« This paper reviews the worldwide growth of open-access (OA) repositories, December 2005 to December 2012, using data collected by the OpenDOAR project. It shows that initial repository development was focused on North America, Western Europe and Australasia, particularly the USA, UK, Germany and Australia. Soon after, Japan increased its repository numbers. Since 2010, other geographical areas and countries have seen repository growth, including East Asia (especially Taiwan), South America (especially Brazil) and Eastern Europe (especially Poland). During the whole period, countries such as France, Italy and Spain have maintained steady growth, whereas countries such as China and Russia have experienced relatively low levels of growth. Globally, repositories are predominantly institutional, multidisciplinary and English-language-based. They typically use open-source OAI-compliant repository software but remain immature in terms of explicit licensing arrangements. Whilst the size of repositories is difficult to assess accurately, the available data indicate that a small number of large repositories and a large number of small repositories make up the repository landscape. These trends and characteristics are analyzed using Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) building on previous studies. IDT is shown to provide a useful explanatory framework for understanding repository adoption at various levels: global, national, organizational and individual. Major factors affecting both the initial development of repositories and their take up by users are identified, including IT infrastructure, language, cultural factors, policy initiatives, awareness-raising activity and usage mandates. It is argued that mandates in particular are likely to play a crucial role in determining future repository development. »
Free-riding, cooperation, and ‘peaceful revolutions’ in copyright
Modern copyright law is based on the inescapable assumption that users, given the choice, will free-ride rather than pay for access. In fact, many consumers of cultural works – music, books, films, games, and other works – fundamentally want to support their production. It turns out that humans are motivated to support cultural production not only by extrinsic incentives, but also by social norms of fairness and reciprocity.
This article explains how producers across the creative industries have used this insight to develop increasingly sophisticated business models that rely on voluntary payments (including pay-what-you-want schemes) to fund their costs of production.
The recognition that users are not always free-riders suggests that current policy approaches to copyright are fundamentally flawed. Because social norms are so important in consumer motivations, the perceived unfairness of the current copyright system undermines the willingness of people to pay for access to cultural goods.
While recent copyright reform debate has focused on creating stronger deterrence through enforcement, increasing the perceived fairness and legitimacy of copyright law is likely to be much more effective.
The fact that users will sometimes willingly support cultural production also challenges the economic raison d’être of copyright law.
This article demonstrates how ‘peaceful revolutions’ are flipping conventional copyright models and encouraging free-riding through combining incentives and prosocial norms. Because they provide a means to support production without limiting the dissemination of knowledge and culture, there is good reason to believe that these commons-based systems of cultural production can be more efficient, more fair, and more conducive to human flourishing than conventional copyright systems.
This article explains what we know about free-riding so far and what work remains to be done to understand the viability and importance of cooperative systems in funding cultural production. »
URL : Free-riding, cooperation, and ‘peaceful revolutions’ in copyright
Alternative location : : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/70343/
On the Role of Research Data Centres in the Management of Publication-related Research Data
This paper summarizes the findings of an analysis of scientific infrastructure service providers (mainly from Germany but also from other European countries). These service providers are evaluated with regard to their potential services for the management of publication-related research data in the field of social sciences, especially economics. For this purpose we conducted both desk research and an online survey of 46 research data centres (RDCs), library networks and public archives; almost 48% responded to our survey. We find that almost three-quarters of all respondents generally store externally generated research data – which also applies to publication-related data.
Almost 75% of all respondents also store and host the code of computation or the syntax of statistical analyses. If self-compiled software components are used to generate research outputs, only 40% of all respondents accept these software components for storing and hosting. Eight out of ten institutions also take specific action to ensure long-term data preservation. With regard to the documentation of stored and hosted research data, almost 70% of respondents claim to use the metadata schema of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI); Dublin Core is used by 30% (multiple answers were permitted). Almost two-thirds also use persistent identifiers to facilitate citation of these datasets. Three in four also support researchers in creating metadata for their data. Application programming interfaces (APIs) for uploading or searching datasets currently are not yet implemented by any of the respondents. Least common is the use of semantic technologies like RDF.
Concluding, the paper discusses the outcome of our survey in relation to Research Data Centres (RDCs) and the roles and responsibilities of publication-related data archives for journals in the fields of social sciences. »
URL : On the Role of Research Data Centres in the Management of Publication-related Research Data
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9356
Research libraries’ new role in research data management…
Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark :
« The amount of research data is growing constantly, due to new technology with new potentials for collecting and analysing both digital data and research objects. This growth creates a demand for a coherent IT-infrastructure. Such an infrastructure must be able to provide facilities for storage, preservation and a more open access to data in order to fulfil the demands from the researchers themselves, the research councils and research foundations.
This paper presents the findings of a research project carried out under the auspices of DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek — Denmark’s Electronic Research Library) to analyse how the Danish universities store, preserve and provide access to research data. It shows that they do not have a common IT-infrastructure for research data management. This paper describes the various paths chosen by individual universities and research institutions, and the background for their strategies of research data management. Among the main reasons for the uneven practices are the lack of a national policy in this field, the different scientific traditions and cultures and the differences in the use and organization of IT-services.
This development contains several perspectives that are of particular relevance to research libraries. As they already curate digital collections and are active in establishing web archives, the research libraries become involved in research and dissemination of knowledge in new ways. This paper gives examples of how The State and University Library’s services facilitate research data management with special regard to digitization of research objects, storage, preservation and sharing of research data.
This paper concludes that the experience and skills of research libraries make the libraries important partners in a research data management infrastructure. »
URL : Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9173
Novel Research Impact Indicators
Citation counts and more recently usage statistics provide valuable information about the attention and research impact associated with scholarly publications.
The open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) has pioneered the concept of article-level metrics, where these metrics are collected on a per article and not a per journal basis and are complemented by real-time data from the social web or altmetrics: blog posts, social bookmarks, social media and other.
URL : Novel Research Impact Indicators
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8427
Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project
The ICT revolution of the last decades impacted scientific communication as it has impacted many other forms of communications, changing the way in which articles are delivered and how they can be discovered.
However, the impact of ICT on the research itself has been much more profound, introducing digital tools to the way in which researchers gather data, perform analyses, and exchange results.
This brought new, digital forms of research output, and disseminating those calls for changes deeply impact the core format of the scientific article.
In 2009, Elsevier introduced the “Article of the Future” project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions.
First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories — such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly.
We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results.
The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?
URL : Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8446
Enhanced Publications Data Models and Information Systems …
Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems :
« “Enhanced publications” are commonly intended as digital publications that consist of a mandatory narrative part (the description of the research conducted) plus related “parts”, such as datasets, other publications, images, tables, workflows, devices. The state-of-the-art on information systems for enhanced publications has today reached the point where some kind of common understanding is required, in order to provide the methodology and language for scientists to compare, analyse, or simply discuss the multitude of solutions in the field. In this paper, we thoroughly examined the literature with a two-fold aim: firstly, introducing the terminology required to describe and compare structural and semantic features of existing enhanced publication data models; secondly, proposing a classification of enhanced publication information systems based on their main functional goals. »
URL : Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8445