Academic Libraries as Data Quality Hubs

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Academic libraries have a critical role to play as data quality hubs on campus. There is an increased need to ensure data quality within ‘e-science’. Given academic libraries’ curation and preservation expertise, libraries are well suited to support the data quality process.

Data quality measurements are discussed, including the fundamental elements of trust, authenticity, understandability, usability and integrity, and are applied to the Digital Curation Lifecycle model to demonstrate how these measures can be used to understand and evaluate data quality within the curatorial process. Opportunities for improvement and challenges are identified as areas that are fruitful for future research and exploration.

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/5/

Staffing and Workflow of a Maturing Institutional Repository…

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Staffing and Workflow of a Maturing Institutional Repository :

“Institutional repositories (IRs) have become established components of many academic libraries. As an IR matures it will face the challenge of how to scale up its operations to increase the amount and types of content archived. These challenges involve staffing, systems, workflows, and promotion. In the past eight years, Kansas State University’s IR (K-REx) has grown from a platform for student theses, dissertations, and reports to also include faculty works. The initial workforce of a single faculty member was expanded as a part of a library-wide reorganization, resulting in a cross-departmental team that is better able to accommodate the expansion of the IR. The resultant need to define staff responsibilities and develop resources to manage the workflows has led to the innovations described here, which may prove useful to the greater library community as other IRs mature.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/4/

Tenure Track Science Faculty and the ‘Open Access…

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Tenure-Track Science Faculty and the ‘Open Access Citation Effect’ :

“INTRODUCTION : The observation that open access (OA) articles receive more citations than subscription-based articles is known as the OA citation effect (OACE). Implicit in many OACE studies is the belief that authors are heavily invested in the number of citations their articles receive. This study seeks to determine what influence the OACE has on the decision-making process of tenure-track science faculty when they consider where to submit a manuscript for publication.

METHODS : Fifteen tenure-track faculty members in the Departments of Biology and Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill participated in semi-structured interviews employing a variation of the critical incident tecnique.

RESULTS Seven of the fifteen faculty members said they would consider making a future article freely-available based on the OACE. Due to dramatically different expectations with respect to the size of the OACE, however, only one of them is likely to seriously consider the OACE when deciding where to submit their next manuscript for publication.

DISCUSSION Journal reputation and audience, and the quality of the editorial and review process are the most important factors in deciding where to submit a manuscript for publication. Once a subset of journals has satisfied these criteria, financial and access issues compete with the OACE in making a final decision.

CONCLUSION In order to increase the number of OA materials, librarians should continue to emphasize depositing pre- and post-prints in disciplinary and institutional repositories and retaining the author rights prior to publication in order to make it possible to do so.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/6/

Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars

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Out of concern for its lifeblood—communication—academia is rushing to correct serious inequities in access and revenue distribution by embracing open access (OA) in a variety of ways: some journals provide access openly to all readers, some allow authors to pay for OA options, some share copyrights with authors to allow open sharing,etc.

For publication in some fully OA journals, though, publication charges associated with an ‘author-pays’ business model can be substantial, reflecting costs involved in production and publication of quality scholarly articles and (sometimes) significant profit margins for publishers. Such charges may constitute significant barriers for potential authors, particularly those at institutions or in countries with fewer resources.

Consequently, an OA journal for readers may in reality be a closed-access journal for authors.

[…]

This commentary is not a criticism of OA publishers with author-pays systems, such as PLoS, which has creatively faced a difficult challenge and stands as an example of a
successful non-profit OA publishing endeavor.

Nor is this commentary an attack on OA journals in general. On the contrary, this paper advocates developing a robust and vibrant variety of OA journals. Two of the authors are also publishers of OA journals that do not follow the ‘author-pays’ system, described briefly later in this commentary.

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/3/

Open Access Self archiving in Library and Information…

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Open Access Self-archiving in Library and Information Science: Indian contribution to E-LIS Repository :

“Open Access (OA) is a widely debated issue in the scientific community as well as in the publishing industry. Although people in all walks of life are greatly benefitted by the OA philosophy, libraries and information centres have been the prime beneficiaries of the new model of information access and delivery. The main objective of the OA ventures is to make the recorded scholarly output freely available to all readers over the Internet. The paper is a case study of E-LIS repository which provides open access LIS literature worldwide. The study found that India is the highest contributor to the repository among all the 42 Asian countries with 658 submissions followed by Turkey and China. M. S. Sridhar, former librarian of ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore found to be the highest individual contributors to E-LIS from India with 106 (234%) papers.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18655/

“Going green” self archiving as a means for…

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“Going green”: self-archiving as a means for dissemination of research output in ecology and evolution :

“There is a perception that is prevalent within the academic community that access to information is being restricted by the large publishing houses that dominate academic publishing. However, self-archiving policies that are promoted by publishers provide a method by which this restriction can be relaxed. In this paper I outline the motivation behind self-archiving publications in terms of increased impact (citations and downloads of articles), increased access for the developing world, and decreased library costs. I then describe the current state of self-archiving policies in 165 ecology and evolution journals. I demonstrate that the majority (52%) of papers published in 2011 could have been self-archived in a format close to their final form. Journals with higher impacts tend to have more restrictive policies on self-archiving, and publishers vary in the extent to which they impose these restrictions. Finally, I provide a guide to academics on how to take advantage of opportunities for self-archiving using either institutional repositories or freely-available online tools.”

URL :http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/IEE/article/view/4555