Archives des mots-clés : open access

From Concerned to Cautiously Optimistic: Assessing Faculty Perceptions and Knowledge of Open Access in a Campus-Wide Study

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“INTRODUCTION : Though open access publishing has many advantages for scholars, very few are interested in learning about and pursuing open access publishing. This article discusses the results of a survey administered to faculty across disciplines at a single university to assess their perceptions, knowledge, and perceived knowledge of open access publishing and related topics.

METHODS : Anonymous electronic survey of 240 faculty members with a response rate of 23%.

RESULTS : Although many respondents considered themselves familiar with open access, very few had practical knowledge of open access publishing. Faculty were uncertain about the value and reliability of open access publishing and were particularly concerned about its applicability in the promotion and tenure process.

CONCLUSION:  Misinformation, lack of motivation, and fear appear to be the main causes of negative perceptions of open access among faculty surveyed. Though science faculty had the highest overall perceived knowledge of open access, they were also most likely to view open access negatively and to believe that the current publishing model works well. Education faculty were more likely to think highly of open access publishing, in part due to a lack of funding for that discipline. Librarians and information professionals should take a tailored approach to discussing open access with faculty by working within the knowledge of the discipline if possible.”

URL : From Concerned to Cautiously Optimistic: Assessing Faculty Perceptions and Knowledge of Open Access in a Campus-Wide Study

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1212

The public impact of Latin America’s approach to open access

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“This study explores the extent to which research published in Latin America—where the vast majority of which is made freely available to the public—has an impact and reach beyond the academic community. It addresses the ways in which the study of research impact is moving beyond the counting citations, which has dominated bibliometrics for well over the last 50 years. As more of the world’s research is made freely available to the public, there is an increasing probability that the impact and reach of research extends beyond the confines of academia.

To establish the current extent of public access, this study explores who the users of Latin American research are, as well as their motivations for accessing the work by using a series of simple pop-up surveys, which were displayed to users of the two largest scholarly journal portals in Latin America.

The results, after thousands of responses, indicate that traditional scholarly use makes up only a quarter of the total use in Latin America. The majority of use is from non-scholar communities, namely students (around 50% of the total use) and from individuals interested for professional or personal reasons (collectively around 20% of the total use). By linking the survey responses to the articles being read, it was also possible to identify points of convergence and divergence in student, faculty, and public interest groups.

Finally, this study employed methods from a new field of inquiry, altmetrics, in an attempt to capture engagement with research on the social Web. The success of such methods for the Latin American case were limited due to low coverage levels, but the research nevertheless contributes to the understanding of nascent field of altmetrics more broadly. The study concludes with a discussion of the conceptual, political, curricular, and methodological implications of this new approach to scientific communication.”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AlperinDissertationFinalPublicImpact-augmented.pdf

Related URL : http://purl.stanford.edu/jr256tk1194

Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science

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Authors : Misha Teplitskiy, Grace Lu, Eamon Duede

With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. This article approaches such a comparison through academic references made within the worlds 50 largest Wikipedias.

Previous studies have raised concerns that Wikipedia editors may simply use the most easily accessible academic sources rather than sources of the highest academic status. We test this claim by identifying the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and modeling whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia.

We find that, controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals. Moreover, in most of the worlds Wikipedias a journals high status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both greatly increase the probability of referencing.

Among the implications of this study is that the chief effect of open access policies may be to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad public audience.

URL : Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science

Alternative location : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23687/full

Aligning Open Access Publication with the Research and Teaching Missions of the Public University: The Case of the Lethbridge Journal Incubator (If ‘if’s and ‘and’s were pots and pans)

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“The Lethbridge Journal Incubator is a joint project of the University of Lethbridge Library, School of Graduate Studies, and Faculty of Arts and Science. Its goal is to address the issue of the sustainability of gold open access journals by aligning the publication process with the educational and research missions of the public University. In this way, the open access publication, which is more commonly understood as a cost center that draws resources away from a host university’s core missions, is transformed into a sustainable, high-impact resource that improves retention and recruitment. It does this by providing graduate students with early experience with scholarly publishing (a proven contributor to in- and post-program student satisfaction and career success), highly-sought after research and technical skills, and project management experience.

This article provides a background to the problem of financing gold open access publication and reports on the experience of the researchers responsible for establishing the incubator as it leaves its experimental phase and becomes a center of the University.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.309

The Changing Publication Practices in Academia: Inherent Uses and Issues in Open Access and Online Publishing and the Rise of Fraudulent Publications

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“Open access and online publishing present significant changes to the Australian higher education sector in a climate demanding increasing research outputs from academic staff. Today’s researchers struggle to discern credible journals from a new wave of ‘low credibility,’ counterfeit, and predatory journals. A New York Times article on the issue resulted in hundreds of anonymous posts, having a whistleblower effect. An analysis of reader posts, examined in this paper, demonstrated that fear and cynicism were dominant, and that unscrupulous publishing practices were often rewarded.

A lack of quality control measures to assist researchers to choose reputable journals and avoid fraudulent ones is becoming evident as universities’ funding and workforce development become increasingly dependent on research outputs. Online publishing is also redefining traditional notions of academic prestige. Adapting to the twenty-first century online publishing landscape requires the higher education sector to meet these challenges with a combination of academic rigour and innovative tools that support researchers, so as to maintain quality and integrity within changing academic publishing practice.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.308

Donations as a Source of Income for Open Access Journals: An Option To Consider?

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“Online open access journals allow readers to view scholarly articles without a subscription or other payment barrier. However, publishing costs must still be covered. Therefore, many of these publications rely on support from a variety of sources. One source of funds not commonly discussed is donations from readers.

This study investigated the prevalence of this practice and sought to learn about the motivation of journal editors to solicit donations, and also to gather input on the effectiveness of this strategy. Results show that very few open access journals solicit donations from readers, and for those that do, donations represent only a very small portion of all support received.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.307

The Users of Library Publishing Services: Readers and Access Beyond Open

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“This article analyzes the discourse of library publishing, examining how the needs of library users have (or haven’t) been framed as core concerns in key collaborative documents from the 2007 Ithaka Report to the 2014 Library Publishing Directory. Access issues, including not only open access but format options, usability, accessibility, and general user experience, have most often been absent or sidelined in this discourse. Even open access has been less central than one might expect. Moreover, even in later documents where it is more commonly trumpeted as a value of libraries, open access is often not presented as a service to readers but to authors.

For these reasons, I argue the promotion of library publishing has missed a key opportunity to promote such services as offering a holistic approach that incorporates the needs of both authors and readers by drawing on the history of user studies in libraries. The absence of the user as information seeker, and especially reader, in this discourse should concern libraries lest library publishing services replicate existing access problems with commercial publishers beyond the question of openness. The opportunity exists for organizations such as the Library Publishing Coalition to foster discussion of reader needs for digital formats and, where feasible, promote a set of best practices.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.303