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The Short-Term Influence of Free Digital…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The Short-Term Influence of Free Digital Versions of Books on Print Sales :
Increasingly, authors and publishers are freely distributing their books electronically to increase the visibility of their work. A vital question for those with a commercial stake in selling books is, “What happens to book sales if digital versions are given away?” We used BookScan sales data for four categories of books (a total of 41 books) for which we could identify the date when the free digital versions of the books were made available to determine whether the free version affected print sales. We analyzed the data on book sales for the eight weeks before and after the free versions were available. Three of the four categories of books had increased sales after the free books were distributed. We discuss the implications and limitations of these results.
URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.101

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Digital Curation and Preservation Biblio…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography :
This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. Most sources have been published between 2000 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints for published articles in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.
URL : http://digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb.htm

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Blogging by South African academic libra…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Blogging by South African academic librarians: a preliminary survey :
Blogging in South African academic libraries is a relatively new phenomenon. At the time of writing, 28 blogs had been authored by South african academic librarians. A study was conducted of these blogs to establish who these bloggers are and why they are blogging. Several have an experimental air to them. Not all the blogs studied are active and not all have a clear aim or idea of who their audience should be. The most effective blogs seem to be those that invite comments and provide commentary on posts, rather than disabling comments and merely providing links to articles or information.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18501/

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Interconnection among Academic Journal Websites: Multilateral versus Bilateral Interconnection

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Electronic academic journal websites provide new services of text and/or datamining and linking, indispensable for efficient allocation of attention among abundant sources of scienti…c information. Fully realizing the benefitt of these services requires interconnection among websites.

Motivated by CrossRef, a multilateral citation linking backbone, this paper performs a comparison between multilateral interconnection through an open platform and bilateral interconnection, and finds that publishers are fully interconnected in the former regime while they can be partially interconnected in the latter regime for exclusion or di¤erentiation motives.

Surprisingly, if partial interconnection arises for di¤erentiation motive, exclusion of small publisher(s) occurs more often under multilateral interconnection. We also find that in the case of multilateral interconnection, a for-profit platform induces less exclusion than an open platform. Various other extensions are analyzed.

URL : https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/medias/doc/wp/io/wp_io_102_2009.pdf

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The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-Sided Market Perspective :
More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on a journal’s quality standard. If the journal’s objective was to maximize social welfare, open access would be optimal as long as the positive externalities generated by its diffusion
exceed the marginal cost of distribution. However, we show that if an open access journal has a different objective (such as maximizing readers’ utility, the impact of the journal or its profit), it tends to choose a quality standard below the socially efficient level.
URL : http://bit.ly/d6bjM2