Archives des mots-clés : case study

Hype or Real Threat: The Extent of Predatory Journals in Student Bibliographies

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Authors : H. Rainer Schira, Chris Hurst

Predatory publishing has risen with the development of open access publishing. This study examines how many potential predatory journals were used by Brandon University students by analyzing their bibliographies.

In total, 245 bibliographies including 2,359 citations were analyzed. Of the 1,485 citations to journals in these citations, five were found to cite journals on Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers.

The probable sources of these journals in the students’ bibliographies were examined.

URL : Hype or Real Threat: The Extent of Predatory Journals in Student Bibliographies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v14i1.4764

Tough data-driven decisions and radical thinking: how Middlesbrough College’s LRC survived austerity

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Author: Tracey Totty

When other libraries had their budgets cut, Middlesbrough College’s Learning Resources Centre (LRC) enjoyed a stable (yet not increasing) budget with minor cuts from 2015–2017. For 2017–2018, the LRC was required to save 50% of its non-pay budget. The cuts were not unexpected, but so much in one go was a severe shock.

As a matter of good practice, we were already making data-driven decisions for all our resources and were trying to get the best deals we could. It was time for consolidation, tougher decisions and, possibly, some radical thinking.

At the beginning of 2017 this process started, and is now reaping rewards. This article will set out how decisions on making the necessary budget cuts were made, what was done to make the reduced budget go further (whilst maintaining the high quality of services) and the results of the exercise.

The author presented this work at the UKSG E-resources for Further Education event in November 2018.

URL : Tough data-driven decisions and radical thinking: how Middlesbrough College’s LRC survived austerity

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.462

Highly cited references in PLOS ONE and their in-text usage over time

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Authors : Wolfgang Otto, Behnam Ghavimi, Philipp Mayr, Rajesh Piryani, Vivek Kumar Singh

In this article, we describe highly cited publications in a PLOS ONE full-text corpus. For these publications, we analyse the citation contexts concerning their position in the text and their age at the time of citing.

By selecting the perspective of highly cited papers, we can distinguish them based on the context during citation even if we do not have any other information source or metrics.

We describe the top cited references based on how, when and in which context they are cited. The focus of this study is on a time perspective to explain the nature of the reception of highly cited papers.

We have found that these references are distinguishable by the IMRaD sections of their citation. And further, we can show that the section usage of highly cited papers is time-dependent.

The longer the citation interval, the higher the probability that a reference is cited in a method section.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11693

Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities’ Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records

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Authors: Karen Bjork, Rebel Cummings-Sauls, Ryan Otto

INTRODUCTION

Institutional repository managers are continuously looking for new ways to demonstrate the value of their repositories. One way to do this is to create a more inclusive repository that provides reliable information about the research output produced by faculty affiliated with the institution.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

This article details two pilot projects that evaluated how their repositories could track faculty research output through the inclusion of metadata-only (no full-text) records.

The purpose of each pilot project was to determine the feasibility and provide an assessment of the long-term impact on the repository’s mission statement, staffing, and collection development policies.

NEXT STEPS

This article shares the results of the pilot project and explores the impact for faculty and end users as well as the implications for repositories.

URL : Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities’ Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2220

Open Access Escape Room: the key to OA engagement?

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Author: Katrine Sundsbø

Open access (OA) has had, and will continue to have, a significant effect on the scholarly publishing landscape in academia, yet many academic staff publish OA in order to comply with policies, rather than engaging with the value of open scholarship and in debates that ultimately affect them.

Training sessions and workshops are often arranged to increase knowledge and awareness in the academic community, but engagement is often low. On the other hand, some academic staff, who already do engage, will happily attend sessions and workshops to increase their knowledge even further.

The struggle to increase OA engagement overall could be due to the training not being appealing enough, and academics not being aware of benefits until after they have attended workshops.

At the University of Essex, we took a bold, brave and curious approach to increasing engagement during Open Access Week 2018, and created an OA-themed escape room.

This resulted in great engagement from students, academic staff and professional services staff, some of whom reported that they never knew how relevant OA was for them. The Open Access Escape Room was a success, and provided a positive environment for conversations around OA.

URL : Open Access Escape Room: the key to OA engagement?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.459

When a Repository Is Not Enough: Redesigning a Digital Ecosystem to Serve Scholarly Communication

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Authors : Robin R. Sewell, Sarah Potvin, Pauline Melgoza, James Silas Creel, Jeremy T. Huff, Gregory T. Bailey, John Bondurant, Sean Buckner, Anton R. duPlessis, Lisa Furubotten, Julie A. Mosbo Ballestro, Ian W. Muise, Brian J. Wright

INTRODUCTION

Our library’s digital asset management system (DAMS) was no longer meeting digital asset management requirements or expanding scholarly communication needs.

We formed a multiunit task force (TF) to (1) survey and identify existing and emerging institutional needs; (2) research available DAMS (open source and proprietary) and assess their potential fit; and (3) deploy software locally for in-depth testing and evaluation.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

We winnowed a field of 25 potential DAMS down to 5 for deployment and evaluation. The process included selection and identification of test collections and the creation of a multipart task based rubric based on library and campus needs assessments.

Time constraints and DAMS deployment limitations prompted a move toward a new evaluation iteration: a shorter criteria-based rubric.

LESSONS LEARNED

We discovered that no single DAMS was “just right,” nor was any single DAMS a static product. Changing and expanding scholarly communication and digital needs could only be met by the more flexible approach offered by a multicomponent digital asset management ecosystem (DAME), described in this study.

We encountered obstacles related to testing complex, rapidly evolving software available in a range of configurations and flavors (including tiers of vendor-hosted functionality) and time and capacity constraints curtailed in-depth testing.

While we anticipate long-term benefits from “going further together” by including university-wide representation in the task force, there were trade-offs in distributing responsibilities and diffusing priorities.

NEXT STEPS

Shifts in scholarly communication at multiple levels—institutional, regional, consortial, national, and international—have already necessitated continual review and adjustment of our digital systems.

URL : When a Repository Is Not Enough: Redesigning a Digital Ecosystem to Serve Scholarly Communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2225

Legal and policy implications of licenses between LIS open access journal publishers and authors : A qualitative case study

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Authors : Tomas A. Lipinski, Katie Chamberlain Kritikos

“Open access” (“OA”) refers to research placed online free from all price barriers and from most permission barriers (Suber, 2015). OA may apply to research outputs published traditionally, such as books (Schwartz, 2012) and articles in academic journals (Suber, 2015), and non-traditionally, such as student dissertations and theses (Schöpfel & Prost).

The lack of legal barriers is grounded in and given effect through the law of copyright and contract, and the submission of content by authors is often executed through a publication agreement.

This paper studies the contract aspects of OA and the open publishing movement in library and information science (“LIS”) scholarly communication. To explore this phenomenon, it undertakes a case study of the publication agreements of five OA LIS journals.

The sample consists of a brand-new open journal with an agreements drafted by copyright librarians (journal 1) and top-ranked LIS journals that converted to OA (journals 2 through 5) (Scimago, 2017).

With a descriptive data analysis based on that in Lipinski and Copeland (2015; 2013) and Lipinski (2013; 2012), the case study investigates the similarities and differences in the agreements used by the sampled OA LIS journals.

The study builds on the best practices from the Harvard Open Access Project (Shieber & Suber, 2016; 2013). It recommends best practices for the drafting and content of OA LIS publication agreements.

URL : Legal and policy implications of licenses between LIS open access journal publishers and authors : A qualitative case study

Alternative location : http://www.qqml-journal.net/index.php/qqml/article/view/440