Heading for the open road costs and benefits…

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Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications :

“This new report investigates the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different routes for achieving that end over the next five years, and compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK.

The report suggests that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to open access publishing (Gold open access) while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed c.£2000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence.

At a time of financial stringency for universities, research funders and publishers, it is important that all the stakeholders in the scholarly communications system work together to find the most cost-effective ways of fulfilling their joint goal of increasing access to the outputs of research. This report provides the first detailed and authoritative analysis of how this might be achieved over the next five years. We hope that it will stimulate new dialogue and new approaches to policy and practice across all stakeholders.”

URL : http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/heading-open-road-costs-and-benefits-transitions-s

Awarness and Use of Open Access and Free Resources on the Internet: A Case Study at BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus, Goa

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“The Internet is a huge source of free and openly available information. However, the awareness about the availability of such free and open source information amongst members of the academic community is not clearly known. This aspect was studied using a structured questionnaire and the data recorded through the survey was analyzed. The results reinforce the commonly held belief that the academic community is largely unaware of these vast and freely available resources. The study also points out the role a librarian can play in imparting awareness through information literacy sessions from the library .”

URL : http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in/dxml/handle/1944/1626

Going beyond the textbook: The need to integrate open access primary literature into the Chemistry curriculum

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Unrestricted, open access to scholarly scientific literature provides an opportunity for chemistry educators to go beyond the textbook, introducing students to the real work of scientists. Despite the best efforts of textbook authors to provide information about recent research results, textbooks are not a substitute for learning to use the primary literature. Chemical educators can use open access articles to develop research-related skills, to foster curiosity, and to cultivate the next generation of scientists. It is becoming increasingly important for chemical educators to teach undergraduates how online journals are changing the nature of chemical research.

Some institutions can not afford online subscription costs, and open access journals can be an important resource to provide practical experience. Open access publications eliminate the barriers to the central work of scientists providing chemistry educators (whether at well-endowed or economically limited colleges) with the key resources for enhancing student learning through current, relevant research.

URL : http://www.journal.chemistrycentral.com/content/5/1/18

Reinventing Research Information Practices in the Humanities This…

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Reinventing Research? Information Practices in the Humanities :

This report is the second in a series of three commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN), each looking at information practices in a specific discipline (life sciences, humanities and physical sciences). The aim is to understand how researchers within a range of disciplines find and use information, and in particular how that has changed with the introduction of new technologies.

Humanities scholars are often perceived in very traditional terms: spending a lot of time working on their own and collaborating only informally through highly-dispersed networks. Unlike most scientists, they have no long tradition of working in formal, close-knit and collaborative research groups. Humanities scholars have also sometimes been presented as ‘depth’ rather than ‘breadth’ researchers, preferring to spend significant amounts of time with a few items, rather than working across a broader frame. In terms of information sources, text and images held in archives and libraries tend to dominate, with less of an association with new web-based technologies (although this is changing with the increasing visibility of digital humanities).

This report suggests that such perceptions may be out of date. In each of our case studies we found researchers working with new tools and technologies, in increasingly collaborative environments, and both producing and using information resources in diverse ways. There is a richness and variety within humanities information practices which must be recognised and understood if we are to provide the right kind of support for researchers.

URL : http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/Humanities_Case_Studies_for_screen.pdf

DataStaR A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to…

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DataStaR: A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to Support Research :

“DataStaR, a Data Staging Repository (http://datastar.mannlib.cornell.edu/) in development at Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann Library (Ithaca, New York USA), is intended to support collaboration and data sharing among researchers during the research process, and to promote publishing or archiving data and high-quality metadata to discipline-specific data centers and/or institutional repositories. Researchers may store and share data with selected colleagues, select a repository for data publication, create high quality metadata in the formats required by external repositories and Cornell’s institutional repository, and obtain help from data librarians with any of these tasks. To facilitate cross-domain interoperability and flexibility in metadata management, we employ semantic web technologies as part of DataStaR’s metadata infrastructure. This paper describes the overall design of the system, the work to date with Cornell researchers and their data sets, and possibilities for extending DataStaR for use in international agriculture research..

URL : http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/index.php/aginfo/article/view/199

Trends of the Institutional Repositories on Agricultural Universities…

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Trends of the Institutional Repositories on Agricultural Universities in Japan :

This paper discusses the present status of institutional repositories in Agricultural Universities in Japan as found in a survey conducted in January 2010. There are over seventy of agricultural universities in Japan which include the broad areas related to agriculture such as the faculty and graduate schools of Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, Life Science, Fisheries Sciences, Agricultural Resource Sciences, Horticulture, Marine Science and Technology, Textile Science and Technology, and Environmental Studies. The experimental project of institutional repositories was started in 2004 and since then, over 100 universities have joined the National Institute of Informatics Institutional Repositories Program. The contents of institutional repositories consist of journal articles, dissertations, bulletins, meeting articles, documents for meetings, books, technical reports, magazine articles, preprints, learning materials, data/datasets, software and other materials. The number and type of contents of institutional repositories differ between each agricultural university. The future direction of institutional repositories of agricultural universities in Japan is also discussed and concludes the paper.

URL : http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/index.php/aginfo/article/view/202

Author Co Citation Analysis ACA a powerful tool…

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Author Co-Citation Analysis (ACA): a powerful tool for representing implicit knowledge of scholar knowledge workers :

“In the last decade, knowledge has emerged as one of the most important and valuable organizational assets. Gradually this importance caused to emergence of new discipline entitled ―knowledge management‖. However one of the major challenges of knowledge management is conversion implicit or tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. Thus Making knowledge visible so that it can be better accessed, discussed, valued or generally managed is a long-standing objective in knowledge management. Accordingly in this paper author co- citation analysis (ACA) will be proposed as an efficient technique of knowledge visualization in academia (Scholar knowledge workers).”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15501