Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938
Cette étude dresse un état des archives ouvertes dans le monde arabe et leurs spécificités à partir d’une grille d’analyse inspirée des travaux similaires dans le monde occidental. Ce qui ressort de cette étude, c’est que l’offre des archives ouvertes arabes est très faible et l’implication des chercheurs arabes dans le dépôt dans ces archives reste limitée.
D’autant plus, le fonds de certaines archives a plus une vocation de bibliothèque numérique que d’archive ouverte. De ce fait, il serait intéressant d’améliorer la qualité et la quantité de ces archives pour contribuer à l’évolution de la recherche scientifique dans le monde arabe et à une meilleure visibilité des chercheurs et des institutions de recherche arabes.
Scientific Output from Latin America and the Caribbean – Identification of the Main Institutions for Regional Open Access Integration Strategies :
« Latin America is a region in which two thirds of the investment in research and development are funded by State resources. It can be foreseen that in the near future governments in the region will encourage and promote, or require by law or mandates, that scientific output from the region become visible and accessible in open access repositories and portals. This paper presents the results of a survey to identify the institutions of the region with the largest volume of scientific output and most exposure of their output on the Web, in order to help make those institutions visible to national, regional and international organizations involved in open access strategies and programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. The results show a leading position by universities from Brazil; a strong presence of universities from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, and some presence of universities from Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Uruguay. »
« The advancement of various fields of science depends on the actions of individual scientists via the peer review process. The referees’ work patterns and stochastic nature of decision making both relate to the particular features of refereeing and to the universal aspects of human behavior. Here, we show that the time a referee takes to write a report on a scientific manuscript depends on the final verdict. The data is compared to a model, where the review takes place in an ongoing competition of completing an important composite task with a large number of concurrent ones – a Deadline -effect. In peer review human decision making and task completion combine both long-range predictability and stochastic variation due to a large degree of ever-changing external « friction ». »
Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central reduces journal readership–retrospective cohort analysis :
« Does PubMed Central-a government-run digital archive of biomedical articles-compete with scientific society journals? A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles (5999 treatment, 7224 control) published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals in nutrition, experimental biology, physiology, and radiology between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text hypertext markup language (HTML) article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in portable document format (PDF) article downloads from the journals’ websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles (treatment) become freely available from the PubMed Central repository. In addition, the effect of PubMed Central on reducing PDF article downloads is increasing over time, growing at a rate of 1.6% per year. There was no longitudinal effect for full-text HTML downloads. While PubMed Central may be providing complementary access to readers traditionally underserved by scientific journals, the loss of article readership from the journal website may weaken the ability of the journal to build communities of interest around research papers, impede the communication of news and events to scientific society members and journal readers, and reduce the perceived value of the journal to institutional subscribers. »
Comparing journals from different fields of Science and Social Science through a JCR Subject Categories Normalized Impact Factor :
« The journal Impact Factor (IF) is not comparable among fields of Science and Social Science because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In this work, a decomposing of the field aggregate impact factor into five normally distributed variables is presented. Considering these factors, a Principal Component Analysis is employed to find the sources of the variance in the JCR subject categories of Science and Social Science. Although publication and citation behaviour differs largely across disciplines, principal components explain more than 78% of the total variance and the average number of references per paper is not the primary factor explaining the variance in impact factors across categories. The Categories Normalized Impact Factor (CNIF) based on the JCR subject category list is proposed and compared with the IF. This normalization is achieved by considering all the indexing categories of each journal. An empirical application, with one hundred journals in two or more subject categories of economics and business, shows that the gap between rankings is reduced around 32% in the journals analyzed. This gap is obtained as the maximum distance among the ranking percentiles from all categories where each journal is included. »
Open Access to the world’s research literature has been an obvious development since the emergence of the Internet. To everyone, it appears clear that the costs of disseminating research could drop dramatically. Yet, progress in achieving it is strangely slow. This paper explores recent developments in open access, including:
• The recent Australian NH&MRC and ARC mandates for open access deposit in university repositories, and how universities are responding to them
• The UK’s Finch Report, and Lord Krebs’ Committee Report
• Recent USA and German developments
• Gradual growth in open access journals, and the challenge for universities and their libraries of transferring reader-side fees (subscriptions) to author-side fees (publication charges)
• The emergence of submission fees so that highly selective journals need not transfer all the costs of rejections onto successful articles
• Fake conferences and journals which exist only to extract attendance or publication fees
• Newer publishing models
• The recent emergence of a third route to open access based on social networking.
The delays in establishing an obvious developmental consequence of the Internet can largely be attributed to two factors: (a) academic apathy and inertia, and (b) publisher protection of profit margins and old business models. Neither of these can be expected to last. Of particular interest is the ‘Titanium Road’, a route to open access that is reliant on social networking.
« Key Findings :
••The role of internet search engines in facilitating discovery of scholarly resources has continued to increase. The perceived decline in the role of the library catalog noted in previous cycles of this survey has been arrested and even modestly reversed, driven perhaps to some degree by significant strategic shifts in library discovery tools and services.
•• Respondents are generally satisfied with their ability to access the scholarly literature, not least because freely available materials have come to play a significant role in meeting their needs.
•• While respondents continued to trend overall towards greater acceptance of a print to electronic transition for scholarly journals, they grew modestly less comfortable with replacing print subscriptions with electronic access. Monographs, although widely used in electronic form, present a mixed picture for any possible format transition. While some monograph use cases are quite strong for electronic versions, others – especially long-form reading – are seen to favor print by a decisive share. Even so, a growing share of respondents expects substantial change in library collecting practices for monographs in the next five years.
•• Respondents’ personal interests are the primary factor in selecting research topics, but junior faculty members report that tenure considerations play an important role, as well. Collaboration models vary significantly across scholarly fields. While humanists are less likely than scientists or social scientists
to conduct quantitative analyses, nevertheless some 25% of humanists report gathering their own data for this purpose.
•• Small but non-trivial shares of respondents use technology in their undergraduate teaching. But while most recognize the availability of resources to help them do so, many respondents do not draw upon resources beyond their own ideas or feel strongly motivated to seek out opportunities to use more technology in their teaching.
•• Respondents tend to value established scholarly dissemination methods, prioritizing audiences in their sub-discipline and discipline, and those of lay professionals, more so than undergraduates or the general public. Similarly, they continue to select journals in which to publish based on characteristics such as topical coverage, readership, and impact factor. Finally, respondents tend to value existing publisher services, such as peer review, branding, copy-editing, while expressing less widespread agreement about the value of newer dissemination support services offered by libraries that are intended to maximize access and impact.
•• Respondents perceive less value from many functions of the academic library than they did in the last cycle of this survey. One notable exception is the gateway function, which experienced a modest resurgence in perceived value. A minority of respondents sees the library as primarily responsible for teaching research skills to undergraduates. And, though still a clear minority, the share of respondents who wish to see substantial change to library staff and buildings has increased. There are large differences in perceptions between disciplinary groups: for example, a smaller share of scientists views many
library roles as very important.
•• Conferences remain at the heart of respondents’ perceptions of the role and value of the scholarly societies in which they participate. Conferences are valued for both the formal function of discovering new scholarship and informal role of connecting scholars with peers. »