Access, preservation and analysis in a consortial journal archive: the evolution of Scholars Portal Journals

Authors : Sabina Pagotto, Wei Zhao

This article discusses Scholars Portal Journals (SP Journals), a library consortium-run platform that aggregates and archives licensed scholarly journal content in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Born in the early days of e-journals out of a need to provide consistent and long-term access to scholarly materials in the sometimes volatile world of online publishing, SP Journals has evolved into a major digital repository and archive.

With over 55 million full-text articles and serving a student population of just under half a million, SP Journals represents a major investment in access to online scholarship.

This article explains the lifecycle of content on the platform, from initial publisher negotiations to delivering usage reports, and discusses considerations of running a locally hosted journal platform.

URL : Access, preservation and analysis in a consortial journal archive: the evolution of Scholars Portal Journals

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.458

Correcting duplicate publications: follow up study of MEDLINE tagged duplications

Authors : Mario Malički, Ana Utrobičić, Ana Marušić

Introduction

As MEDLINE indexers tag similar articles as duplicates even when journals have not addressed the duplication(s), we sought to determine the reasons behind the tagged duplications, and if the journals had undertaken or had planned to undertake any actions to address them.

Materials and methods

On 16 January 2013, we extracted all tagged duplicate publications (DPs), analysed published notices, and then contacted MEDLINE and editors regarding cases unaddressed by notices.

For non-respondents, we compared full text of the articles. We followed up the study for the next 5 years to see if any changes occurred.

Results

We found 1011 indexed DPs, which represented 555 possible DP cases (in MEDLINE, both the original and the duplicate are assigned a DP tag). Six cases were excluded as we could not obtain their full text.

Additional 190 (35%) cases were incorrectly tagged as DPs. Of 359 actual cases of DPs, 200 (54%) were due to publishers’ actions (e.g. identical publications in the same journal), and 159 (46%) due to authors’ actions (e.g. article submission to more than one journal). Of the 359 cases, 185 (52%) were addressed by notices, but only 25 (7%) retracted.

Following our notifications, MEDLINE corrected 138 (73%) incorrectly tagged cases, and editors retracted 8 articles.

Conclusions

Despite clear policies on how to handle DPs, just half (54%) of the DPs in MEDLINE were addressed by journals and only 9% retracted. Publishers, editors, and indexers need to develop and implement standards for better correction of duplicate published records.

URL : Correcting duplicate publications: follow up study of MEDLINE tagged duplications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2019.010201

Open data to evaluate academic researchers: an experiment with the Italian Scientific Habilitation

Authors : Angelo Di Iorio, Silvio Peroni, Francesco Poggi

The need for scholarly open data is ever increasing. While there are large repositories of open access articles and free publication indexes, there are still a few examples of free citation networks and their coverage is partial.

One of the results is that most of the evaluation processes based on citation counts rely on commercial citation databases. Things are changing under the pressure of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), whose goal is to campaign for scholarly publishers to make their citations as totally open.

This paper investigates the growth of open citations with an experiment on the Italian Scientific Habilitation, the National process for University Professor qualification which instead uses data from commercial indexes.

We simulated the procedure by only using open data and explored similarities and differences with the official results. The outcomes of the experiment show that the amount of open citation data currently available is not yet enough for obtaining similar results.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03287

Plus ou moins open : les revues de rang A en Sciences de l’information et de la communication

Auteurs/Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Hélène Prost, Amel Fraisse

Selon une étude récente, presque la moitié des articles publiés par des chercheurs français sont diffusés en libre accès, déposés dans les archives ouvertes, comme HAL, ou mis en ligne dans des revues administrées suivant le modèle du “open access”, sans abonnement payant.

Dans cet environnement dynamique, les agences d’évaluation de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche ont un rôle à jouer, par le biais de leurs critères et outils d’évaluation.

En fonction de leur approche et méthodologie, ces établissements peuvent créer des opportunités pour le développement du libre accès, par l’incitation au partage des résultats de la recherche, ou bien, ralentir le processus par le maintien des critères habituels, dont notamment l’évaluation bibliométrique à partir du classement des publications.

