Current Status of ShodhGangotri: Repository of Indian Research in Progress

Across the globe, new research projects are undertaken every year by the researchers. There should be some system which will maintain a database of ongoing research work in order to avoid duplication of research. Some universities and institutions in foreign countries maintain database of research in progress.

In India, various universities and institutions like INFLIBNET, DELNET, NASSDOC, IISc, CSIR and University of Mysore etc. have their Electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) repository providing open or login based access to full-text ETDs. But, none of these have any database of Research in Progress.

Recently, INFLIBNET introduced ShodhGangotri, which has been built to maintain a database of synopsis of on-going M.Phil/ Ph.D in Indian universities and institutions. The present paper provides a brief picture of the current status of ShodhGangotri. »

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/997/

Too early too fast The regulation of the…

Too early, too fast? The regulation of the eBook market in France and its possible effects on EU libraries :

« Until now, legislative interventions on eBooks and libraries have been applied to mass digitization programmes. France has taken further steps, with general regulation of the eBook market. Over and above the French “cultural exception”, the eBook price-maintenance law of May 26, 2011, and the decrease in the eBook VAT rate decided in 2012 will have profound effects on this sector and, perhaps, could prevent the strains between publishers and libraries seen in the USA.
Moreover there is a problem with regulation, namely: what is an eBook? The French Parliament laid the foundations for the debate, but the answers depend on the EU authorities, who have to define a clear policy. The ongoing discussions could have a major consequence: is the eBook, becoming a juridical object, subjected to the “digital renting and lending right”, in line with the 2006 Council directive? This may be the first step towards regulation of the European library market. »

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8539/9605

Open Access literature productivity of Physics A DOAJ…

Open Access literature productivity of Physics: A DOAJ Perspective :

« The World Wide Web has introduced new vistas for scholarly publishing which can be accessed online via internet. DOAJ is the most accepted and authoritative list of scholarly, peer-reviewed, fully Open Access journals. This study aims to analyze the contribution of open access literature in the subject physics through DOAJ. Directory of Open Access Journals covers literature contribution of a wide variety of subjects, countries and also different languages. Study analyses Indian contribution to DOAJ, institution-wise categorization, language-wise distribution. »

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/971/

Open Access And Scholarly Monographs in Canada

« The unprecedented access to knowledge enabled by the internet is a critical development in the democratization of education. The Open Access (OA) movement argues that scholarly research is a common good that should be freely available. In theory, university presses concur, however, providing such access is largely unsupportable within current business model parameters.

This study presents an overview of OA in North America and Europe, focusing on the Canadian context. Given their relatively small market and current funding models, Canadian scholarly presses differ somewhat from American and European publishers vis-à-vis OA. Drawing both on information from industry stakeholders and relevant research, this paper aims to clarify how Canadian university presses might proceed with respect to OA. While the study does not make specific recommendations, possible business models are presented that might help university presses offset the cost of offering OA to the important body of scholarship that they publish. »

URL : http://www.ccsp.sfu.ca/2013/08/open-access-and-scholarly-monographs-in-canada/

Open Data as a Foundation for Innovation The…

Open Data as a Foundation for Innovation: The Enabling Effect of Free Public Sector Information for Entrepreneurs :

« Public open data access has a direct impact on future IT entrepreneurs’ perception of ability to execute their business plans. Using high quality (50%–98% response rate) survey data from 138 Swedish IT-entrepreneurs, we find that access to public open data is considered very important for many IT-startups; 43% find open data essential for the realization of their business plan and 82% claim that access would support and strengthen the business plan. The survey also indicates a significant interest in, and willingness to pay for, public sector information data from companies that do not intend to commercialize data themselves but intend to use it to support or test other business models. From the survey, it is possible to infer that the previous discourse on open data, viewing it as a means for government accountability or e-government, or as the foundation for the commercialization of public sector information data is too limited. Open data should instead be seen as an enabler of innovation outside these traditional sectors. This also indicates that the previously calculated societal values of open data might be underestimated. »

URL : http://works.bepress.com/jan_kallberg/18/

Data reuse and the open data citation advantage…

Data reuse and the open data citation advantage :

« Background: Attribution to the original contributor upon reuse of published data is important both as a reward for data creators and to document the provenance of research findings. Previous studies have found that papers with publicly available datasets receive a higher number of citations than similar studies without available data. However, few previous analyses have had the statistical power to control for the many variables known to predict citation rate, which has led to uncertain estimates of the “citation benefit”. Furthermore, little is known about patterns in data reuse over time and across datasets.

Method and Results: Here, we look at citation rates while controlling for many known citation predictors and investigate the variability of data reuse. In a multivariate regression on 10,555 studies that created gene expression microarray data, we found that studies that made data available in a public repository received 9% (95% confidence interval: 5% to 13%) more citations than similar studies for which the data was not made available. Date of publication, journal impact factor, open access status, number of authors, first and last author publication history, corresponding author country, institution citation history, and study topic were included as covariates. The citation benefit varied with date of dataset deposition: a citation benefit was most clear for papers published in 2004 and 2005, at about 30%. Authors published most papers using their own datasets within two years of their first publication on the dataset, whereas data reuse papers published by third-party investigators continued to accumulate for at least six years. To study patterns of data reuse directly, we compiled 9,724 instances of third party data reuse via mention of GEO or ArrayExpress accession numbers in the full text of papers. The level of third-party data use was high: for 100 datasets deposited in year 0, we estimated that 40 papers in PubMed reused a dataset by year 2, 100 by year 4, and more than 150 data reuse papers had been published by year 5. Data reuse was distributed across a broad base of datasets: a very conservative estimate found that 20% of the datasets deposited between 2003 and 2007 had been reused at least once by third parties.

Conclusion: After accounting for other factors affecting citation rate, we find a robust citation benefit from open data, although a smaller one than previously reported. We conclude there is a direct effect of third-party data reuse that persists for years beyond the time when researchers have published most of the papers reusing their own data. Other factors that may also contribute to the citation benefit are considered. We further conclude that, at least for gene expression microarray data, a substantial fraction of archived datasets are reused, and that the intensity of dataset reuse has been steadily increasing since 2003. »

URL : https://peerj.com/articles/175/

European Landscape Study of Research Data Management

The European Landscape Study of Research Data Management offers an overview of how to effectively support researchers in their data management. It looks at interventions by funding agencies, research institutions, national bodies and publishers across the European Union member states. The report also makes recommendations that organisations can adopt to help their researchers.

URL : https://www.sim4rdm.eu/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/SIM4RDM%20landscape%20report%20vs1%204_14.08.13.pdf