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E-Journal Usage and Impact in Scholarly …

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

E-Journal Usage and Impact in Scholarly Research: A Review of the Literature :

« This article reviews the literature dealing with scholarly information behavior around the use of e-journals. Its aims are to examine the use and impact the availability of e-journals has had on the community of scholars, mainly from the UK, but looking also at literature from other countries. Results demonstrated the huge rise in availability and take-up of e-journals, although there are mixed findings regarding the fate of the print format. Access to e-literature is dominated by keyword searching, with subject-specific (e.g., chemical abstracts); or general academic (Web of Knowledge) gateways and search engines (typically Google) all used above publishers platforms, alerts, and other ways to find literature. The value of e-journals has been shown to be high, both in terms of in gaining new insights and helping with teaching, and in measure of “Contingent valuation”: the time or cost incurred by not having provision. Barriers to e-journal use included non-purchase of titles by the library and years or volumes not available electronically. Although many disciplinary differences exist, due to their differing natures and means of scholarly communication, nevertheless, the review concludes that it is now unthinkable for researchers to work without the convenience and comprehensiveness that e-journals provide them. »

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a928400689&fulltext=713240928

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Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE: report on a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

This survey formed part of the ‘Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE’ project, commissioned by the JISC and led by UCL.

The survey was designed to capture a snapshot of current and planned electronic theses policies and practices in UK HEIs, and to gather evidence about the main barriers to the electronic deposit of e-theses.

URL : http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/116819

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Access, Readership, Citations: A Randomi…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Access, Readership, Citations: A Randomized Controlled Trial Of Scientific Journal Publishing :

« This dissertation explores the relationship of Open Access publishing with subsequent readership and citations. It reports the findings of a randomized controlled trial involving 36 academic journals produced by seven publishers in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Between January, 2007 and February, 2008, 712 articles were randomly assigned free access status upon publication from the publisher’s websites (the treatment), leaving 2,533 control articles that were accessible by subscription (the control). Article usage data was gathered from the publishers’ websites and article citations were gathered from ISI’s Web of Knowledge. At the time of this writing, all articles have aged at least two years. Articles receiving the Open Access treatment received significantly more readership (as measured by article downloads) and reached a broader audience (as measured by unique visitors), yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles. A pronounced increase in article downloads with no commensurate increase in citations to Open Access treatment articles may be explained through social stratification, a process which concentrates scientific authors at elite, resource-rich institutions with excellent access to the scientific literature. For this community, access is essentially a non-issue. The real beneficiaries of Open Access are the communities that consume, but do not contribute to, the scientific literature. The focus on information consumers requires us to advance the theory of the attention economy. The linear transmission model, where information flows from the sender to the receiver is rejected for a two-sided market model, with authors on one side, readers on the other and journals fulfilling the role of the intermediary agent. The primary purpose of the journal-agent is to transmit quality signals to potential readers. I argue that this model is able to explain both author and reader behaviors as well as the persistent role of journals in an information environment that decouples certification from dissemination. »

URL : http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/17788

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Développement et Usage des Archives Ouvertes en France. 2e partie : Usage

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Le rapport présente les résultats d’un projet de recherche mené en 2009 à l’université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3. L’objectif du projet : évaluer les résultats de la politique en faveur des archives ouvertes en France. La 2e partie du rapport intitulé « Usage » contient un état de l’art de l’analyse des statistiques d’utilisation des archives ouvertes et fournit quelques éléments chiffrés sur les archives ouvertes en France, à partir de données collectées en ligne sur plusieurs sites. L’enquête est suivie d’une étude de cas, l’analyse des fichiers log de l’archive institutionnelle IRIS de l’université Lille 1.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00527043/fr/

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The Anatomy of an Electronic Discussion …

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The Anatomy of an Electronic Discussion List for Librarians, KUTUP-L: Bibliometric and Content Analyses of Postings :

« Electronic discussion lists are widely used as a professional and scientific communication tool since late 1980s. Analysis of messages sent to discussion lists provides useful information on professional as well as scientific communication patterns. In this paper, we present the findings of a bibliometric analysis of some 20,000 messages sent to KUTUP‐L, an electronic discussion list for Turkish librarians, between 1994 and 2008. We test if the distributions of messages and their authors conform to Pareto, Price and Lotka laws. We then analyze the contents of 977 messages based on a stratified sample. Findings indicate that the number of messages sent to KUTUP‐L has increased over the years along with the number of authors. Two thirds (1,232) of about 1,900 list members posted at least one message to the list while the rest preferred to be so called “lurkers”. Some 35 authors posted almost half (49%) the messages while 20% of the authors posted 83% of all messages. The distribution of messages to authors conform to Price (“the square root of all authors would post half the messages”) and Pareto laws (so called “80/20 rule”), respectively. Of the 1,232 authors, one third (as opposed to 60% predicted by Lotka’s Law) sent only one message to the list. Results of content analysis show that 40% of messages sent to the list were off‐topic. Issues about or related with information management services (32%), library and information science (23%) and professional and scientific communication (19%) were discussed more often in the list. The intent analysis of the postings shows that three quarters of the messages were initiatory while the rest were reflexive. That’s to say that the majority of messages posted on KUTUP‐L to initiate a discussion did not seem to generate enough interest for others to reflect upon them by sending follow up messages, suggesting that professional and scientific communication taking place on KUTUP‐L on certain subjects can be characterized as more of a one‐way communication than a participatory one. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18727/

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Analysis of Research Support Services at…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Analysis of Research Support Services at international Best Practice Institutions :

« The following analysis aims to provide an overview and status of the research support services available to university researchers – with a focus on the services provided by university libraries – as well as to propose a strategy for CULIS with respect to research support of researchers at the University of Copenhagen. The analysis starts by defining the term research support service. This definition is used to categorize the national services and is iterated before moving on to the international institutions. We have described the services at 11 international and 8 national university libraries and identified the services that define the best practice institutions. We have found that research support services are often developing more or less organically, and service contents are moving toward becoming more tool-oriented, i.e. with less focus on the traditional information objects, books, journals, manuscripts. E.g. in scholarly publishing the focus is moving from acquiring, cataloging and local dissemination to facilitating the production and publication of books and journals, to supporting the authors on legal issues and to disseminating globally. Competences related to metadata structuring are potentially of great value to the growing field of data-archiving by researchers. The recommendations to CULIS are to conduct a new quantitative survey of researchers’ needs similar to the project “Ph.D. students’ information seeking behavior” in order to paint a clearer picture of what the researchers of The University of Copenhagen needs. Assessment could be made of whether the focus on physical student environments should be matched for researchers. It is a general recommendation to formulate a strategy for the area of providing research support services, formulate clear goals for the institution as well as for the individual services, dedicate resources for running services, dedicate resources to developing services, coordinate existing services, provide overview of goals and services (internally and externally), participate in networking and user activities, position university libraries as part of the research infrastructure. When developing new services, it is our recommendation that special focus be put on primary research data and accompanying metadata – dataverses, environments for generating and sharing research content – VREs, dedicated support of individual researchers, research groups and dedicated information for researchers – researcher information hubs. »

URL : http://hprints.org/hprints-00516997/fr/