Information and Computation

In this chapter, concepts related to information and computation are reviewed in the context of human computation. A brief introduction to information theory and different types of computation is given. Two examples of human computation systems, online social networks and Wikipedia, are used to illustrate how these can be described and compared in terms of information and computation.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1428

Sustainability of Open Access Resources The Collective Provision…

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Sustainability of Open Access Resources : The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources :

“This report is the third in a series which examines issues relating to the economic sustainability of critical infrastructure services that support the operation and growth of open-access dissemination of scholarly and scientific research. This report is intended to guide funders and project planners in constructing and coordinating collective funding models capable of supporting open-access infrastructure resources. The report:

  • reviews the fundamentals of robust sustainability modeling (Section 2);
  • outlines the economic and institutional issues that confront those seeking to sustain free infrastructure services and discusses the implications of free models for an initiative’s ability to provide an optimal level of service (Section 3); and
  • dentifies strategies for overcoming institutional free ridership in the design of funding models and describes practical mechanisms for coordinating the collective provision of infrastructure services (Section 4).”

URL : http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/collective-provision-of-oa-services.pdf

Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh…

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Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh: A New Paradigm of Scholarly Communication :

“Nowadays, open access (OA) in its diverse forms constitutes the most interesting and promising model for the research output of an academic or research institution. The purpose of the present study is to discuss the situation of OA in the developing world, with a focus on Bangladesh. The study also addresses why OA is important for developing countries and which initiatives have been taken in Bangladesh. Finally, we discuss some challenging issues of OA and suggestions on how to overcome these issues. It is rather obvious that developing countries have always faced a lack of research information and were unable to afford sufficient subscriptions to journals. The other side of the picture is the poor dissemination of the research outcome in the developing world. In Bangladesh, only three organizations have their institutional repository and have a reasonable number of local OA journals. We will identify some problems that impede the process of building open access IR, or more generally an OA environment in Bangladesh. We are convinced, however, that we will witness in the near future a sustainable growth of open access initiatives, with more open access literature and digital repositories.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8245

Anatomy of Green Open Access Open Access…

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Anatomy of Green Open Access :

“Open Access (OA) is the free unrestricted access to electronic versions of scholarly publications. For peer reviewed journal articles there are two main routes to OA, publishing in OA journals (gold OA) or archiving of article copies or manuscripts at other web locations (green OA). This study focuses on summarizing and extending upon current knowledge about green OA. A synthesis of previous studies indicates that the green OA coverage of all published journal articles is approximately 12%, with substantial disciplinary variation. Typically, green OA copies become available with considerable time delays, partly caused by publisher imposed embargo periods, and partly by author tendencies to archive manuscripts only perio dically. Although green OA copies should ideally be archived in proper repositories, a large share is stored on home pages and similar locations, with no assurance of long-term preservation. Often such locations contain exact copies of published articles, which may infringe on the publisher’s exclusive rights. The technical foundation for green OA uploading is becoming increasingly solid, which is largely due to the rapid increase in the number of institutional repositories. The number of articles within th e scope of OA mandates, which strongly influence the self-archival rate of articles, is nevertheless still low.”

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc8/Personal%20VersionGreenOa.pdf

A longitudinal comparison of citation rates and growth…

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A longitudinal comparison of citation rates and growth among open access journals :

“The study documents the growth in the number of journals and articles along with the increase in normalized citation rates of open access (OA) journals listed in the Scopus bibliographic database between 1999 and 2010. Longitudinal statistics on growth in journals/articles and citation rates are broken down by funding model, discipline, and whether the journal was launched or had converted to OA. The data we re retrieved from the web sites of SCIMago Journal and Country Rank (journal /article counts), JournalM3trics (SNIP2 values), Scopus (journal discipline) and Director y of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (OA and funding status). OA journals/articles have grown much faster than subscription journals but still make up less that 12% of the journals in Scopus. Two-year cita tion averages for journals funded by article processing charges (APCs) have reached the same level as subscription journals. Citation averages of OA journals funded by other means continue to lag well behind OA journals funded by APCs and subscription journals. We hypothesize this is less an issue of quality than due to the fact that such journals are commonly published in languages other than English and tend to be located outside the four major publishing countries.”

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc9/acceptedversion.pdf

Fulfilling an Institutional and Public Good Mission A…

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Fulfilling an Institutional and Public Good Mission: A Case Study of Access :

“Access to higher education has been and remains a critical issue, yet research typically focuses on students and programs which may overlook the role of the faculty. Through an in-depth case study, the perspectives of tenured and tenure-track faculty at a predominately White, Midwestern land-grant, research institution are described as they relate to issues of student access to higher education. The context of the case was instrumental in understanding faculty perspectives of access and centered on the fundamental notion of education as public good and its association with institutional history and mission. The findings suggest that faculty members uphold the belief of higher education serving a greater purpose, or public good. However, faculty participants rarely saw themselves as actors in the issue of access.
The faculty held many expectations for students, some of which were reflected in the access literature and models, such as academic preparation and ability to navigate the university. Other expectations are absent in the access literature. Faculty members expect students to demonstrate a certain cultural capital and rewards students who demonstrate these skills, behaviors and knowledge. These expectations are often implicit and hidden from students. These finding suggests that some students or groups of students, especially those that face the biggest barriers to higher education, have the potential to be overlooked without advocacy and faculty buy-in. This study also advances the emerging theory of Academic Capital Formation (St. John et al., 2011) by presenting the faculty’s view of access.”

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cehsedaddiss/125/