Catégories
status

The Impact of Open Access Contributions Developed and…

The Impact of Open Access Contributions: Developed and Developing World Perspectives :

« The study explores the research impact of ‘Open Access research articles’ across the globe with a view to test the hypothesis that “OA research contributions emanating from developing countries receive equal citations (subsequently resultant research impact) as those from the developed world”. The study covers 5639 research articles from 50 Open Access DOAJ based Medical Sciences journals covering the period from 2005 to 2006. The research impact of OA research publications measured by the citation counts varies from journal to journal and from country to country. Statistically significant difference is noted between the research impact of the developed and the developing world for OA research articles. The research articles from the developed countries receive higher number of citations (subsequently resultant research impact) compared to those of the developing world. The study may help and pave way for framing policies and strategies to increase the impact of research in the developing world. »

URL : http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?107_elpub2011

Catégories
status

Characteristics of Education Doctoral Dissertation References An Inter…

Characteristics of Education Doctoral Dissertation References: An Inter-Institutional Analysis of Review of Literature Citations :

« This study had two purposes: to examine the expertise of doctoral students in their use of the scholarly literature and to investigate the use of citation analysis as a tool for collection development. Analysis of 1,842 coded citations gleaned from 30 education dissertations awarded in 2000 from 3 institutions in the United States revealed that journal articles, at 45%, were cited most frequently, followed by monographs (33.9%) and « other » (18.3%), with magazines and Web sites contributing less than 2% each of the total material types cited. The study examined 858 journal and magazine citations, which were found in 239 unique titles. A relatively small number of journals contained a high percentage of the references found in the dissertations analyzed. Based on a design by D. Kohl and L. Wilson (1986), dissertation citations were also scored for scholarliness, currency, and appropriateness of format, and scores on the three criteria were averaged to arrive at a quality rating. Results of interinstitutional comparisons revealed a significant amount of variation and were considered in conjunction with institutional characteristics and published criteria for quality bibliographies. The data suggest that the assumption of doctoral student expertise in their use of the scholarly literature may be overstated and should be examined in relation to their preparation for professional status. For purposes of developing a library’s research collection, a core list of titles, generated on the basis of multiple, rather than single, institutional analysis is indicated. (Contains 8 figures, 11 tables, and 28 references.) »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15870

Catégories
status

Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing Sources of…

Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing: Sources of Funding and Factors Influencing Choice of Journal :

« Open access (OA) journals make their full text content available for free on the Web and use other means than subscriptions or access charges for funding the publication process. Publication fees or article processing charges (APC)s have become the predominant means for funding professional OA publishing. We surveyed 1,038 authors from seven discipline categories who recently published articles in 74 OA journals that charge APCs. Authors were asked about the source of funding for the APC, factors influencing their choice of a journal and past history publishing in OA and subscription journals. Additional information about the journal and the authors’ country were obtained from the journal websites. A total of 429 (41%) authors completed the survey. There were large differences in the source of funding among disciplines. Journals with impact factors charged higher APCs as did journals from disciplines where grant funding is plentiful. Topical fit, quality, and speed of publication where the most important factors in the authors’ choice of a journal. Open accessibility was less important but a significant factor for many authors in their choice of a journal to publish. These findings are consistent with other research on OA publishing and suggest, that if OA journals meet normal quality standards, authors and their employers and funders are willing to pay reasonable APCs, the acceptable levels of which are dependent on the field of science and the quality of the journal in question. »

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc/

Catégories
status

Recruiting Content for the Institutional Repository The Barriers…

Recruiting Content for the Institutional Repository: The Barriers Exceed the Benefits :

« Focus groups conducted at Carnegie Mellon reveal that what motivates many faculty to self-archive on a website or disciplinary repository will not motivate them to deposit their work in the institutional repository. Recruiting a critical mass of content for the institutional repository is contingent on increasing awareness, aligning deposit with existing workflows, and providing value-added services that meet needs not currently being met by other tools. Faculty share concerns about quality and the payoff for time invested in publishing and disseminating their work, but disagree about metrics for assessing quality, the merit of disseminating work prior to peer review, and the importance of complying with publisher policies on open access. Bridging the differences among disciplinary cultures and belief systems presents a significant challenge to marketing the institutional repository and developing coherent guidelines for deposit. »

URL : http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/2068

Catégories
EN

Loading Brief MARC Records for Open-Access Books in an Academic Library Online Catalog

Mbooks are open-access, digitized books freely available on the Internet. This article describes the Auraria Library’s experience of loading brief MARC records for Mbooks into its online public access catalog and looks at some of the issues that arose from the record-loading project.

Despite the low quality of the records, librarians in Auraria Library thought that loading them into the catalog was advantageous because of the rich content in the collection, and because many of the records could be improved using the global update functionality in the catalog.

Making the records available through the catalog, as opposed to merely linking to the entire collection from the Library’s Web page, was considered to be valuable because of the aggregation a catalog provides, and because the Mbooks collection helped fill gaps in the Library’s physical collections.

As more open-access, digitized books become available, libraries will need to plan and manage how best to provide access to them.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15841

Catégories
status

Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works …

Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works :

« In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds. »

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1647586

Catégories
status

The LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access The…

The LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access :

« The LERU Roadmap towards Open Access represents a conscious decision by the League of European Research Universities to investigate new models for scholarly communication and the dissemination of research outputs emanating from LERU universities. »

URL : http://www.leru.org/files/publications/LERU_AP8_Open_Access.pdf