Open Textbooks and Increased Student Access and Outcomes…

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Open Textbooks and Increased Student Access and Outcomes :

“This study reports findings from a year-long pilot study during which 991 students in 9 core courses in the Virginia State University School of Business replaced traditional textbooks with openly licensed books and other digital content. The university made a deliberate decision to use open textbooks that were copyrighted under the Creative Commons license. This decision was based on the accessibility and flexibility in the delivery of course content provided by open textbooks. More students accessed digital open textbooks than had previously purchased hard copies of textbooks. Higher grades were correlated with courses that used open textbooks.”

URL : http://www.eurodl.org/?article=533

Peer-Reviewed Open Research Data: Results of a Pilot

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Peer review of publications is at the core of science and primarily seen as instrument for ensuring research quality. However, it is less common to independently value the quality of the underlying data as well.

In the light of the ‘data deluge’ it makes sense to extend peer review to the data itself and this way evaluate the degree to which the data are fit for re-use. This paper describes a pilot study at EASY – the electronic archive for (open) research data at our institution.

In EASY, researchers can archive their data and add metadata themselves. Devoted to open access and data sharing, at the archive we are interested in further enriching these metadata with peer reviews.

As a pilot, we established a workflow where researchers who have downloaded data sets from the archive were asked to review the downloaded data set. This paper describes the details of the pilot including the findings, both quantitative and qualitative.

Finally, we discuss issues that need to be solved when such a pilot is turned into a structural peer review functionality for the archiving system.

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/231

Trends in Use of Scientific Workflows Insights from…

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Trends in Use of Scientific Workflows: Insights from a Public Repository and Recommendations for Best Practice :

“Scientific workflows are typically used to automate the processing, analysis and management of scientific data. Most scientific workflow programs provide a user-friendly graphical user interface that enables scientists to more easily create and visualize complex workflows that may be comprised of dozens of processing and analytical steps. Furthermore, many workflows provide mechanisms for tracing provenance and methodologies that foster reproducible science. Despite their potential for enabling science, few studies have examined how the process of creating, executing, and sharing workflows can be improved. In order to promote open discourse and access to scientific methods as well as data, we analyzed a wide variety of workflow systems and publicly available workflows on the public repository myExperiment. It is hoped that understanding the usage of workflows and developing a set of recommended best practices will lead to increased contribution of workflows to the public domain.”

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/232

SW MIS A Semantic Web Based Model for…

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SW-MIS: A Semantic Web Based Model for Integration of Institutional Repositories Metadata Records :

“Despite providing a low level of interoperability, the method of Metadata Harvesting is very common within service providers for unifying access to the institutional repositories. On the other hand, the semantic web-based method of Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) has not been widely adopted by service providers due to its complexity as well as the small number of ORE compatible archives. The purpose of this study is to provide a new metadata integration model, through which resources harvested from repositories are aggregated and converted to Resource Description Format (RDF) so that can take advantage of integrating into the semantic web resources. For the purpose of this study a metadata integration model, namely SW-MIS (Semantic Web-based Metadata Integration System) has been developed, which involves four steps, including: metadata harvesting, exposing harvested metadata, creating Semantic Web compliance data sets, and providing the search and brows interface. For each step, a specific software tool was developed, so that together formed an information workflow system.”

URL : http://www.researchgate.net/publication/233855032_SW-MIS_A_Semantic_Web_Based_Model_for_Integration_ofInstitutional_Repositories_Metadata_Records

Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

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Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process.

It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications.

Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0050109

General cost analysis for scholarly communication in Germany…

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General cost analysis for scholarly communication in Germany : results of the “Houghton Report” for Germany :

“Conducted within the project “Economic Implications of New Models for Information Supply for Science and Research in Germany”, the Houghton Report for Germany provides a general cost and benefit analysis for scientific communication in Germany comparing different scenarios according to their specific costs and explicitly including the German National License Program (NLP).”

URL : http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/27530

Relationships between users resources and services in learning…

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Relationships between users, resources and services in learning object repositories :

“In this paper we describe a proposal for defining the relationships between resources, users and services in a digital repository. Nowadays, virtual learning environments are widely used but digital repositories are not fully integrated yet into the learning process. Our final goal is to provide final users with recommendation systems and reputation schemes that help them to build a true learning community around the institutional repository, taking into account their educational context (i.e. the courses they are enrolled into) and their activity (i.e. system usage by their classmates and teachers). In order to do so, we extend the basic resource concept in a traditional digital repository by adding all the educational context and other elements from end-users’ profiles, thus bridging users, resources and services, and shifting from a library-centered paradigm to a learning-centered one.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10609/17721