A Campus Partnership to Foster Compliance with Funder Mandates

Authors : Jeff R. Broadbent, Andrea Payant, Kevin Peterson, Betty Rozum, Liz Woolcott

Data from federally funded research must now be made publicly accessible and discoverable. Researchers must adhere to guidelines established by federal agencies, and universities must be prepared to demonstrate compliance with the federal mandate.

At Utah State University, the Office of Research and Graduate Studies and the Merrill-Cazier Library partnered to facilitate data sharing and create an audit trail demonstrating compliance with the terms of each researcher’s award.

This systematic approach uses existing resources such as the grant management system, the institutional repository (IR), and the Library online catalog. This paper describes our process and the first eight months of implementation.

URL : http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/lib_pubs/274/

Making the Mission Visible: Altmetrics and Nontraditional Publishing

Authors : Jennifer L. Bonnet, Marisa Méndez-Brady

Purpose

Whereas traditional book and journal publishing remain the gold standard for many post-secondary institutions, nontraditional publishing is just as prolific at the flagship university in Maine. The university has strong land and sea grant missions that drive a broad research agenda, with an emphasis on community outreach and engagement.

However, the impact of researchers’ contributions outside of academe is unlikely to be accurately reflected in promotion, tenure or review processes. Thus, the authors designed a series of altmetrics workshops aimed at seeding conversations around novel ways to track the impact of researchers’ diverse scholarly and creative outputs.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper presents a case study of the instructional approach taken at the University of Maine library to facilitate discussions of alternative impact assessments that reach beyond traditional publications.

Findings

Evaluations revealed an increased awareness of, and interest in, impact tracking tools that capture both traditional scholarship, like journal articles, and nontraditional scholarly and creative outputs, such as videos, podcasts and newsletters.

The authors learned that altmetrics provides an entry point into a broader conversation about scholarly impact, and was best received by those whose scholarly output is not always captured by traditional metrics.

Practical implications

Scholars are equipped with novel methods for describing the value of their work and discovering a broader audience for their research. Future initiatives will target the needs identified through initial conversations around altmetrics.

Originality/value

Altmetrics workshops provide spaces to explore the potential for new tools that capture a range of previously unconsidered measures of impact, and to discuss the implications of those measures.

URL : http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/lib_staffpub/27/

 

Assessing the Openness of Anthropology Journals

Authors : Melody Dale, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Sheeji Kathuria, Mary Ann Jones

This study analyses the extent of gold open access (OA) publishing options in 377 anthropology journals by applying a six-level coding scheme (0=non-transparent publishing, 5=fully OA, i.e., free to read and publish without embargo).

This analysis is meant to simplify the process of identifying OA journal publishing options in the discipline of anthropology, in addition to sharing findings on some of the prominent issues in OA publishing as they relate to anthropology journals, including non-transparency among publishers and the prevalence and price of article processing charges (APCs).

We conclude that publishers should be more transparent about their OA publishing options and policies by providing conspicuous and straightforward information to potential authors. Further, we find that in the anthropology scholarly communication ecosystem,

APCs for hybrid journals are more expensive than those for fully gold OA journals, thus contradicting the assumption that gold OA is more costly to researchers.

URL : http://scholar.colorado.edu/libr_facpapers/92/

Incidence of predatory journals in computer science literature

Authors : Simona Ibba, Filippo Eros Pani, John Gregory Stockton, Giulio Barabino, Michele Marchesi, Danilo Tigano

Purpose

One of the main tasks of a researcher is to properly communicate the results he obtained. The choice of the journal in which to publish the work is therefore very important. However, not all journals have suitable characteristics for a correct dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Some publishers turn out to be unreliable and, against a payment, they publish whatever researchers propose. The authors call “predatory journals” these untrustworthy journals.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the incidence of predatory journals in computer science literature and present a tool that was developed for this purpose.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors focused their attention on editors, universities and publishers that are involved in this kind of publishing process. The starting point of their research is the list of scholarly open-access publishers and open-access stand-alone journals created by Jeffrey Beall.

Specifically, they analysed the presence of predatory journals in the search results obtained from Google Scholar in the engineering and computer science fields. They also studied the change over time of such incidence in the articles published between 2011 and 2015.

Findings

The analysis shows that the phenomenon of predatory journals somehow decreased in 2015, probably due to a greater awareness of the risks related to the reputation of the authors.

Originality/value

We focused on computer science field, using a specific sample of queries. We developed a software to automatically make queries to the search engine, and to detect predatory journals, using Beall’s list.

URL : Incidence of predatory journals in computer science literature

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-12-2016-0108

Processus de diffusion des mémoires de Master. Littérature grise et accessibilité : un enjeu majeur dans le domaine de la Recherche. Étude de cas : projet MemorySID

Auteur/Author : Sylvain Vanacker

Ce mémoire a été élaboré à la suite d’un stage ayant eu lieu à l’Atelier National de Reproduction de Thèses de Villeneuve d’Ascq. Il s’agit d’une étude de cas concernant le Projet MemorySID et s’intéressant aux processus de traitement et de diffusion de mémoires de stage d’étudiants de Master en Sciences de l’Information et de la Documentation.

L’environnement de travail y est décrit ainsi que les missions confiées et la méthodologie mise en place. Ce mémoire de stage évoque les phases d’indexation et de vérification des méta-données de mémoires sur la plate-forme Nuxeo ainsi que les étapes de diffusion dans l’ENT de Lille 3 et en Libre Accès dans l’archive ouverte DUMAS.

Enfin, une analyse étudiant l’impact et l’importance qu’engendre l’accès aux mémoires de Master et à la Littérature Grise dans le domaine de la Recherche complète ce mémoire et permet de s’interroger sur l’intérêt de cette démarche.

URL : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01558312