The Internet selective learning and the rise of…

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The Internet, selective learning, and the rise of issue specialists :

“Using national survey data (N = 1,208) in the U.S., the present study found that individuals relying upon the Internet translated their interest in the health care issue into issue–specific knowledge. However, those who depended on network TV, newspapers, and radio failed to display a high level of issue–specific knowledge, even when they were interested in the issue. The findings suggest that the Internet plays an important role in fostering issue specialists rather than generalists.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3888/3206

Digital inclusion and data profiling In the…

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Digital inclusion and data profiling :

“In the United States, digital inclusion policies designed to introduce poor people, communities of color, indigenous, and migrants (collectively, “chronically underserved communities” or “the underserved”) to the economic, social, and political benefits of broadband lie in tension with new practices and techniques of online surveillance. While online surveillance activity affects all broadband users, members of chronically underserved communities are potentially more vulnerable to the harmful effects of surveillant technologies. This paper examines specific examples of commercial data profiling against a longer history of low–tech data profiling of chronically underserved communities. It concludes by calling for issues of online privacy and surveillance to punctuate digital inclusion discourse. Until this happens, digital inclusion policies threaten to bring chronically underserved communities into online worlds that, as Gandy (2009) argued, reinforce and exacerbate social exclusion and inequalities.”
URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3821/3199

Intended and Unintended Consequences of a Publish-or-Perish Culture: A Worldwide Survey

How does publication pressure in modern-day universities affect the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in science? By using a worldwide survey among demographers in developed and developing countries, we show that the large majority perceive the publication pressure as high, but more so in Anglo-Saxon countries and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. However, scholars see both the pros (upward mobility) and cons (excessive publication and uncitedness, neglect of policy issues, etc.) of the so-called ‘publish-or-perish’ culture.

By measuring behavior in terms of reading and publishing, and perceived extrinsic rewards and stated intrinsic rewards of practicing science, it turns out that publication pressure negatively affects the orientation of demographers towards policy and knowledge of the population facts. There are no signs that the pressure affects reading and publishing outside the core discipline.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=1983205

Step by step installation guide of a digital…

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Step by step installation guide of a digital preservation infrastructure :

“The Ceris-CNR project of digital preservation infrastructure has been committed by Bess (Social Science Electronic Library of Piemonte) for years 2011-2012 sponsored by Compagnia di San Paolo of Turin. Ceris-CNR role is to handle all the post-scan of the digitalization, for this purpose it has deployed the software and server platforms of the repository and also the web portal for the presentation, research and consulting. This report is a guide of step by step followed to build the digital archive infrastructure.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16911

Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research for…

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Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research for Voluntary and Charitable Sector Organisations :

“This study was carried out by The Office for Public Management (OPM) in partnership with the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). We were commissioned in July 2011 by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on behalf of the Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) to conduct research into the benefits of open access (OA) to scholarly research outputs to voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations.”

URL : http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/576/

Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research to…

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Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research to the Public Sector :

“The objective of this project was to synthesise and generate evidence on the benefits that Open Access to scholarly research outputs has generated to the public sector, and to provide case studies of organisations that have realised such benefits. The project considered the benefits of Open Access for researchers in public sector organisations. It did not aim to be comprehensive in its coverage of the public sector, as there are many organisations for which research is only a very small part of their activity, and has only very limited impact on their policies and decisions. We have also focused on Open Access to research articles, as these still make up the largest proportion of research outputs used in analysis, policy and decision-making: research data is becoming more important but is still nascent in its influence in the organisations we surveyed. These organisations in any case often generate their own data through commissioned surveys and other tools as their needs tend to be very specific.”

URL : http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/575/

Usage and Impact of Controlled Vocabularies in a…

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Usage and Impact of Controlled Vocabularies in a Subject Repository for Indexing and Retrieval :

“Since 2009, the German National Library for Economics (ZBW) supports both indexing and retrieval of Open Access scientific publications like working papers, postprint articles and conference papers by means of a terminology web service. This web service is based on concepts organized as a ‘Standard Thesaurus for Economics’ (STW), which is modelled and regularly published as Linked Open Data. Moreover, it is integrated into the institution’s subject repository for automatically suggesting appropriate key words while indexing and retrieving documents, and for automatically expanding search queries on demand to gain better search results. While this approach looks promising to augment ‘off the shelf’ repository software systems in a lightweight manner with a disciplinary profile, there is still significant uncertainty about the effective usage and impact of controlled terms in the realm of these systems. To cope with this, we analyze the repository’s logfiles to get evidence of search behaviour which is potentially influenced by auto suggestion and expansion of scientific terms derived from a discipline’s literature.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2011-3_4/index.html?000555