InfoDoc MicroVeille – Page 392 – Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938

Legal Aspects of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research

Posted on 26 août 2015 by Hans Dillaerts

Internet growth, content digitisation, and expanding “big data” and data analytics capabilities have affected the ways in which publicly funded research results are accessed, disseminated and used. While these technological advances have made sharing and processing information easier, that does not change the fact that the information may be protected by IP laws.

Open access efforts, which aim to make the outputs of publicly funded research more widely accessible in digital formats, therefore raise a number of IP policy questions. To explain the interplay between open access and IP laws, this chapter provides an overview of the IP regimes that protect research outputs in a sample of OECD jurisdictions. It then reviews the open access policies that are in place in some of those jurisdictions and examines two contexts in which IP questions can arise when open access principles are applied: public/private partnerships and text and data mining.

URL : Legal Aspects of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research

Non classé

Open Science in Poland 2014 : A Diagnosis

Posted on 25 août 2015 by Hans Dillaerts

The process of producing and distributing scientific knowledge has been undergoing significant changes recently, termed collectively as “opening” of science. The changes were begun with the development of new technologies, but their dynamics was also influenced by the features of scholary communication and the social role of scientific research, as well as its institutional and political context. The basic aspect of Open Science is Open Access to scientific literature and data, but openness can also concern other elements of science, such
as conducting, evaluating, disseminating and using research and its findings.

The open models were initially implemented locally, as a “grassroot” movement, but with time a need arose for a more systematic approach, especially in strategies and policies of institutions responsible for research and funding, both state-owned and international bodies. In Poland such strategies and policies are yet to be developed, and the basic condition to be fulfilled is establishing a diagnosis of the current state of openness in the Polish science sector. The present report is an attempt to draw such a diagnosis.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Szprot2015.pdf

Alternative location : http://pon.edu.pl/index.php/nasze-publikacje?pubid=16

Too much of a good thing? An observational study of prolific authors

Posted on 25 août 2015 by Hans Dillaerts

Introduction

Researchers’ productivity is usually measured in terms of their publication output. A minimum number of publications is required for some medical qualifications and professional appointments. However, authoring an unfeasibly large number of publications might indicate disregard of authorship criteria or even fraud. We therefore examined publication patterns of highly prolific authors in 4 medical specialties.

Methods

We analysed Medline publications from 2008–12 using bespoke software to disambiguate individual authors focusing on 4 discrete topics (to further reduce the risk of combining publications from authors with the same name and affiliation). This enabled us to assess the number and type of publications per author per year.

Results

While 99% of authors were listed on fewer than 20 publications in the 5-year period, 24 authors in the chosen areas were listed on at least 25 publications in a single year (i.e., >1 publication per 10 working days). Types of publication by the prolific authors varied but included substantial numbers of original research papers (not simply editorials or letters).

Conclusions

Institutions and funders should be alert to unfeasibly prolific authors when measuring and creating incentives for researcher productivity.

URL : Too much of a good thing? An observational study of prolific authors

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1154

Les licences Creative Commons et l’accès libre

Posted on 24 août 2015 by Hans Dillaerts

Lancées à la fin de 2002, les licences Creative Commons (CC) ont connu un succès fulgurant; des centaines de millions d’objets numériques sont maintenant diffusés sous ces licences. Elles sont souvent associées à l’accès libre, en vertu de leur potentiel en matière de réutilisation des œuvres. Mais dans quelle mesure ces licences, dans leurs diverses déclinaisons, conviennent-elles aux objectifs de la publication scientifique en accès libre et aux intérêts des chercheurs ?

Au moyen d’une analyse des textes disponibles dans le site CC, je montrerai comment les conditions ou restrictions optionnelles des licences créent de vastes zones d’incertitude qui nuisent à la réutilisation, ce qui porte à conclure que la licence la moins restrictive, CC BY, demeure la plus indiquée, en dépit des risques associés, à tort ou à raison, à son caractère libéral.

URL : Les licences Creative Commons et l’accès libre

Alternative location : http://r-libre.teluq.ca/389/

A New Ranking Scheme for the Institutional Scientific Performance

Posted on 24 août 2015 by Hans Dillaerts

We propose a new performance indicator to evaluate the productivity of research institutions by their disseminated scientific papers. The new quality measure includes two principle components: the normalized impact factor of the journal in which paper was published, and the number of citations received per year since it was published. In both components, the scientific impacts are weighted by the contribution of authors from the evaluated institution.

As a whole, our new metric, namely, the institutional performance score takes into account both journal based impact and articles specific impacts. We apply this new scheme to evaluate research output performance of Turkish institutions specialized in astronomy and astrophysics in the period of 1998-2012. We discuss the implications of the new metric, and emphasize the benefits of it along with comparison to other proposed institutional performance indicators.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03713

Document Supply of Grey Literature and Open Access: Ten Years Later

Posted on 24 août 2015 by Hans Dillaerts

Purpose

The paper aims to investigate the impact of the open access movement on the document supply of grey literature. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a comparative survey of five major scientific and technical information centres: The British Library (UK), KM (Canada), INIST-CNRS (France), KISTI (South Korea) and TIB Hannover (Germany).

Findings

The five institutions supplied less than 1.8 million supplied items in 2014, i.e. half of the activity in 2004 (−55 per cent). There were 85,000 grey documents, mainly conference proceedings and reports, i.e. 5 per cent of the overall activity, a historically low level compared to 2004 (−72 per cent). At the same time, they continue to expand their open access strategies. Just as in 2004 and 2008, these strategies are specific, and they reflect institutional and national choices rather than global approaches, with two or three common or comparable projects (PubMed Central, national repositories, attribution of DOIs to datasets, dissertations and other objects). In spite of all differences, their development reveals some common features, like budget cuts, legal barriers (copyright), focus on domestic needs and open access policies to foster dissemination and impact of research results.

Document supply for corporate customers tends to become a business-to-business service, while the delivery for the public sector relies more, than before, on resource sharing and networking with academic and public libraries. Except perhaps for the TIB Hannover, the declining importance of grey literature points towards their changing role – less intermediation, less acquisition and collection development and more high-value services, more dissemination and preservation capacities designed for the scientific community needs (research excellence, open access, data management, etc.).

Originality/value

The paper is a follow-up study of two surveys published in 2006 and 2009.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01181081