Notre étude propose un regard sur notre propre discipline, avec un état des lieux dans le domaine des sciences de l’information et de la communication en France, à partir de la liste actualisée des revues de rang A publiée fin 2017 et sous l’aspect du libre accès.

L’approche est exploratoire. Il s’agit avant tout d’étudier nos propres standards et pratiques, en tant que communauté de recherche en SIC par rapport à la politique scientifique du libre accès et de la science ouverte. 38 % des revues de rang A en SIC sont en libre accès. Mais ces revues représentent seulement 4 % de l’ensemble des revues SIC en libre accès.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/4706

Adapting data management education to support clinical research projects in an academic medical center

Author : Kevin B. Read

Background

Librarians and researchers alike have long identified research data management (RDM) training as a need in biomedical research. Despite the wealth of libraries offering RDM education to their communities, clinical research is an area that has not been targeted.

Clinical RDM (CRDM) is seen by its community as an essential part of the research process where established guidelines exist, yet educational initiatives in this area are unknown.

Case Presentation

Leveraging my academic library’s experience supporting CRDM through informationist grants and REDCap training in our medical center, I developed a 1.5 hour CRDM workshop.

This workshop was designed to use established CRDM guidelines in clinical research and address common questions asked by our community through the library’s existing data support program.

The workshop was offered to the entire medical center 4 times between November 2017 and July 2018. This case study describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of this workshop.

Conclusions

The 4 workshops were well attended and well received by the medical center community, with 99% stating that they would recommend the class to others and 98% stating that they would use what they learned in their work.

Attendees also articulated how they would implement the main competencies they learned from the workshop into their work.

For the library, the effort to support CRDM has led to the coordination of a larger institutional collaborative training series to educate researchers on best practices with data, as well as the formation of institution-wide policy groups to address researcher challenges with CRDM, data transfer, and data sharing.

URL : Adapting data management education to support clinical research projects in an academic medical center

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.5195%2Fjmla.2019.580

Online Safety and Academic Scholarship: Exploring Researchers’ Concerns from Ghana

Authors: Kodjo Atiso, Jenna Kammer

INTRODUCTION

This paper investigates factors, including fears of cybercrime, that may affect researchers’ willingness to share research in institutional repositories in Ghana.

METHODS

Qualitative research was conducted to understand more about the experiences of Ghanaian researchers when sharing research in institutional repositories. Interviews were conducted with 25 participants, documents related to policy and infrastructure in Ghana were examined, and observations were held in meetings of information technology committees.

FINDINGS

The findings indicate that researchers are specifically concerned about three areas when sharing research online: fraud, plagiarism, and identity theft.

DISCUSSION

This paper adds to research that examines barriers toward using institutional repositories, and highlights the lack of basic preventative strategies in Ghana—such as training, security, and infrastructure that are commonplace in developed countries.

CONCLUSION

This study draws on findings from Bossaller and Atiso (2015) that identified fears of cybercrime as one of the major barriers to sharing research online for Ghanaian researchers.

While several other studies have found that fear of identity theft or plagiarism are barriers toward sharing work in the institutional repository, this is the first study that looks specifically at the experiences researchers have had with cybercrime to understand this barrier more fully.

URL : Online Safety and Academic Scholarship: Exploring Researchers’ Concerns from Ghana

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2263

Monitoring open access publishing costs at Stockholm University

Author : Lisa Lovén

Stockholm University Library (SUB) has been tracking the University’s open access (OA) publishing costs within the local accounting system since 2016. The objective is to gain an overview of the costs and to use this as a basis for decisions about how to proceed in order to support the transition to OA at Stockholm University.

This article explains the reasons behind using the accounting system as the primary source of information and describes the workflow of tracking costs and how additional data are retrieved.

Basic findings from the 2017 cost compilation are outlined, and the steps taken in 2018, with consequences for both the current workflow and the costs at SUB, are briefly discussed. A breakout session on this topic was presented at the UKSG Annual Conference in Glasgow in 2018.

URL : Monitoring open access publishing costs at Stockholm University

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.451