The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals A…

The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals: A Study of College and University Libraries in Indiana :

« Objectives: This study examines what factors are considered by college and university libraries in Indiana when making the decision to cancel subscriptions to print journals when an electronic equivalent is available. The study also looks at who the primary decision makers are in this regard. Libraries at public and private institutions of varying sizes were included in the study.

Methods : An online survey was sent to seventy-three libraries in the consortium, Academic Libraries of Indiana. Structured interviews with administrators at nine libraries were also conducted.

Results: Academic libraries in Indiana use subscription cost, redundancy of formats, student preference, budget reductions and usage as the primary factors in canceling print journal subscriptions in favor of their electronic counterparts. There is also a preference for the electronic format for new subscriptions even when a print version is also available.

Conclusions: The study indicates that subscription cost is the most important consideration in the journal cancelation process with other factors also having an effect on the preference of libraries for electronic versions of journals. The study also shows that libraries at public and private colleges and universities are at different stages of moving away from print to an online-only journal format. At the same time, there is consensus that a small collection of print titles will still be needed. The primary decision-makers are librarians, faculty, and library administrators. »

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/10330

Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me : Open Science and its Discontents

[…] Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me takes as its starting point the so-called ‘computational turn’ to data-intensive scholarship in the humanities.

The phrase ‘the computational turn’ has been adopted to refer to the process whereby techniques and methodologies drawn from (in this case) computer science and related fields – including science visualization, interactive information visualization, image processing, network analysis, statistical data analysis, and the management, manipulation and mining of data – are being used to produce new ways of approaching and understanding texts in the humanities; what is sometimes thought of as ‘the digital humanities’.

The concern in the main has been with either digitizing ‘born analog’ humanities texts and artifacts (e.g. making annotated editions of the art and writing of William Blake available to scholars and researchers online), or gathering together ‘born digital’ humanities texts and artifacts (videos, websites, games, photography, sound recordings, 3D data), and then taking complex and often extremely large-scale data analysis techniques from computing science and related fields and applying them to these humanities texts and artifacts – to this ‘big data’, as it has been called.

Witness Lev Manovich and the Software Studies Initiative’s use of ‘digital image analysis and new visualization techniques’ to study ‘20,000 pages of Science and Popular Science magazines… published between 1872-1922, 780 paintings by van Gogh, 4535 covers of Time magazine (1923-2009) and one million manga pages’ (Manovich, 2011), and Dan Cohen and Fred Gibb’s text mining of ‘the 1,681,161 books that were published in English in the UK in the long nineteenth century’ (Cohen, 2010).

What Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me endeavours to show is that such data-focused transformations in research can be seen as part of a major alteration in the status and nature of knowledge. It is an alteration that, according to the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, has been taking place since at least the 1950s.

It involves nothing less than a shift away from a concern with questions of what is right and just, and toward a concern with legitimating power by optimizing the social system’s performance in instrumental, functional terms. This shift has significant consequences for our idea of knowledge.

[..] In particular, Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me suggests that the turn in the humanities toward datadriven scholarship, science visualization, statistical data analysis, etc. can be placed alongside all those discourses that are being put forward at the moment – in both the academy and society – in the name of greater openness, transparency, efficiency and accountability.

URL : http://livingbooksaboutlife.org/pdfs/bookarchive/DigitizeMe.pdf

Knowledge Sharing Among Inventors: Some Historical Perspectives

This chapter documents instances from past centuries where inventors freely shared knowledge of their innovations with other inventors. It is widely believed that such knowledge sharing is a recent development, as in Open Source Software.

Our survey shows, instead, that innovators have long practiced “collective invention” at times, including inventions in such key technologies as steam engines, iron, steel, and textiles.

Generally, innovator behavior was substantially richer than the heroic portrayal often found in textbooks and museums. Knowledge sharing promoted innovation, sometimes coexisting with patents, at other times, not, suggesting that policy should foster both knowledge sharing and invention incentives.

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1944201

The impact of open access journals on library and information scientists’ research in Taiwan

« As some library and information science (LIS) journals in Taiwan are open access, the aim of the study is to investigate what, if any, impact open access journals have on library and information science scholars‘ research in Taiwan. Therefore, the objectives of the study is to explore the scholarly productivity of LIS scholars in Taiwan, to find out what articles they publish and OA articles as a percentage of all titles, and to calculate the mean citation rate of open access articles and articles not freely available online. A bibliometric method was used in the study. To determine whether a difference in research impact existed, two research impact indicators were used, that is, open access articles as a percentage of all published titles and mean citation rate of open access articles and those not freely available online. Data on published articles with citation counts by the LIS scholars in Taiwan from 2000 to 2009 was collected from the ACI Database and Social Science Citation Index Database. The study shows that for 72 LIS scholars who were subjects of the investigation, 64 of them had published 745 articles within the previous ten years: 679 articles in Chinese and 66 articles in English; 499 of these were OA articles, and 264 were non-OA articles; OA articles constituted 66.98% of the total number of academic articles. The mean citation rate of OA versus non-OA article citation was 1.29.Analysis of impact indicators shows that open access journals have an impact on the research of LIS scholars in Taiwan, in particular, LIS OA journals have more research impact in Chinese than those in English. »

URL : http://eprints.ptar.uitm.edu.my/3624/

Etat de la publication en Open Access dans les disciplines scientifiques présentes à l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Ce mémoire, réalisé sous mandat de la bibliothèque de l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), fait état de la publication en Open Access aujourd’hui. Il couvre ainsi les disciplines scientifiques présentes dans l’institution, plus particulièrement les Sciences, Techniques et Médecine (STM).

