InfoDoc MicroVeille – Page 521 – Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938

Public Availability of Published Research Data in High…

Posted on 9 septembre 2011 by Hans Dillaerts

Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals :

« Background : There is increasing interest to make primary data from published research publicly available. We aimed to assess the current status of making research data available in highly-cited journals across the scientific literature.

Methods and Results : We reviewed the first 10 original research papers of 2009 published in the 50 original research journals with the highest impact factor. For each journal we documented the policies related to public availability and sharing of data. Of the 50 journals, 44 (88%) had a statement in their instructions to authors related to public availability and sharing of data. However, there was wide variation in journal requirements, ranging from requiring the sharing of all primary data related to the research to just including a statement in the published manuscript that data can be available on request. Of the 500 assessed papers, 149 (30%) were not subject to any data availability policy. Of the remaining 351 papers that were covered by some data availability policy, 208 papers (59%) did not fully adhere to the data availability instructions of the journals they were published in, most commonly (73%) by not publicly depositing microarray data. The other 143 papers that adhered to the data availability instructions did so by publicly depositing only the specific data type as required, making a statement of willingness to share, or actually sharing all the primary data. Overall, only 47 papers (9%) deposited full primary raw data online. None of the 149 papers not subject to data availability policies made their full primary data publicly available.

Conclusion : A substantial proportion of original research papers published in high-impact journals are either not subject to any data availability policies, or do not adhere to the data availability instructions in their respective journals. This empiric evaluation highlights opportunities for improvement. »

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024357
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024357

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AUPress A Comparison of an Open Access University…

Posted on 5 septembre 2011 by Hans Dillaerts

AUPress: A Comparison of an Open Access University Press with Traditional Presses :

« This study is a comparison of AUPress with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on the rankings that are correlated with book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. The results of one-way ANOVA analyses show that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AUPress in comparison with traditional university presses. However, AUPress, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by the number of downloads of the open electronic versions. »

URL : http://ifets.info/others/abstract.php?art_id=1165

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Google Scholar as a tool for discovering journal…

Posted on 2 septembre 2011 by Hans Dillaerts

Google Scholar as a tool for discovering journal articles in library and information science :

« Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the coverage of Google Scholar for the Library and Information Science (LIS) journal literature as identified by a list of core LIS journals from a study by Schlögl and Petschnig (2005).

Methods: We checked every article from 35 major LIS journals from the years 2004 to 2006 for availability in Google Scholar (GS). We also collected information on the type of availability—i.e., whether a certain article was available as a PDF for a fee, as a free PDF, or as a preprint.

Results: We found that only some journals are completely indexed by Google Scholar, that the ratio of versions available depends on the type of publisher, and that availability varies a lot from journal to journal. Google Scholar cannot substitute for abstracting and indexing services in that it does not cover the complete literature of the field. However, it can be used in many cases to easily find available full texts of articles already found using another tool.

Originality/value: This study differs from other Google Scholar coverage studies in that it takes into account not only whether an article is indexed in GS at all, but also the type of availability. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/16084

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Search engine user behaviour How can users be…

Posted on 2 septembre 2011 by Hans Dillaerts

Search engine user behaviour: How can users be guided to quality content? :

« The typical behaviour of the Web search engine user is widely known: a user only types in one or a few keywords and expects the search engine to produce relevant results in an instant. Search engines not only adapt to this behaviour. On the contrary, they are often faced with criticism that they themselves created this kind of behaviour. As search engines are trendsetters for the whole information world, it is important to know how they cope with their users’ behaviour. Recent developments show that search engines try to integrate results from different collections into their results lists and to guide their users to the right results. These results should not only be relevant in general, but also be pertinent in the sense of being relevant to the user in his current situation and in accordance to his background. The article focuses on the problems of guiding the user from his initial query to these results. It shows how the general users are searching and how the intents behind their queries can be used to deliver the right results. It will be shown that search engines try to give some good results for everyone instead of focusing on complete result sets for a specific user type. If the user wishes, he can follow the paths laid out by the engines to narrow the results to a result set suitable to him. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/16078

Open Data, Open Society. A research project about openness of public data in EU local administration

Posted on 1 septembre 2011 by Hans Dillaerts

This report discusses the current and potential role, in a truly open society, of raw Public Sector Information (PSI) that is really open, that is fully accessible and reusable by everybody. The general characteristics of PSI and the conclusions are based on previous studies and on the analysis of
current examples both from the European Union and the rest of the world.

