status

Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing Sources of…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing: Sources of Funding and Factors Influencing Choice of Journal :

« Open access (OA) journals make their full text content available for free on the Web and use other means than subscriptions or access charges for funding the publication process. Publication fees or article processing charges (APC)s have become the predominant means for funding professional OA publishing. We surveyed 1,038 authors from seven discipline categories who recently published articles in 74 OA journals that charge APCs. Authors were asked about the source of funding for the APC, factors influencing their choice of a journal and past history publishing in OA and subscription journals. Additional information about the journal and the authors’ country were obtained from the journal websites. A total of 429 (41%) authors completed the survey. There were large differences in the source of funding among disciplines. Journals with impact factors charged higher APCs as did journals from disciplines where grant funding is plentiful. Topical fit, quality, and speed of publication where the most important factors in the authors’ choice of a journal. Open accessibility was less important but a significant factor for many authors in their choice of a journal to publish. These findings are consistent with other research on OA publishing and suggest, that if OA journals meet normal quality standards, authors and their employers and funders are willing to pay reasonable APCs, the acceptable levels of which are dependent on the field of science and the quality of the journal in question. »

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc/

status

Recruiting Content for the Institutional Repository The Barriers…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Recruiting Content for the Institutional Repository: The Barriers Exceed the Benefits :

« Focus groups conducted at Carnegie Mellon reveal that what motivates many faculty to self-archive on a website or disciplinary repository will not motivate them to deposit their work in the institutional repository. Recruiting a critical mass of content for the institutional repository is contingent on increasing awareness, aligning deposit with existing workflows, and providing value-added services that meet needs not currently being met by other tools. Faculty share concerns about quality and the payoff for time invested in publishing and disseminating their work, but disagree about metrics for assessing quality, the merit of disseminating work prior to peer review, and the importance of complying with publisher policies on open access. Bridging the differences among disciplinary cultures and belief systems presents a significant challenge to marketing the institutional repository and developing coherent guidelines for deposit. »

URL : http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/2068

status

La transformation numérique au service de la croissance…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

La transformation numérique au service de la croissance :

« Alors que débute la deuxième décennie du xxie siècle, l’influence du numérique sur la société mondiale est incontestable. La numérisation est aujourd’hui un élément fondamental dans le fonctionnement de certains domaines de la société tels que la finance, et est amenée à devenir incontournable pour l’ensemble des couches sociales, comme on peut le voir avec la généralisation de la téléphonie mobile et du Web. Pour réussir cette révolution, il faut être capable de l’encourager mais également de contrôler les inévitables déviances et confusions qu’implique le développement des technologies de l’information.

Face à cette transformation irréversible et globale, la France et tout particulièrement l’État français doivent aujourd’hui réussir à se forger une place significative dans la définition des paramètres de la société numérique. Ce changement doit tout d’abord s’effectuer pour que la France rattrape son retard dans la conception et la production de technologies numériques, domaines jusqu’ici dominés par la Chine et les États-Unis. Les entrepreneurs français doivent apprendre à saisir les innombrables opportunités offertes par le numérique.

Dans un deuxième temps, il est nécessaire que l’État français réussisse à suivre le rythme exponentiel des mutations engendrées par les usages et les initiatives personnelles pour être capable de participer à la régulation mondiale d’Internet (dans la mesure où cette régulation est possible), mais aussi afin d’éviter une fracture numérique qui pourrait éprouver certaines catégories de la population.

Pour finir, la puissance publique se doit d’accompagner les citoyens face à une révolution numérique qui transforme tous les aspects de la société. Cette action passe à la fois par une garantie de la neutralité du Net – pour permettre aux français un libre choix des acteurs et des services numériques, mais aussi par une sécurisation des usages, tout particulièrement une sécurisation des transactions. »

.
URL : http://www.fondapol.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Note-CORNIOU-211-06-14-WEB-2.pdf

status

Collaboratory Digital Libraries for Humanities in the Italian…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Collaboratory Digital Libraries for Humanities in the Italian context :

« The study investigates the approach to collaboration in Humanities, within the Italian context, to test the possibility of collaborative digital library for scholars. The research hypothesis is that collaboration can foster innovation and scienti c development: therefore, within Humanities, digital libraries can be the collaborative laboratory for research. Thus, understanding perception of scholars towards collaboration, especially online, and comprehending if wiki systems could be the framework of collaboration were the objectives of the study. A qualitative approach has been adopted, using case study as research method: in-depth, semi-structured interviews to Digital Humanities scholars provide data integrated with interviews with two key informants (one of which is prof. Umberto Eco). The results of the study show that Humanities, within Italian context, do appreciate collaboration and the concept of a collaboratory digital library, though several issues need to be solved. In fact, Humanities are still tied with individual work and collaboration is not easy to pursue, for cultural, technical and political reasons. Great e ort needs to be done at many different levels to eliminate obstacles and facilitate online collaboration for scholars. The study provides a draft model for a collaborative digital library arisen from gathered data. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15839

EN

Loading Brief MARC Records for Open-Access Books in an Academic Library Online Catalog

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Mbooks are open-access, digitized books freely available on the Internet. This article describes the Auraria Library’s experience of loading brief MARC records for Mbooks into its online public access catalog and looks at some of the issues that arose from the record-loading project.

Despite the low quality of the records, librarians in Auraria Library thought that loading them into the catalog was advantageous because of the rich content in the collection, and because many of the records could be improved using the global update functionality in the catalog.

Making the records available through the catalog, as opposed to merely linking to the entire collection from the Library’s Web page, was considered to be valuable because of the aggregation a catalog provides, and because the Mbooks collection helped fill gaps in the Library’s physical collections.

As more open-access, digitized books become available, libraries will need to plan and manage how best to provide access to them.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15841

status

Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works …

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works :

« In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds. »

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1647586

status

The LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access The…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access :

« The LERU Roadmap towards Open Access represents a conscious decision by the League of European Research Universities to investigate new models for scholarly communication and the dissemination of research outputs emanating from LERU universities. »

URL : http://www.leru.org/files/publications/LERU_AP8_Open_Access.pdf