Non classé

Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda offers a systematic overview of the major issues, trends, and areas of priority in online distance education research. In each chapter, an international expert or team of experts provides an overview of one timely issue in online distance education, summarizing major research on the topic, discussing theoretical insights that guide the research, posing questions and directions for future research, and discussing the implications for distance education practice as a whole. Intended as a primary reference and guide for distance educators, researchers, and policymakers, Online Distance Education addresses aspects of distance education practice that have often been marginalized, including issues of cost and economics, concerns surrounding social justice, cultural bias, the need for faculty professional development, and the management and growth of learner communities. At once soundly empirical and thoughtfully reflective, yet also forward-looking and open to new approaches to online and distance teaching, this text is a solid resource for researchers in a rapidly expanding discipline. »

URL : Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda

Alternative URL : http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120233

Non classé

What Do Researchers Need? Feedback On Use of Online Primary Source Materials

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Cultural heritage institutions are increasingly providing online access to primary source materials for researchers. While the intent is to enable round-the-clock access from any location, few studies have examined the extent to which current web delivery is meeting the needs of users. Careful use of limited resources requires intelligent assessment of researcher needs in comparison to the actual online presentation, including access, retrieval and usage options. In the hopes of impacting future delivery methods and access development, this article describes the results of a qualitative study of 11 humanities faculty researchers at the University of Alabama, who describe and rate the importance of various issues encountered when using 29 participant-selected online databases. »

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july14/deridder/07deridder.html

Non classé

Degrees of Openness Access : Restrictions in Institutional Repositories

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Institutional repositories, green road and backbone of the open access movement, contain a growing number of items that are metadata without full text, metadata with full text only for authorized users, and items that are under embargo or that are restricted to on-campus access. This paper provides a short overview of relevant literature and presents empirical results from a survey of 25 institutional repositories that contain more than 2 million items. The intention is to evaluate their degree of openness with specific attention to different categories of documents (journal articles, books and book chapters, conference communications, electronic theses and dissertations, reports, working papers) and thus to contribute to a better understanding of their features and dynamics. We address the underlying question of whether this lack of openness is temporary due to the transition from traditional scientific communication to open access infrastructures and services, or here to stay, as a basic feature of the new and complex cohabitation of institutional repositories and commercial publishing. »

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july14/prost/07prost.html

Non classé

Open access and online journals in orthopaedics : What does the future hold ?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Introduction: Open access journalism has expanded in the last two decades, with increasing titles in all medical specialties, including orthopaedic surgery. No study has evaluated the impact of open access orthopaedic journals or their associated risks and benefits to academic publishing and patient care.
Methods: This study evaluated open access orthopaedic journals utilizing various databases including the Directly of Open Access Journals (www.DOAJ.org), PubMed Central (www.PubMed.org), Google search queries and recent articles, stories, and editorials on the topic of open access journalism. All orthopaedic surgery journals were recorded, as well as associated characteristics including publisher, year of publication, articles and issues per year, impact factor, and potential risk of a “predatory” publisher. Data were summarized and presented.
Results: Our search yielded a total of 42 orthopaedic open access journals in the English language from 30 different publishers. In total, there were nearly 13,000 articles available from these journals available without a license or subscription. Of the 42 journals, 13 (31%) were considered predatory or borderline publishers, and only one had a published impact factor (IF = 0.737). In contrast, 8 of the remaining 29 journals (28%) had a published impact factor with a mean value of 1.788 (range: 0.597-4.302).
Conclusion: Open access publishing is a rising trend in the orthopaedic literature, and allows for free, public and international availability of research findings. Like any new technology, open access is not without its faults, and critics have appropriately raised concerns about academic integrity and profiteering by certain publishers. Researchers and surgeons alike are responsible for maintaining the quality of the orthopaedic literature, by participating in the peer review process and avoiding the temptation to publish quickly. »

URL : http://www.coa.org/docs/2014AnnualMeeting/9FrankoOrrinOpenAccessOrthopaedics.pdf

Non classé

Understanding Repository Growth at the University of North Texas: A Case Study

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Over the past decade the University of North Texas Libraries (UNTL) has developed a sizable digital library infrastructure for use in carrying out its core mission to the students, faculty, staff and associated communities of the university. This repository of content offers countless research possibilities for end users across the Internet when it is discovered and used in research, scholarship, entertainment, and lifelong learning. The characteristics of the repository itself provide insight into the workings of a modern digital library infrastructure, how it was created, how often it is updated, or how often it is modified. In that vein, the authors created a dataset comprised of information extracted from the UNT Libraries’ archival repository Coda and analyzed this dataset in order to demonstrate the value and insights that can be gained from sharing repository characteristics more broadly. This case study presents the findings from an analysis of this dataset. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0547

Non classé

Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia readers and readership

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Hundreds of scholarly studies have investigated various aspects of the immensely popular Wikipedia. Although a number of literature reviews have provided overviews of this vast body of research, none of them has specifically focused on the readers of Wikipedia and issues concerning its readership. In this systematic literature review, we review 99 studies to synthesize current knowledge regarding the readership of Wikipedia and also provide an analysis of research methods employed. The scholarly research has found that Wikipedia is popular not only for lighter topics such as entertainment, but also for more serious topics such as health information and legal background. Scholars, librarians and students are common users of Wikipedia, and it provides a unique opportunity for educating students in digital literacy. We conclude with a summary of key findings, implications for researchers, and implications for the Wikipedia community. »

URL : http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/978653/

Non classé

Why and where Wikipedia is cited in journal articles?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« The aim of this research was to identify the motivations for citation to Wikipedia in scientific papers. Also, the number of citation to Wikipedia, location of citation, type of citing papers, subject of citing and cited articles were determined and compared in different subject fields. From all English articles indexed in Scopus in 2007 and 2012 that have cited Wikipedia, 602 articles were selected using stratified random sampling. Content analysis and bibliometric methods were used to carry out the research. Results showed that there are 20 motivations for citing Wikipedia and the most frequent of them are providing general information and definition, facts and figures. Citations to Wikipedia often were in the introduction and introductory sections of papers. Computer sciences, internet and chemistry were the most cited subjects. The use of Wikipedia in articles is increasing both in terms of quantity and diversity. However, there are disciplinary differences both in the amount and the nature of use of Wikipedia. »

URL : http://www.jscires.org/text.asp?2013/2/3/231/135415