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The cost and quality of online open textbooks…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The cost and quality of online open textbooks: Perceptions of community college faculty and students :

« Proponents of open educational resources (OER) claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the college classroom. We investigated student and faculty perceptions of OER used in a community college context. Over 125 students and 11 faculty from seven colleges responded to an online questionnaire about the cost and quality of the open textbooks used in their classrooms. Results showed that the majority of students and faculty had a positive experience using the open textbooks, appreciated the lower costs, and perceived the texts as being of high quality. The potential implications for OER initiatives at the college level seem large. If primary instructional materials can in fact be made available to students at no or very low cost, without harming learning outcomes, there appears to be a significant opportunity for disruption and innovation in higher education. »

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3972

EN

When press is not printed : the challenge of collecting digital newspapers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Since its birth in the early seventeenth century, the press has played a prominent role in the political and social life of France. Over the two last decades, the economic and even cultural pillars on which the press ecosystem is built has been challenged by the growing use of digital technologies, and by the increasing role of the Internet as a way to distribute and access information.

Heritage libraries need to address the accelerating shift from analogue to digital in order to maintain the continuity of their objectives and of their missions. Many aspects need to be taken into account: legal, scientific, technical, economic and organizational issues have to be identified and addressed.

This paper looks at the example of the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France or BnF), and at the way it has dealt with collecting newspapers in digital form. During the ten last years, the BnF has launched several experiments, testing different approaches, with varying degrees of success: – Direct deposit of electronic publications on physical media (CDs and DVDs) or through FTP. – Fully automated web harvesting.

Since December 2010, almost 100 news websites (national and daily newspapers, pure players, news portals…) are collected on a daily basis. -Web harvesting through agreements with producers. »

URL : http://hal-bnf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00769084

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Bibliographic Metadata Harvesting to Support the Management of…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Bibliographic Metadata Harvesting to Support the Management of an Institutional Repository :

« This thesis approaches the problem of automatic harvesting of bibliographic metadata records from several indexing services, in the context of the population of institutional repositories. Since the manual insertion of records is a tedious and error-prone task, the automation of the process intends to facilitate the management of a repository. However, the automated harvesting of records has to deal with the problem of identifying authors and with the need to consolidate duplicate records retrieved from different services. In an approach to the automation of the aforementioned task, we introduce a system that proposes to harvest bibliographic metadata records from different information sources publicly available, identify and consolidate the retrieved records that are considered duplicates and make available the results of such consolidation to external parties that are interested in the information, such as an institutional repository. The proposed system was tested with real bibliographic metadata corresponding to scientific publications of a subset of faculty members at Instituto Superior T´ecnico. The results of the evaluation show that, despite the required time to identify and consolidate, the merged records contain a valid aggregation of all available information in the system and can be efficiently accessed by external entities through a machine-to-machine interface. »

URL : https://dspace.ist.utl.pt/bitstream/2295/1271450/1/dissertacao.pdf

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Status of Open Access Repositories in SAARC Countries…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Status of Open Access Repositories in SAARC Countries: A Picture from OpenDOAR and ROAR :

« The paper throws light on the growth and development of open repositories in SAARC countries. The study explores various facets of open repositories and tries to present a lucid picture of their overall development in the region. The study provides a detailed description of repositories in terms of country and content type, reuse policies, and language diversity etc. The repositories of the SAARC countries were thoroughly sifted from the two prominent open access repositories (OpenDOAR and ROAR) and analyzed for various parameters. The paper discuss various steps that need to be taken to elevate the number and quality of repositories in the region with special reference to the research output and potential of the region to become one of the front runners of open access movement. »

URL : http://ijpd.co.in/vol1no2/001.pdf

EN

Rising Publication Delays Inflate Journal Impact Factors

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Journal impact factors have become an important criterion to judge the quality of scientific publications over the years, influencing the evaluation of institutions and individual researchers worldwide. However, they are also subject to a number of criticisms.

Here we point out that the calculation of a journal’s impact factor is mainly based on the date of publication of its articles in print form, despite the fact that most journals now make their articles available online before that date.

We analyze 61 neuroscience journals and show that delays between online and print publication of articles increased steadily over the last decade. Importantly, such a practice varies widely among journals, as some of them have no delays, while for others this period is longer than a year.

Using a modified impact factor based on online rather than print publication dates, we demonstrate that online-to-print delays can artificially raise a journal’s impact factor, and that this inflation is greater for longer publication lags.

We also show that correcting the effect of publication delay on impact factors changes journal rankings based on this metric.

We thus suggest that indexing of articles in citation databases and calculation of citation metrics should be based on the date of an article’s online appearance, rather than on that of its publication in print.

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0053374

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Forging New Service Paths Institutional Approaches to Providing…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Forging New Service Paths: Institutional Approaches to Providing Research Data Management Services :

« Objective: This paper describes three different institutional experiences in developing research data management programs and services, challenges/opportunities and lessons learned.

Overview: This paper is based on the Librarian Panel Discussion during the 4th Annual University of Massachusetts and New England Region e-Science Symposium. Librarians representing large public and private research universities presented an overview of service models developed at their respective organizations to bring support for data management and eScience to their communities. The approaches described include two library-based, integrated service models and one collaboratively-staffed, center-based service model.

Results: Three institutions describe their experiences in creating the organizational capacity for research data management support services. Although each institutional approach is unique, common challenges include garnering administrative support, managing the integration of services with new or existing staff structures, and continuing to meet researchers needs as they evolve.

Conclusions: There is no one way to provide research data management services, but any staff position, committee, or formalized center reflects an overarching organizational commitment to data management support. »

URL : http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol1/iss3/2/

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Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« We have now tested the Finch Committee’s Hypothesis that Green Open Access Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories. With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we show that deposit number and rate is significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit rates of 70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated deposit rate of 20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%. The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates. »

URL : http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/344687/