How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted…

How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations :

“We analyze the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. We employ a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011. We study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether significant differences exist between them. Second, we run correlation tests to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions and both article downloads and article citations. We find that Twitter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are correlated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating that social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific impact of an article.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2461

Online survey on scientific information in the digital…

Online survey on scientific information in the digital age :

“The public consultation ‘Online survey on scientific information in the digital age’ spurred great interest among different categories of stakeholders, with 1 140 responses received. The Commission received responses from 42 countries, including from all Member States except Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Slovakia, with 37 % of all responses submitted by German respondents.

Respondents were asked if there is no access problem to scientific publications in Europe: 84 % disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement. The high prices of journals/subscriptions (89 %) and limited library budgets (85 %) were signalled as the most important barriers to accessing scientific publications. More than 1 000 respondents (90 %) supported the idea that publications resulting from publicly funded research should, as a matter of principle, be in open access (OA) mode. An even higher number of respondents (91 %) agreed or agreed strongly that OA increased access to and dissemination of scientific publications. Self-archiving (‘green OA’) or a combination of self-archiving and OA publishing (‘gold OA’) were identified as the preferred ways that public research policy should facilitate in order to increase the number and share of scientific publications available in OA. Respondents were asked, in the case of self-archiving (‘green OA’), what the desirable embargo period is (period of time during which publication is not yet open access): a six-month period was favoured by 56 % of respondents (although 25 % disagree with this option).

As for the question of access to research data, the vast majority of respondents (87 %) disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement that there is no access problem for research data in Europe. The barriers to access research data considered very important or important by respondents were: lack of funding to develop and maintain the necessary infrastructures (80 %); the insufficient credit given to researchers for making research data available (80 %); and insufficient national/regional strategies/policies (79 %). There was strong support (90 % of responses) for research data that is publicly available and results
from public funding to be, as a matter of principle, available for reuse and free of charge on the Internet. Lower support (72 % of responses) was given for data resulting from partly publicly and partly privately funded research.

Responding to the question asking whether preservation of scientific information is at present sufficiently addressed, 64 % of the respondents disagreed or disagreed strongly. The main barriers signalled in this area were: uncertainty as to who is responsible for preserving scientific information (80 %); the quality and interoperability of repositories (78 %); and the lack of a harmonised approach to legal deposit (69 %).”

URL : http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/survey-on-scientific-information-digital-age_en.pdf

Driving on the Green Road of Open Access…

Driving on the Green Road of Open Access: The Green Factor for Successful Institutional Repository :

“In this electronic publishing age, institutions have increasingly recognized that an institutional repository (IR) is an essential infrastructure of scholarly dissemination. An institutional repository is broadly defined as a digital archive of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and students of an institution and accessible to end users both within and outside of the institution. To achieve the success, IR must require to plan, implement, evaluate maintain and sustain green factor on driving of the green road of institutional repository. This paper examines how to harness successful factors to make an institutional repository the central and authoritative source of the research materials output of institutions. There is much discussion and examination of the factors that help to build and sustain a successful repository for the long- term survival, value and usability that depends on numerous criteria have been discussed in the topic.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/16340

Costs risks and benefits in improving access to…

Costs, risks and benefits in improving access to journal articles :

“This paper reports on a study – overseen by representatives of the publishing, library, and research funder communities in the UK – investigating the drivers, costs, and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different but realistic scenarios for moving towards that end over the next five years, including gold and green open access, moves towards national licensing, publisher-led delayed open access, and transactional models. It then compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK. The scenarios, and the modelling on which they are based, amount to a benefit-cost analysis to help in appraising policy options. Our conclusion is that policymakers should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to gold open access, while seeking to ensure that the average level of publication fees does not exceed c.?2.000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rest of the world; and that total payments to publishers from UK universities do not rise as a consequence.”

URL : http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2011/00000024/00000004/art00002?token=004f18031db1d5e76e586546243138425b20632136702a5f705e4e2663433b393f6a333f2566a11

Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be …

Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving :

“Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/

New Gateways to Scholarly Communication …

New Gateways to Scholarly Communication through Open Access :
“The draumatic changes in 21st century has been occurred in the world of publication of scolarly communication.One of the phenomenais of Open Access Publishing Model.The open access movement is increasingly guiding the publishing practices of scholarly research. This paper will look at developments in the open access movement, how open access affects scholarly communication, and what eventual role librarians will play in its progress.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18044/