examples of creative negotiations with ebook publishers.

Insight chapters address hot topics in the ebook universe, including:

  • The changing world of access to scholarly digital content in the mobile environment.
  • The challenges faced by the library as online distance learning moves from margin to mainstream.
  • How ebooks have the potential to meet a wide range of accessibility needs.
  • Experimentation with ebooks as a shared service.

This collection will provide inspiration and guidance to institutions as they develop projects and services to support students and researchers and will be of interest to library practitioners, publishers, ebook vendors, information professionals, teachers, lecturers and students.”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/12-3-123-1-10-20141114.pdf

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bal

Le virage Linked Open Data en bibliothèque : étude des pratiques, mise en œuvre, compétences des professionnels

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Les Linked Open Data (LOD) mettent peu à peu en évidence des enjeux considérables pour les professionnels de l’information et les bibliothèques. Cet article fait un tour d’horizon de la question en abordant plusieurs aspects. Après avoir introduit les concepts-clés de cette thématique, il s’attache à déterminer l’utilité des LOD en bibliothèque en présentant quelques applications innovantes. Prérequis pour la création de telles applications, la conversion des données en LOD est décrite sous la forme d’un procédé généralisable.

L’article change ensuite de perspective et se penche sur le professionnel de l’information, en identifiant les compétences les plus pertinentes à acquérir pour faire face à ces évolutions. Enfin, il décrit la réalisation concrète d’une formation à distance sur les LOD, accessible à tous sur le web.

URL : http://www.ressi.ch/num15/article_100

Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

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The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject.

We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced.

We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.

URL : Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development

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The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/journal.pone.0115069.pdf

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115069