Widening access to serials in the developing world…

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Widening access to serials in the developing world: the role and philosophy of INASP :

“The International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) has been working for many years with partner countries in the developing world to support all aspects of the scholarly research and communication cycle – by facilitating access to international scholarly e-journals, supporting the creation of indigenous e-journals, equipping librarians with the skills to support research, and
helping libraries to create the infrastructure to enable them to deliver services in the digital library environment and provide integrated management of digital resources.

For a philanthropic organisation such as INASP sustainability is central as without a plan for self-sufficiency all philanthropic work will ultimately fail. This paper describes our Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERii) approach to supporting sustainable availability, access and use of research that is owned by and embedded within researchers’ own institutions. PERii has been described by Chan and Costa (2005)1 as “the most comprehensive initiative of access to worldwide research” and as well as the learning and successes, this paper will also set out some of the challenges that have arisen in building capacity to enable libraries to take charge of their own futures.

These challenges are significant. There are the obvious obstacles of funding and limitations of ICT and related infrastructures, but in many ways the real sustainability challenges relate to people: how to build on existing strengths and assets and enhance local ability to solve problems; encouraging and stimulating individuals to act either alone or, more effectively, together; and understanding the country context.”

URL : http://conference.ifla.org/sites/default/files/files/papers/ifla77/164-belcher-en.pdf

Bookshare: Making Accessible Materials Available Worldwide

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Bookshare is the largest online library of accessible copyrighted materials for readers with print disabilities. In the last three years Bookshare has built a collection of over 30,000 books available throughout the world, serving people in 28 countries that span the globe. Developed and operated by Benetech, a non-profit using technology to serve unmet social needs,

Bookshare International works with local partners to provide content in multiple languages to serve people with print disabilities. Bookshare is particularly focused on addressing the accessible “book famine” in developing countries and applies ongoing
innovation to do so in a sustainable, effective manner.

URL : http://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2011/148-beaumon-en.pdf

Analysis of Chemists and Economists survey on Open…

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Analysis of Chemists and Economists survey on Open Access :

“The data presented here should be approached with due caution. We are dealing with a relatively small number of academics from a selection of higher education institutions (HEIs), so extrapolating these findings to academia as a whole would not be advisable. There are few non-participants in open access (OA) in the sample, so if there is a bias in the sample, it is towards those who already engage with OA. We can therefore feel more confident about the data regarding why academics do use OA as opposed to why they do not. There were however a large number of participants who did not always make their work OA. From them we should gain some insight into the barriers that currently exist to making work OA.

We know that three institutions from which the academics in this study were drawn have a policy or mandate requiring academic staff to make their work open access. Of those that did have an institutional policy (54 academics), only seven were confident of this. A similar picture existed with funder mandates. Of those that did have a funder mandate (65 academics) only 14 reported that they did. The majority of the academics in the study are engaged with open access, so we can conclude that these policies have had little impact on the uptake of OA. HEIs have failed to get the message of these mandates over to these engaged academics, so we can surmise that the message has also not got over to the less engaged.

The motivations for engaging with open access given by these academics tend to be internal, personal reasons, especially altruistic ones. Both chemists and economists see themselves as working for the wider public benefit. However, economists especially also give more selfish reasons, where OA is seen as conferring a personal benefit. External forces that attempt to push academics towards engagement with OA feature less prominently. One academic commented that the existence of an institutional mandate would make him feel less inclined to engage. However, these are academics who are already engaged, and may be enthusiastic, early adopters of OA. It may take more “push” to bring the others on board.

Quality is a concern for both chemists and economists. The need to publish in high-impact journals and the peer-review process are major concerns of academics when they choose not to participate in OA. These are however issues that would affect any new journal, in any medium. Reputation and the perception of quality take time to develop. However open-access journals need to ensure that they have adequate quality procedures in place with regard to issues like plagiarism and peer review.

The use of an open access option from a traditional journal was the least popular means of making work open access. This is in spite of this option offering a solution to the problem of quality. Cost was a major issue for academics when they choose not to make work open access. Most of these same academics reported that institutional support for payment of open access fees would encourage them to participate in future.”

