Combining peer review and metrics to ass…

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Combining peer review and metrics to assess journals for inclusion in Scopus :

“Peer review has been in place for centuries as an accepted process to validate manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Yet a similarly rigorous assessment of content also happens a level up, when looking at the quality of journals that apply for indexing in bibliographic databases. Scopus, an abstract & citation database provided by Elsevier, indexing 18,000 scientific titles, is receiving an increasing number of title suggestions; in 2009 this grew to almost 5,000 in that year alone. Some of the suggested journals are dedicated to niche areas and/or are published in other languages than English. To ensure a fair and transparent evaluation of these titles and to address the rising interest in being indexed, Scopus redesigned its entire title evaluation process – basing it on a metrical scorecard and on the principles of peer review. By developing an online editorial system – the Scopus Title Evaluation Platform (STEP) – Scopus also created the prerequisite of an improved communication with publishers and editors about their journals.”

URL : http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2010/00000023/00000004/art00011

Digital accessibility within the Brazili…

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Digital accessibility within the Brazilian context :

“Accessibility has been inserted into the public policy agenda of several governments, including Brazil. Therewith, the Secretary of Logistics and Information Technology (SLTI) of the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management of the Brazilian Government designed the Electronic Government Accessibility model (e-Mag). Thus, this paper is intended to present a brief history of Brazilian initiatives in digital accessibility; the e-Mag and its recommendations; the ASES (Site Accessibility Evaluator and Simulator) software to facilitate the accessibility process; the virtual learning course and technical lectures to disseminate the model and further steps to improve and establish it.”

URL : http://www.epractice.eu/files/European%20Journal%20epractice%20Volume%2010.5_4.pdf

Automatic Aggregation of Faculty Publica…

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Automatic Aggregation of Faculty Publications from Personal Web Pages :

“Many researchers make their publications available on personal web pages. In this paper, we propose a simple method for the automatic aggregation of these documents. We search faculty web pages for archived publications and present their full text links together with the author’s name and short content excerpts on a comprehensive web page. The excerpts are generated simply by querying a standard web search engine.”

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/3765

Open access and academic reputation : “…

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Open access and academic reputation :

“Open access aims to make knowledge freely available to those who would make use of it. High-profile open access journals, such as those published by PLoS (Public Library of Science), have been able to demonstrate the viability of this model for increasing an author’s reach and reputation within scholarly communication through the use of such bibliographic tools as the Journal Impact Factor, conceived and developed by Eugene Garfield. This article considers the various approaches that authors, journals, and funding agencies are taking toward open access, as well as its effect on reputation for authors and, more widely, for journals and the research enterprise itself.”

URL : http://nopr.niscair.res.in/handle/123456789/10242

Coming of age in the academy? The status of our emerging field

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Science communication is certainly growing as an academic field, as well as a professional specialization. This calls to mind predictions made decades ago about the ways in which the explosion of scientific knowledge was envisioned as the likely source of new difficulties in the relationship between science and society.

It is largely this challenge that has inspired the creation of the field of science communication. Has science communication become its own academic subdiscipline in the process? What exactly does this entail?

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C06/Jcom0903%282010%29C06.pdf

From analogue to digital scholarship: implications for science communication researchers

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Digital media have transformed the social practices of science communication. They have extended the number of channels that scientists, media professionals, other stakeholders and citizens use to communicate scientific information.

Social media provide opportunities to communicate in more immediate and informal ways, while digital technologies have the potential to make the various processes of research more visible in the public sphere.

Some digital media also offer, on occasion, opportunities for interaction and engagement. Similarly, ideas about public engagement are shifting and extending social practices, partially influencing governance strategies, and science communication policies and practices.

In this paper I explore this developing context via a personal journey from an analogue to a digital scholar. In so doing, I discuss some of the demands that a globalised digital landscape introduces for science communication researchers and document some of the skills and competencies required to be a digital scholar of science communication.

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C05/Jcom0903%282010%29C05.pdf

Is science communication its own field? …

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Is science communication its own field? :

The present comment examines to what extent science communication has attained the status of an academic discipline and a distinct research field, as opposed to the common view that science communication is merely a sub-discipline of media studies, sociology of science or history of science. Against this background, the authors of this comment chart the progress science
communication has made as an emerging subject over the last 50 years in terms of a number of
measures. Although discussions are still ongoing about the elements that must be present to
constitute a legitimate disciplinary field, we show here that science communication meets four key
elements that constitute an analytical framework to classify academic disciplines: the presence of
a community; a history of inquiry; a mode of inquiry that defines how data is collected; and the
existence of a communications network.”

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C04/Jcom0903%282010%29C04.pdf