Do developing countries profit from free books? Discovery and online usage in developed and developing countries compared

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Author : Ronald Snijder

For years, Open Access has been seen as a way to remove barriers to research in developing countries. In order to test this, an experiment was conducted to measure whether publishing academic books in Open Access has a positive effect on developing countries.

During a period of nine months the usage data of 180 books was recorded. Of those, a set of 43 titles was used as control group with restricted access. The rest was made fully accessible.

The data shows the digital divide between developing countries and developed countries: 70 percent of the discovery data and 73 percent of online usage data come from developed countries. Using statistical analysis, the experiment confirms that Open Access publishing enhances discovery and online usage in developing countries.

This strengthens the claims of the advocates of Open Access: researchers from the developing countries do benefit from free academic books.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0016.103

Facilitating access to free online resources: challenges and opportunities for the library community

The volume of online content continues to grow exponentially, and much of it is freely available. Some of this content is of potentially significant value for teaching, learning and research purposes. However, ‘free to access’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘easy to find’. Taylor & Francis have conducted a research programme to help explore the issues relating to free online content discoverability from the perspective of librarians.

Our research included several focus groups, teledepth interviews and an online survey ; which together have helped build a picture of the challenges associated with surfacing free online content within an institution for educational and research purposes

URL : http://www.tandf.co.uk/libsite/pdf/TF-whitepaper-free-resources.pdf
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Discoverability Challenges and Collaboration Opportunities within the Scholarly Communications Ecosystem: A SAGE White Paper Update

The prominence of mainstream search engines and the rise of web-scale, pre-indexed discovery services present new challenges and opportunities for publishers, librarians, vendors, and researchers. With the aim of furthering collaborative conversations, SAGE commissioned a study of opportunities for improving academic discoverability with value chain experts in the scholarly communications ecosystem.

Results were released in January 2012 as a white paper titled Improving Discoverability of Scholarly Content in the Twentieth Century: Collaboration Opportunities for Librarians, Publishers, and Vendors. Following the white paper, this article explores the implications for these findings through review of commissioned studies, research reports, journal articles, conference papers, and white papers published in the ensuing twelve months. Sidebars highlight especially promising cross-sector initiatives for enhancing researcher discoverability of the scholarly corpus at appropriate points in their workflow, including the NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) and the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID).

Concluding reflections highlight opportunities for librarians to contribute to cross-sector collaborations that support discovery of quality peer-reviewed content by improving navigation, discoverability, visibility, and usage of the scholarly corpus.

URL : http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/240

How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals …

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How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals :

“This summary report is the output of a large scale survey of journal readers (n=19064) about journal content discovery conducted during May, June and July of 2102. While statistics and analytics can tell us some of this information, there are many gaps in the knowledge that these can provide which we have endeavoured to fill by asking readers what how they discover journal content.”

URL : http://www.renewtraining.com/How-Readers-Discover-Content-in-Scholarly-Journals-summary-edition.pdf

Improving the Discoverability of Scholarly Content in the…

Improving the Discoverability of Scholarly Content in the Twenty-First Century :

“Discoverability is a popular buzzword—ultimately meaning the degree to which scholars can locate the content needed to advance their research and other creative activity. Improved user discovery experiences require heightened collaboration among (1) scholarly publishers and their published authors; (2) search engine developers, database providers, abstracting and indexing services, and academic publishers; (3) electronic resource management and integrated library system vendors; and (4) librarians who advance institutional discoverability. Drawing from interviews with value chain experts, results of research studies, and insights from scholarly literature, this white paper assesses the currently fragmented discovery environment and proposes cross-sector conversations to further visibility and, ultimately, usage of the scholarly corpus, not only on the open web, but within library services.”

URL : http://www.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/librarian/DiscoverabilityWhitePaper/