URL : http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/rcs/Chemists&Economists_Analysis-Steve_Davies.pdf

A further exploration of the views of chemists…

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A further exploration of the views of chemists and economists on Open Access issues in the UK :

“Most UK researchers are attached to academic institutions. Although there are variations in the breadth of the subscription base of institutional libraries, most scholars have smooth and seamless access to most of the scholarly research outputs that they require, for most of the time. Their world is largely an open one. For this reason, the policy discourse about openness in general, and Open Access in particular has had little influence on most academics. Their world is dominated less by issues of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and public good, than by the motivations in relation to scholarly publishing that exist within their own field. The focus of this study is on the latter, that is, on culture and the reasons behind researchers’ attitude to Open Access.

It is worth noting that ‘ Open Access’ is not a term whose nuances and implications are widely understood. For most people the key distinction is – ‘is it free or do I have to pay for it?’ The organisation and arrangements that go on behind the scenes to make that ‘free’ stuff possible is and will probably always be only a concern for a tiny minority of people. But having the free access is a concern for everyone. In a similar way: everyone wants to use Google to find things but how many people get involved in discussing search algorithms, ranking and indexing?”

URL : http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/rcs/Chemists&EconomistsViews_on_OA.pdf

The Impact of Open Access Contributions Developed and…

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The Impact of Open Access Contributions: Developed and Developing World Perspectives :

“The study explores the research impact of ‘Open Access research articles’ across the globe with a view to test the hypothesis that “OA research contributions emanating from developing countries receive equal citations (subsequently resultant research impact) as those from the developed world”. The study covers 5639 research articles from 50 Open Access DOAJ based Medical Sciences journals covering the period from 2005 to 2006. The research impact of OA research publications measured by the citation counts varies from journal to journal and from country to country. Statistically significant difference is noted between the research impact of the developed and the developing world for OA research articles. The research articles from the developed countries receive higher number of citations (subsequently resultant research impact) compared to those of the developing world. The study may help and pave way for framing policies and strategies to increase the impact of research in the developing world.”

URL : http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?107_elpub2011

Characteristics of Education Doctoral Dissertation References An Inter…

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Characteristics of Education Doctoral Dissertation References: An Inter-Institutional Analysis of Review of Literature Citations :

“This study had two purposes: to examine the expertise of doctoral students in their use of the scholarly literature and to investigate the use of citation analysis as a tool for collection development. Analysis of 1,842 coded citations gleaned from 30 education dissertations awarded in 2000 from 3 institutions in the United States revealed that journal articles, at 45%, were cited most frequently, followed by monographs (33.9%) and “other” (18.3%), with magazines and Web sites contributing less than 2% each of the total material types cited. The study examined 858 journal and magazine citations, which were found in 239 unique titles. A relatively small number of journals contained a high percentage of the references found in the dissertations analyzed. Based on a design by D. Kohl and L. Wilson (1986), dissertation citations were also scored for scholarliness, currency, and appropriateness of format, and scores on the three criteria were averaged to arrive at a quality rating. Results of interinstitutional comparisons revealed a significant amount of variation and were considered in conjunction with institutional characteristics and published criteria for quality bibliographies. The data suggest that the assumption of doctoral student expertise in their use of the scholarly literature may be overstated and should be examined in relation to their preparation for professional status. For purposes of developing a library’s research collection, a core list of titles, generated on the basis of multiple, rather than single, institutional analysis is indicated. (Contains 8 figures, 11 tables, and 28 references.)”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15870

Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory…

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Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory and Practice :

“In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is a publicly available scholarly edition of twelve unpublished poems written by Freytag-Loringhoven between 1923 and 1927. This edition provides access to a textual performance of her creative work in a digital environment. It is encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) P5 Guidelines for critical apparatuses including parallel segmentation and location-referenced encoding. The encoded text is rendered into an interactive web interface using XSLT, CSS, and JavaScript available through the Versioning Machine (http://www.v-machine.org/). One aspect of textual performance theory I am exploring within In Transition concerns the social text network. The social text network these twelve texts always and already represent presupposes the notion of a constant circulation of networked social text systems. The network represented by In Transition is based primarily on issues of reception, materiality, and themes which engage and reflect the social nature of the text in the 1920s and now. This is to say two things: (1) that the concept of the network is not new with digital scholarly editions; and (2) that these networks in a digital edition foreground the situated 1920s history of these texts as well as the real-time, situated electronic reading environment. The argument of a digital edition like In Transition is formed as much by the underlying theory of text as it is by its content and the particular application or form it takes. This discussion employs the language of knowledge representation in computation (through terms like domain, ontology, and logic) in order to situate this scholarly edition within two existing frameworks: theories of knowledge representation in computation and theories of scholarly textual editing.”

URL : http://jtei.revues.org/203