« The scholarly communication landscape is rapidly changing and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of data management. Mandates by major funding agencies, further expanded by executive order and pending legislation in 2013, require many research grant applicants to provide data management plans for preserving and making their research data openly available. However, do faculty researchers have the requisite skill sets and are their institutions providing the necessary infrastructure to comply with these mandates? To answer these questions, three groups were surveyed in 2012: research and teaching faculty, sponsored programs office staff, and institutional repository librarians. Survey results indicate that while faculty desire to share their data, they often lack the skills to do this effectively. Similarly, while repository managers and sponsored programs offices often provide the necessary infrastructure and knowledge, these resources are not being promoted effectively to faculty. The study offers important insights about services academic libraries can provide to support faculty in their data management efforts: providing tools for sharing research data; assisting with describing, finding, or accessing research data; providing information on copyright and ownership issues associated with data sets; and assisting with writing data management plans. »
Why Do We Still Have Journals?
« The Web has greatly reduced the barriers to entry for new journals and other platforms for communicating scientific output, and the number of journals continues to multiply. This leaves readers and authors with the daunting cognitive challenge of navigating the literature and discerning contributions that are both relevant and significant. Meanwhile, measures of journal impact that might guide the use of the literature have become more visible and consequential, leading to “impact gamesmanship” that renders the measures increasingly suspect. The incentive system created by our journals is broken. In this essay, I argue that the core technology of journals is not their distribution but their review process. The organization of the review process reflects assumptions about what a contribution is and how it should be evaluated. Through their review processes, journals can certify contributions, convene scholarly communities, and curate works that are worth reading. Different review processes thereby create incentives for different kinds of work. It’s time for a broader dialogue about how we connect the aims of the social science enterprise to our system of journals. »
The Zen of Multidisciplinary Team Recommendation
« In order to accomplish complex tasks, it is often necessary to compose a team consisting of experts with diverse competencies. However, for proper functioning, it is also preferable that a team be socially cohesive. A team recommendation system, which facilitates the search for potential team members can be of great help both for (i) individuals who need to seek out collaborators and (ii) managers who need to build a team for some specific tasks.
A decision support system which readily helps summarize such metrics, and possibly rank the teams in a personalized manner according to the end users’ preferences, can be a great tool to navigate what would otherwise be an information avalanche.
In this work we present a general framework of how to compose such subsystems together to build a composite team recommendation system, and instantiate it for a case study of academic teams. »
Diamond open access and open peer review: An analysis of the role of copyright and librarians in the support of a shift towards open access in the legal domain
« The aim of this paper is to support initiatives that stimulate volunteer involvement in creating qualitatively good conversations about the law on the internet. The article’s core argument is that policies on open access, copyright and library services all concentrate nowon the results of scholarly conversations, while a shift in focus towards the process of scholarly communication is needed to develop new incentives for a culture of sharing. Ways to foster openness in scholarly communication need to be discipline specific. This will be elaborated by discussing the plan for an open environment for collaboration on an English translation of a Dutch introduction to private law. »
The Past, Present, and Future of Demand Driven Acquisitions in Academic Libraries
« The challenge of creating an effective and appropriate library collection has been further tested by the recent advent of what Clayton Christensen has termed “disruptive technology.” In his well-known study, The Innovator’s Dilemma,Christensen explores the impact of technological change on the business and other communities. For Christensen, technology can either be sustaining or disruptive. Sustaining technologies improve the performance of products and continue to make them valuable to the consumer. Disruptive technologies, on the other hand, initially underperform in the marketplace, but have a tendency to improve their quality at a rapid rate and eventually replace the established technology. The result, as Henry Lucas noted, was that the customer benefited greatly from “more choice, more flexibility, more options.” For libraries, the availability of electronic books (ebooks) that can be accessed outside of the traditional catalog via a patron-driven or demand-driven process (DDA) is indeed disruptive to the entire fabric of established collection development procedures. »
Toward Improved Discoverability of Scholarly Content: Cross-Sector Collaboration Essentials
« By way of follow-up to earlier work in understanding and improving discoverability of scholarly content, this article reports on recent data and reflections that led to clearer definitions of discovery and discover-ability, as well as deeper cross-sector collaborations on standards, transparency, metadata, and new forms of partnerships. Recent advances in discoverability are also described – from enhanced library-based web-scale searching to serving researcher needs through the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) registry. The article points to a 2014 SAGE white paper that presents in greater detail opportunities for wider collaboration among libraries, publishers, service providers, and researchers in the interest of furthering discovery, access, and usage of scholarly writings and creative work. »
URL : Toward Improved Discoverability of Scholarly Content
Alternative URL : http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/282