Can we use altmetrics at the institutional level? A case study analysing the coverage by research areas of four Spanish universities

Authors : Daniel Torres-Salinas, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Evaristo Jiménez-Contreras

Social media based indicators or altmetrics have been under scrutiny for the last seven years. Their promise as alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact is still far from becoming a reality.

Up to now, most studies have focused on the understanding of the nature and relation of altmetric indicators with citation data. Few papers have analysed research profiles based on altmetric data.

Most of these have related to researcher profiles and the expansion of these tools among researchers. This paper aims at exploring the coverage of the Altmetric.com database and its potential use in order to show universities’ research profiles in relationship with other databases.

We analyse a sample of four different Spanish universities.First, we observe a low coverage of altmetric indicators with only 36 percent of all documents retrieved from the Web of Science having an ‘altmetric’ score.Second, we observe that for the four universities analysed, the area of Science shows higher ‘altmetric’ scores that the rest of the research areas.

Finally, considering the low coverage of altmetric data at the institutional level, it could be interesting for research policy makers to consider the development of guidelines and best practices guides to ensure that researchers disseminate adequately their research findings through social media.

URL : Can we use altmetrics at the institutional level? A case study analysing the coverage by research areas of four Spanish universities

Alternative location : https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00232

Archives Ouvertes de la Connaissance. Valoriser et diffuser les données de recherche

Projet commun de l’Université de Strasbourg, l’Université de Haute-Alsace, l’Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) et la Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire (BNU) de Strasbourg, les Archives Ouvertes de la Connaissance offriront aux (enseignants)-chercheurs et doctorants un service pour la valorisation de leurs données de recherche.

Ce mémoire propose, dans un premier temps, de replacer le projet dans le contexte des archives institutionnelles françaises et européennes, afin d’en dégager les spécificités ; dans un second temps, sont présentés les enjeux et les modalités de mise en forme et de diffusion des données de recherche, que produisent les établissements alsaciens partenaires et qui seront liées à l’archive ouverte.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/66039-archives-ouvertes-de-la-connaissance-valoriser-et-diffuser-les-donnees-de-recherche.pdf

Alternative location : http://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/66039-archives-ouvertes-de-la-connaissance-valoriser-et-diffuser-les-donnees-de-recherche

Pour qui écrivons-nous ?

Cet article revient sur 10 ans de discussions en France autour de l’accès ouvert aux publications scientifiques, en poursuivant deux objectifs. D’une part, il tente de clarifier certains termes du débat. Il s’agit en particulier de distinguer les nombreuses manières de mettre un article en ligne (par l’auteur ou par la revue, sur un site personnel, dans une archive ouverte ou sur un portail de revues, etc.).

Il s’agit également d’envisager une variété de modèles économiques possibles. L’article distingue notamment, outre le modèle classique de l’abonnement, celui de l’auteur-payeur et celui du freemium (financement volontaire par certaines institutions).

D’autre part, l’auteure prend position en faveur de l’accès ouvert. Elle souligne qu’il est déjà largement pratiqué en France, tandis que les revues de bien d’autres pays ne deviennent jamais, même plusieurs années après parution, librement accessibles.

Elle insiste enfin sur l’enjeu que représente pour les auteur.e.s comme pour les revues de sciences humaines et sociales l’ouverture d’un lectorat immensément plus large que celui des pairs.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01309291

Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories

The amount of open access content stored in repositories has increased dramatically, which has created new technical and organisational challenges for bringing this content together. The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) project has been dealing with these challenges by aggregating and enriching content from hundreds of open access repositories, increasing the discoverability and reusability of millions of open access manuscripts.

As repository managers and library directors often wish to know the details of the content harvested from their repositories and keep a certain level of control over it, CORE is now facing the challenge of how to enable content providers to manage their content in the aggregation and control the harvesting process. In order to improve the quality and transparency of the aggregation process and create a two-way collaboration between the CORE project and the content providers, we propose the CORE Dashboard.

URL : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10138/

Managing open access with EPrints software: a case study

Recent additional open access (OA) requirements for publications by authors at UK higher education institutions require amendments to support mechanisms. These additional requirements arose primarily from the Research Councils UK Open Access Policy, applicable from April 2013, and the new OA policy for Research Excellence Framework  eligibility published in March 2014 and applicable from April 2016.

Further provision also had to be made for compliance with the UK Charities Open Access Fund, the European Union, other funder policies, and internal reporting requirements.

In response, the University of Glasgow has enhanced its OA processes and systems. This case study charts our journey towards managing OA via our EPrints repository. The aim was to consolidate and manage OA information in one central place to increase efficiency of recording, tracking and reporting. We are delighted that considerable time savings and reduction in errors have been achieved by dispensing with spreadsheets to record decisions about OA.

URL : Managing open access with EPrints software: a case study

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.277

Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics

In high energy physics scholarly papers circulate primarily through online preprint archives based on a centralized repository, arXiv.org, that physicists simply refer to as ‘the archive.’ This is not a tool for preservation and memory, but rather a space of flows where written objects are detected and then disappear, and their authors made available for scrutiny.

In this work I analyse the reading and publishing practices of two subsets of particle physicists, theorists and experimentalists. In order to be recognized as legitimate and productive members of their community, physicists need to abide by the temporalities and authorial practices structured by the archive. Theorists live in a state of accelerated time that shapes their reading and publishing practices around a 24 hour cycle.

Experimentalists resolve to tactics that allow them to circumvent the slowed-down time and invisibility they experience as members of large collaborations. As digital archives for the exchange of preprint articles emerge in other scientific fields, physics could help shed light on general transformations of contemporary scholarly communication systems.

URL : Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics

Alternative location : http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.08539