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Much Obliged: Analyzing the Importance and Impact of Acknowledgements in Scholarly Communication

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Author rights, peer review, open access, and the role of institutional repositories have all come under scrutiny by scholars, librarians, and legal experts in the last decade. Much of the conversation is centered on liberating information from the confinements of legal, financial, and hierarchical restraints. The relevancy of traditional citation analysis too, understood within the framework of an h-Index and Eigen factor, is under scrutiny with the rise of altmetrics. Collectively, these issues form the core of the scholarly communication process, from creation to dissemination to impact.

However, an overlooked facet of the scholarly communication process is the acknowledgement. As an expression of scholarly debt, the acknowledgment is an important facet of intellectual networks. Not only does the acknowledgement demonstrate the intellectual contributions of colleagues, advisors, funding agencies, and mentors but also the significance of librarians in the scholarly communication process. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/25428/

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The One Repo: background, implementation and call for funding

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts
« As scholarly communication undergoes seismic changes, endless opportunities are opening up. In an open-access world, there is potential for Internet-enabled research on huge corpuses, discovering new correlations and making new connections. To facilitate these processes, we need platform that provides uniform access to the metadata and full text of all open-access articles, whether in repositories or open-access journals. The platform must provide data that is complete, up to date, high quality and open for every kind of re-use.

The One Repo ( http://onerepo.net/) is is that platform. It aims to make the entire open-access scholarly record available via a Web UI, embeddable widgets and various web-services, as well providing all of the metadata for direct download. It is built from battle-tested components that are in use in high-volume commercial systems.

Numerous harvesting methods are used. The existing demonstrator presents a UI that integrates results from a small number of repositories and other sources. We seek funding to rapidly increase coverage. The One Repo has dramatic implications forscholarship, research and engineering across every field of human endeavour. »


URL : http://onerepo.net/onerepo-whitepaper.pdf

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From Concerned to Cautiously Optimistic: Assessing Faculty Perceptions and Knowledge of Open Access in a Campus-Wide Study

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« INTRODUCTION : Though open access publishing has many advantages for scholars, very few are interested in learning about and pursuing open access publishing. This article discusses the results of a survey administered to faculty across disciplines at a single university to assess their perceptions, knowledge, and perceived knowledge of open access publishing and related topics.

METHODS : Anonymous electronic survey of 240 faculty members with a response rate of 23%.

RESULTS : Although many respondents considered themselves familiar with open access, very few had practical knowledge of open access publishing. Faculty were uncertain about the value and reliability of open access publishing and were particularly concerned about its applicability in the promotion and tenure process.

CONCLUSION:  Misinformation, lack of motivation, and fear appear to be the main causes of negative perceptions of open access among faculty surveyed. Though science faculty had the highest overall perceived knowledge of open access, they were also most likely to view open access negatively and to believe that the current publishing model works well. Education faculty were more likely to think highly of open access publishing, in part due to a lack of funding for that discipline. Librarians and information professionals should take a tailored approach to discussing open access with faculty by working within the knowledge of the discipline if possible. »

URL : From Concerned to Cautiously Optimistic: Assessing Faculty Perceptions and Knowledge of Open Access in a Campus-Wide Study

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1212

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Scholarly Communication as a Core Competency: Prevalence, Activities, and Concepts of Scholarly Communication Librarianship as Shown Through Job Advertisements

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« INTRODUCTION : The dynamic nature of the scholarly communication landscape has produced a need for the creation of positions specifically focused on these issues. Yet, no clear title or job description for scholarly communication librarianship has emerged. The lack of standardization in this area is problematic for educators, professionals, and prospective professionals.

METHODS : Analyzing 13,869 job advertisements published between 2006 and 2014, this study attempts to examine the prevalence of scholarly communication terms and activities and the types of positions in which these terms and activities appear.

RESULTS : This study finds an increase in the use of the term “scholarly communication” in the title or text of job advertisements over the last nine years, with more than 7% of positions in the most recent year containing the term.