Bien que ce travail porte principalement sur la publication dans les revues en Open Access (« gold path »), il aborde aussi l’archivage ouvert (« green path»). La partie théorique de ce mémoire dresse un panorama actuel de l’Open Access. Elle détermine les principaux modes d’Open Access existants via une typologie et définit les différents modèles économiques existants.

Ce travail s’intéresse aussi à la question de l’évaluation des articles scientifiques, des droits en vigueur dans ce domaine, ainsi que l’usage d’outils statistiques pour la qualification des revues. L’importance de l’Open Access est démontrée, en tenant compte des particularités, propres aux grandes disciplines scientifiques.

Le point de vue des chercheurs sur la question du libre accès est présenté, suivi d’une réflexion autour de projets de financements institutionnels. Enfin, d’éventuelles perspectives de développements futurs sont élaborées.

La partie pratique présente, quant à elle, les résultats d’une enquête, menée entre février et juin 2011 sur le campus. Elle repose sur une analyse quantitative des références d’articles scientifiques publiés, présentes dans Infoscience, l’archive ouverte de l’institution. Une mesure de l’importance de la publication en Open Access à l’EPFL, entre 2008 et 2010, a ainsi été effectuée.

En parallèle, une analyse qualitative, menée sous la forme d’entretiens individuels, a permis de prendre connaissance des attentes et des besoins de certains chercheurs sur ce sujet. Les résultats obtenus renseignent aussi de manière significative sur leurs pratiques et leurs préoccupations, qui varient sensiblement selon leurs habitudes et leurs expériences.

Ce mémoire a donc pour but de faire une synthèse de ces différents éléments et ainsi, de déterminer les enjeux actuels de l’Open Access, que ce soit à l’EPFL ou dans n’importe quel autre contexte institutionnel, côtoyant la publication scientifique.

URL : http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/169218/

Open access institutional repositories for scholarly communication: A developing country perspective

Scholarly communication is the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavours. Nowadays, Open Access Repositories (OARs) and Open Access (OA) has become the emerging ways to share research output, academic result and disseminating information to the academic community for better usability and visibility.

The purpose of this present study is to discuss the role of OAIR (Open Access Institutional Repository) in scholarly communication and focused how does developing country like Bangladesh may be benefited through this system.

The major focus of the present study is to familiar with different initiatives of building OAIR and Open Access (OA) in Bangladesh. In pursuing the above objectives, the present research posed the following research questions (RQs) that will guide the study as well. How OAIR can be used as an effective tool for scholarly communication?

What is the present status of the OAIR and OA initiatives in Bangladesh and what are the prospects of OAIR in Bangladesh? An analysis of the appropriate literature was carried out, focusing on papers explicitly referring to changing roles of OAIR. The study performed online searches and substantial amount of literature has been reviewed. Literature collected through internet, personal visits, and secondary sources of information has been analyzed.

Findings reveal that OAIR is very important for the scholarly communication and Bangladesh is not far behind to get the fullest advantages of the OAIR. It is suggested some directions for building OAIR and OA initiatives in Bangladesh.

It is believed that faculty and research scholars will be able to publish their research output in the proposed IR to visible their scholarly research output globally. This study no doubt will foster more research on OAIR for the improvement of Open Access scenarios in Bangladesh.

URL : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anup_Das7/publication/249774716_Open_Access_and_Institutional_Repositories_-_A_Developing_Country_Perspective_A_case_study_of_India/links/00b7d52bbf9f967a64000000.pdf

La circulation de l’information au sein de la…

La circulation de l’information au sein de la blogosphère: le cas des blogs en information-documentation :

« Cette communication présente les premiers résultats d’une analyse de la circulation de l’information au sein d’un espace constitué par les blogs français en information-documentation. Cette blogosphère est envisagée comme un dispositif info-communicationnel créé par et pour un public d’experts. L’objectif de l’étude est de comprendre les modalités selon lesquelles l’information y circule. L’analyse des billets postés sur douze blogs a permis de décrire les productions de chaque blogueur et de comprendre les réactions qu’elles suscitent auprès des différents acteurs de ce dispositif.

This paper presents the first findings of a study exploring the French blogosphere in Library and Information Science. A panel of 12 blogs is considered both as an editorial and a communicational tool designed by and for a specific public of specialized librarians and LIS scholars. The goal of the study is to understand how information is disseminated within it. Analyzing the posts makes possible to understand the blogging behavior and the role of this blogosphere on the different actors and stakeholders involved. »

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00629903/fr/