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10 years of Malaria Journal: how did Ope…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

10 years of Malaria Journal: how did Open Access change publication patterns ? :

« Fifteen years ago, most publications were paper-based, accessible only by subscription. By the late 1990s, this ‘traditional’ mode of access to scientific literature was about to change dramatically, as the result of the development of Open Access. This Editorial, written as Malaria Journal reaches its 10th birthday, looks at the impact of the Open Access movement on publication in the field of tropical medicine in general and malaria in particular. »
URL : http://www.malariajournal.com/content/9/1/284

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The Future of the Journal? Integrating research data with scientific discourse

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

To advance the pace of scientific discovery we propose a conceptual format that forms the basis of a truly new way of publishing science. In our proposal, all scientific communication objects (including experimental workflows, direct results, email conversations, and all drafted and published information artifacts) are labeled and stored in a great, big, distributed data store (or many distributed data stores that are all connected).

Each item has a set of metadata attached to it, which includes (at least) the person and time it was created, the type of object it is, and the status of the object including intellectual property rights and ownership. Every researcher can (and must) deposit every knowledge item that is produced in the lab into this repository.

With this deposition goes an essential metadata component that states who has the rights to see, use, distribute, buy or sell this item. Into this grand (and system-wise distributed, cloud-based) architecture, all items produced by a single lab, or several labs, are stored, labeled and connected.

URL : http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4742/version/1

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Free Our Libraries! Why We Need A New Ap…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Free Our Libraries! Why We Need A New Approach to Putting Library Collections Online :

« Today businesses are scanning millions of books from the world’s great libraries and offering access to them on the Web. This conjures up the vision of a vast, free, Internet public library of accumulated knowledge. It seems like a marriage made in heaven—the union of corporate capital and enormous library collections, carrying knowledge into virtually every home and workplace. Unfortunately, it’s not. New funding strategies, coordinated library action, and forward-looking principles are needed. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19180/

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Researchers’ attitude to using institut…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Researchers’ attitude to using institutional repositories : a case study of the Oslo University Institutional Repository (DUO) :

« Institutional Repositories (IRs) have been considered one of the disseminating and preserving method for scholarly research publications. However, the success of IR is dependent on the contribution of researchers and faculty members. In order to investigate researchers’ attitudes and their contribution to the Institutional repository a survey was conducted by taking 43 researchers as a sample study at the University of Oslo. The findings indicated that researchers were found to have a low level awareness of the Institutional repository but were interested in contributing their research work to the university institutional repository and have a positive attitude towards providing free access to scholarly research results of the University of Oslo. »

URL : https://oda.hio.no/jspui/handle/10642/426

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Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access I…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research :

« Background
Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher’s version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) average twice as many citations as articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective
self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals.
Methdology
Principal Findings: The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations).
Conclusions/Significance
The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders. »

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18493/58/MandateOA_PLOSpostprint.pdf

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Library automation and Open source softw…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Library automation and Open source software in Italy: an overview :

« Library automation in Italy started in 60s in order to computerize the managing process in specialized documentation centres. Between the late 60s and the early 70s library automation started within the two National Libraries (Florence, and Rome) too. During the 80s the National Library Service (SBN) was taking shape, but the process would finish ten years later only. From that time, the world of library automation in Italy is divided into those who joined SBN and those not, with rebounds on the software market. The analysis is focused on the scarce diffusion of open source ILS, although in the history of Italian library automation can be found both products without commercial distributors, and attempts to create native OS products or to release source code files previously of a file owner. Hypothesis are put forward in order to find the reasons of the lacking development of OS ILS advance. The results are compared with figures on other European countries. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/17599/