CONCLUSIONS : An analysis of the levels of engagement with scholarly communication demonstrates that jobs with substantial levels of engagement are increasing; whereas those requiring passive knowledge or awareness of scholarly communication issues are decreasing. Jobs with scholarly communication as a primary job responsibility are differentiated by a focus on repositories, open access, copyright, authors’ rights, and intellectual property differentiate core scholarly communication positions. »

URL : Scholarly Communication as a Core Competency: Prevalence, Activities, and Concepts of Scholarly Communication Librarianship as Shown Through Job Advertisements

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1236

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A Triangulation Method to Dismantling a Disciplinary « Big Deal »

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« In late 2012, it appeared that the University Library, University of Saskatchewan would likely no longer be able to afford to subscribe to the entire American Chemical Society « Big Deal » of 36 journals. Difficult choices would need to be made regarding which titles to retain as individual subscriptions. In an effort to arrive at the most conscientious and evidence-based decisions possible, three discrete sources of data were collected and compared: full-text downloads, citation analysis of faculty publications, and user feedback.

This case study will describe the triangulation method developed — including the unconventional approach of applying a citation analysis technique to usage data and survey responses. Such a thorough, labor-intensive, method is likely not practical for analyzing larger, multidisciplinary journal bundles. When it becomes necessary to break up a smaller collection important to researchers in a particular discipline, this technique may provide strong evidence to support librarian decisions as well as involve faculty in the process. »

URL : http://www.istl.org/15-spring/refereed3.html

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In abundance: Networked participatory practices as scholarship

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« In an era of knowledge abundance, scholars have the capacity to distribute and share ideas and artifacts via digital networks, yet networked scholarship often remains unrecognized within institutional spheres of influence. Using ethnographic methods including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, this study investigates networks as sites of scholarship. Its purpose is to situate networked practices within Boyer’s (1990) four components of scholarship – discovery, integration, application, and teaching – and to explore them as a techno-cultural system of scholarship suited to an era of knowledge abundance.

Not only does the paper find that networked engagement both aligns with and exceeds Boyer’s model for scholarship, it suggests that networked scholarship may enact Boyer’s initial aim of broadening scholarship itself through fostering extensive cross-disciplinary, public ties and rewarding connection, collaboration, and curation between individuals rather than roles or institutions. »

URL : In abundance: Networked participatory practices as scholarship

Related URL : http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2158

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The public impact of Latin America’s approach to open access

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« This study explores the extent to which research published in Latin America—where the vast majority of which is made freely available to the public—has an impact and reach beyond the academic community. It addresses the ways in which the study of research impact is moving beyond the counting citations, which has dominated bibliometrics for well over the last 50 years. As more of the world’s research is made freely available to the public, there is an increasing probability that the impact and reach of research extends beyond the confines of academia.

To establish the current extent of public access, this study explores who the users of Latin American research are, as well as their motivations for accessing the work by using a series of simple pop-up surveys, which were displayed to users of the two largest scholarly journal portals in Latin America.

The results, after thousands of responses, indicate that traditional scholarly use makes up only a quarter of the total use in Latin America. The majority of use is from non-scholar communities, namely students (around 50% of the total use) and from individuals interested for professional or personal reasons (collectively around 20% of the total use). By linking the survey responses to the articles being read, it was also possible to identify points of convergence and divergence in student, faculty, and public interest groups.

Finally, this study employed methods from a new field of inquiry, altmetrics, in an attempt to capture engagement with research on the social Web. The success of such methods for the Latin American case were limited due to low coverage levels, but the research nevertheless contributes to the understanding of nascent field of altmetrics more broadly. The study concludes with a discussion of the conceptual, political, curricular, and methodological implications of this new approach to scientific communication. »

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AlperinDissertationFinalPublicImpact-augmented.pdf

Related URL : http://purl.stanford.edu/jr256tk1194