Generation, management and usage of data constituting what is normally called PSI is a very large topic. This report only focuses on some parts of it. First of all, we only look here at really « public » PSI, that is information (from maps to aggregate health data) that is not tied to any single individual and whose publication, therefore, raises no privacy issues.

It is also important to distinguish between actual raw data (basic elements of information like numbers, names, dates, single geographical features like the shape of a lake, addresses…), their results (more or less complex documents, policies, laws…) and the procedures and chains of command followed to generate and use such results, that is to vote or, inside Public Administrations, to take or implement decisions.

So far, discussion and research on Open Data at national level has had relatively more coverage, even if much of the PSI that has the most direct impact on the life of most citizens is the one that is generated, managed and used by local, not central, administrations and end users (citizens, businesses or other organizations). Creation of wealth and jobs can be easier, faster and cheaper to stimulate, especially in times of economic crisis, at the local level. Finally, open access to public data is much more necessary for small businesses that for big corporations, since the latter can afford to pay for access to data anyway (and high prices of data may also protect them from competition from smaller companies).

For all these reasons, the main focus of this report will be on the raw data that constitute « public » PSI as defined above. This is the reason why in this report the terms « raw data » and « PSI » are practically interchangeable. We will also focus on the local dimension of Open PSI, that is raw data
directly produced by, or directly relevant for, local communities (City and Regions), and on their
direct impact on local government and local economy.

Chapters 2 and 3 summarize the importance of data in the modern society and some recent developments on the Open Data front in Europe. Chapter 4 explains why raw PSI should be open, while Chapter 5 shows the potential of such data with a few real world examples from several (mostly EU) countries. Chapter 6 looks at some dangers that should not be ignored when promoting Open Data and Chapter 7 proposes some general practices to follow for getting the most out of them. Some conclusions and the next phases of the project are in Chapter 8.

URL : http://www.dime-eu.org/files/active/0/ODOS_report_1.pdf

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An Open Access Future? Report from the eurocancercoms project

Posted on 30 août 2011 by Hans Dillaerts

« In 2010, the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) as a member of the Eurocancercoms FP7 project conducted a survey on professional communication activities across its European membership with particular reference to the use of the internet and barriers to communication. Over half of the survey respondents were working in basic cancer research, a further third in translational research and the remaining respondents in epidemiology or medical oncology. From a range of interesting information and opinions, the survey revealed that the internet is used by 94% of cancer researchers for professional activities every day with the majority accessing PubMed and online journals daily or 2-3 times a week. These simple statistics place access to published research findings online at the centre of support for cancer researchers’ work: a crucial sharing of information which can accelerate progress in the scientific battle with cancer.

While the survey had not focussed on Open Access specifically, comment banks and discussions at consensus meetings following the publication of the survey results highlighted the issue of access to subscription journals, the barrier to essential and urgent information that a ‘paywall’ creates, and the need for free access. A second survey picking up on the issue of Open Access publishing has now been completed. This paper shares the results of that survey, which was again conducted across the European membership of EACR, and cross references responses with selected data from the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) 2011 which was undertaken across all academic disciplines. The SOAP data is freely accessible and can be mined for information by anyone who wishes to use it. A number of questions were included in the survey that mirrored those used by SOAP, allowing the direct comparison of results. In this article a comparison has been made between the responses provided by cancer researchers and the 7,433 respondents to the SOAP survey from the Biological Sciences. (Over 43,000 responses were received across all disciplines to the SOAP survey.)

As a conclusion and invitation to further discussion, this paper also contributes to the debate around subscription and Open Access publishing, supporting the case for accelerating the progress towards Open Access publishing of cancer research articles as a particularly supportive way of assisting all researchers to make unhindered progress with their work. »

URL : http://www.eacr.org/about/20110820_Open%20Access%20Future.pdf