Archives des mots-clés : open access

Mobilizing Curriculum Studies in a Virtual World Open…

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Mobilizing Curriculum Studies in a (Virtual) World: Open Access, Edupunks, and the Public Good :

“Despite societal imperatives for equity—whether espoused by nation states or transnational agencies like UNESCO—current models of higher education are unequivocally failing to provide universal access. This paper seeks to explore the (cyber)spaces (un)occupied by higher education, specifically in the area of curriculum studies, arguing that the World Wide Web can be used to effect the democratization of education. Further, it argues for the benefits of Open Access research by means of a small-scale empirical study, the results of which indicate that making research openly accessible does not diminish the impact of research, but rather may actually increase it.”

URL : http://ojs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/cje-rce/article/view/1149

Federated Search Service for OAI-compliant, Open-Access Repositories in India

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Many of the research institutions and universities across the world are facilitating open-access (OA) to their intellectual outputs through their respective OA institutional repositories (IRs) or through the centralized subject-based repositories. The registry of open access repositories (ROAR) lists more than 2850 such repositories across the world. The awareness about the benefits of OA to scholarly literature and OA publishing is picking up in India, too. As per the ROAR statistics, to date, there are more than 90 OA repositories in the country. India is doing particularly well in publishing open-access journals (OAJ). As per the directory of open-access journals (DOAJ), to date, India with 390 OAJs, is ranked 5th in the world in terms of numbers of OAJs being published.

Much of the research done in India is reported in the journals published from India. These journals have limited readership and many of them are not being indexed by Web of Science, Scopus or other leading international abstracting and indexing databases. Consequently, research done in the country gets hidden not only from the fellow countrymen, but also from the international community. This situation can be easily overcome if all the researchers facilitate OA to their publications.

One of the easiest ways to facilitate OA to scientific literature is through the institutional repositories. If every research institution and university in India set up an open-access IR and ensure that copies of the final accepted versions of all the research publications are uploaded in the IRs, then the research done in India will get far better visibility. The federation of metadata from all the distributed, interoperable OA repositories in the country will serve as a window to the research done across the country.

Federation of metadata from the distributed OAI-compliant repositories can be easily achieved by setting up harvesting software like the PKP Harvester. In this paper, we share our experience in setting up a prototype metadata harvesting service using the PKP harvesting software for the OAI-compliant repositories in India.

URL : http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/43176/

Umgang mit Open Access Publikationsgebühren – die Situation…

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Umgang mit Open-Access-Publikationsgebühren – die Situation in Deutschland in 2010 :

“Mit der dynamischen Entwicklung von Open Access gewinnt die Diskussion um den Umgang mit Gebühren, die für Open-Access-Publikationen anfallen, an Bedeutung. Die deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen widmen sich dieser Diskussion, seit 2008 auch im Rahmen der Schwerpunktinitiative „Digitale Information“. Im Jahr 2010 wurde in einer Umfrage unter Hochschulen und außeruniversitären Forschungsinstitutionen die Praxis im Umgang mit diesen Publikationsgebühren unter die Lupe genommen. Dabei wurde deutlich, dass sich die Wissenschaftsorganisationen des Themas annehmen und bestrebt sind, Mechanismen zu entwickeln, um ihren Angehörigen die Veröffentlichung in Open-Access-Zeitschriften, die sich durch Publikationsgebühren finanzieren, unkompliziert zu ermöglichen. Darüber hinaus zeigt der Blick auf die Open-Access-Strategien der Organisationen, dass diese die Transformation von einem subskriptionsbasierten hin zu einem Open-Access-basierten Publikationssystem vorantreiben. Die Ergebnisse der Umfrage machen jedoch auch die Herausforderungen deutlich. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die Landschaft der Open-Access-Zeitschriften, beschreibt die Aktivitäten und Entwicklungen in den Wissenschaftsorganisationen und stellt die Ergebnisse der Erhebung unter wissenschaftlichen Institutionen in Deutschland vor.”

“Along with the dynamic development of open access, the question of how to handle open access publication charges is increasingly discussed. German research organisations have been involved in this discussion as part of their activities within the Priority Initiative “Digital Information” of the “Alliance of German Science Organisations” since 2008. In 2010 they commissioned a survey among universities and research institutions, focusing on their practice in dealing with publication charges. As a result, it became clear that these organisations are aware of the issue. For their members, they seek to develop mechanisms to facilitate publishing in author fee-based open access journals. In general, an overview of the open access strategies of the organisations shows an ongoing transformation process from a subscription-based towards an open access publishing system. However, the survey results also point to challenges. The article gives an overview of open-access related activities and developments in German research organisations and presents the results of the survey on handling of open access publication charges among academic institutions in Germany.”

URL : http://www.egms.de/static/en/journals/mbi/2012-12/mbi000240.shtml

Open Access Status of Journal Articles from ERC…

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Open Access Status of Journal Articles from ERC Funded Projects :

“The main objective of this analysis is to estimate the extent to which journal articles from ERC funded projects are available in an open access.

A list of 630 journal articles reported in 88 mid-term project reports formed the basis of this analysis. A web-based search to find openly accessible versions of these articles was undertaken from a computer network with no subscription linked to it. Articles were classified as available in open access if the web-based search yielded a copy of the journal article, an author personal copy or a pre-print.

The results show that 62 % of journal articles from ERC funded projects are available in open access. The share of articles in open access varies across research domains. It is close to 70 % in Life Sciences, 65 % in Physical Sciences and Engineering and nearer 50 % in Social Sciences and Humanities. A comparison with the data on open access status provided by the grant holders in their mid-term reports shows that self-reporting leads to an underestimation of the proportion of open access articles.

The potential policy implications of the results are highlighted in the last section of the report. They include among others, the idea of using soft measures to further encourage open access and seeking the cooperation of the libraries of organisations hosting ERC grantees to ensure that the ERC’s Open Access policy is well aligned with institutional policies and practices and does not place an undue burden on researchers.”

URL : http://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/open_access_study_status_journal_articles_ERC_funded_projects.pdf

Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

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Authors : Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon

Background

In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk.

Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model.

Methods

The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model.

Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich’s periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal.

A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data.

Results

Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996.

OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/73

Software systems for increasing availability of scientific research…

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Software systems for increasing availability of scientific-research outputs :

“This paper describes the basic approaches for publishing scientic-research outputs using modern ICT technologies and web applications such as institutional repositories, the NDLTD, and CRIS. Also, the CRIS which has been developed at the University of Novi Sad is described. That system unies the mentioned approaches and it is compatible with all of them.”

URL : http://www.dmi.rs/NSJOM/Papers/42_1/NSJOM_42_1_037_048.pdf