Trends of the Institutional Repositories on Agricultural Universities…

Trends of the Institutional Repositories on Agricultural Universities in Japan :

This paper discusses the present status of institutional repositories in Agricultural Universities in Japan as found in a survey conducted in January 2010. There are over seventy of agricultural universities in Japan which include the broad areas related to agriculture such as the faculty and graduate schools of Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, Life Science, Fisheries Sciences, Agricultural Resource Sciences, Horticulture, Marine Science and Technology, Textile Science and Technology, and Environmental Studies. The experimental project of institutional repositories was started in 2004 and since then, over 100 universities have joined the National Institute of Informatics Institutional Repositories Program. The contents of institutional repositories consist of journal articles, dissertations, bulletins, meeting articles, documents for meetings, books, technical reports, magazine articles, preprints, learning materials, data/datasets, software and other materials. The number and type of contents of institutional repositories differ between each agricultural university. The future direction of institutional repositories of agricultural universities in Japan is also discussed and concludes the paper.

URL : http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/index.php/aginfo/article/view/202

Open access readership citations a randomized controlled trial…

Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing :

“Does free access to journal articles result in greater diffusion of scientific knowledge? Using a randomized controlled trial of open access publishing, involving 36 participating journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, we report on the effects of free access on article downloads and citations. Articles placed in the open access condition (n=712) received significantly more downloads and reached a broader audience within the first year, yet were cited no more frequently, nor earlier, than subscription-access control articles (n=2533) within 3 yr. These results may be explained by social stratification, a process that concentrates scientific authors at a small number of elite research universities with excellent access to the scientific literature. The real beneficiaries of open access publishing may not be the research community but communities of practice that consume, but rarely contribute to, the corpus of literature.—Davis, P. M. Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing.”

URL : http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2011/03/29/fj.11-183988.abstract

La bibliométrie un nouveau cap pour une archive…

La bibliométrie : un nouveau cap pour une archive institutionnelle :

“En complément de ses objectifs de diffusion et de conservation, Archimer, l’archive institutionnelle de l’Ifremer, offre un ensemble d’outils bibliométriques. Dès l’enregistrement, de nombreux automatismes homogénéisent les informations (noms d’auteurs, organismes, affiliation interne…), gage de qualité des analyses bibliométriques.

Archimer permet le calcul automatique de plusieurs indicateurs définis entre l’Ifremer et ses Ministères de Tutelles dans le cadre de son contrat quadriennal. Il offre également des éléments d’analyses de sa production documentaire (ex : répartition de la valeur des facteurs d’impacts des revues, évolution du nombre de citations des publications, présentation des collaborations internationales…).

La centralisation de cette production documentaire dans Archimer permettra ainsi l’abandon d’une multitude de systèmes actuellement utilisés par les différentes unités de recherche pour assurer ces fonctions. C’est donc un gain de productivité autant que de fiabilité qui est attendu.”

URL : http://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00031/14253/

Discovering the Information Needs of Humanists When Planning…

Discovering the Information Needs of Humanists When Planning an Institutional Repository :

“Through in-person interviews with humanities faculty members, this study examines what information needs are expressed by humanities scholars that an institutional repository (IR) can address. It also asks what concerns humanists have about IRs, and whether there is a repository model other than an institutional one that better suits how they work. Humanists make relatively low use of existing IRs, but this research indicates that an institutional repository can offer services to humanities faculty that are desired by them, especially the digitization, online storage, curation, and sharing of their research materials and publications. If presented in terms that make sense to humanities faculty, and designed consciously with their needs and concerns in mind, an IR can be of real benefit to their teaching, scholarship, collaborations, and publishing.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/seaman/03seaman.html

Beyond the Data Deluge A Research Agenda for…

Beyond the Data Deluge: A Research Agenda for Large-Scale Data Sharing and Reuse :

“There is almost universal agreement that scientific data should be shared for use beyond the purposes for which they were initially collected. Access to data enables system-level science, expands the instruments and products of research to new communities, and advances solutions to complex human problems. While demands for data are not new, the vision of open access to data is increasingly ambitious. The aim is to make data accessible and usable to anyone, anytime, anywhere, and for any purpose. Until recently, scholarly investigations related to data sharing and reuse were sparse. They have become more common as technology and instrumentation have advanced, policies that mandate sharing have been implemented, and research has become more interdisciplinary. Each of these factors has contributed to what is commonly referred to as the “data deluge”. Most discussions about increases in the scale of sharing and reuse have focused on growing amounts of data. There are other issues related to open access to data that also concern scale which have not been as widely discussed: broader participation in data sharing and reuse, increases in the number and types of intermediaries, and more digital data products. The purpose of this paper is to develop a research agenda for scientific data sharing and reuse that considers these three areas.”

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/163

Open Science in Practice: Researcher Perspectives and Participation

We report on an exploratory study consisting of brief case studies in selected disciplines, examining what motivates researchers to work (or want to work) in an open manner with regard to their data, results and protocols, and whether advantages are delivered by working in this way. We review the policy background to open science, and literature on the benefits attributed to open data, considering how these relate to curation and to questions of who participates in science.

The case studies investigate the perceived benefits to researchers, research institutions and funding bodies of utilising open scientific methods, the disincentives and barriers, and the degree to which there is evidence to support these perceptions. Six case study groups were selected in astronomy, bioinformatics, chemistry, epidemiology, language technology and neuroimaging.

The studies identify relevant examples and issues through qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. We provide a typology of degrees of open working across the research lifecycle, and conclude that better support for open working, through guidelines to assist research groups in identifying the value and costs of working more openly, and further research to assess the risks, incentives and shifts in responsibility entailed by opening up the research process are needed.

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/173

Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship …

Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship :

“To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of open access on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three journals at the University of Georgia School of Law and confirm that legal scholarship freely available via open access improves an article’s research impact. Open access legal scholarship – which today appears to account for almost half of the output of law faculties – can expect to receive 50% more citations than non-open access writings of similar age from the same venue.”

URL : http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/64/