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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

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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

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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

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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/

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A report of the AAUP Task Force on…

A report of the AAUP Task Force on Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing :

« Within the scholarly communications ecosystem, scholarly publishers are a keystone species. University presses—as well as academic societies, research institutions, and other scholarly publishers—strive to fulfill our mission of « making public the fruits of scholarly research » as effectively as possible within that ecosystem. While that mission has remained constant, in recent years the landscape in which we carry out this mission has altered dramatically.

The expertise residing within university presses can help the scholarly enterprise prosper in both influence and impact as it moves ever more fully digital. However, the simple product-sales models of the twentieth century, devised when information was scarce and expensive, are clearly inappropriate for the twenty-first century scholarly ecosystem.

This report a) identifies elements of the current scholarly publishing systems that are worth protecting and retaining throughout this and future periods of transition; b) explores business models of existing projects which hold promise; c) outlines the characteristics of effective business models; d) addresses the challenges of the transitional period we are entering; and e) arrives at recommendations that might allow us to sustain high-quality scholarship at a time when the fundamental expectations of publishing are changing.

URL : http://aaupnet.org/resources/reports/business_models/

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Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles

Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant show how file format profiles, the starting point for preservation plans and actions, can also be used to reveal the fingerprints of emerging types of institutional repositories.

URL : http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/hitchcock-tarrant/

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Results of the SOAP Survey: EIFL Partner…

Results of the SOAP Survey: EIFL Partner Countries :

« The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has run a large-scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open access publishing. In the SOAP Symposium on 13 January 2011 in Berlin, the results of the SOAP Survey were made publicly available. « Highlights from the SOAP project survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing » article is available in arXiv presenting preliminary analysis of the survey responses. To allow a maximal re-use of the information collected by this survey, the data were released under a CC0 waiver, so to allow libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open access publishing.

SURFfoundation made the first overview of the SOAP survey results, tailored to the situation in the Netherlands. Marnix van Berchum and Annemiek van der Kuil selected the questions and the selection should be considered as a first attempt to analyse the SOAP data for the Dutch situation. Further analysis could include different questions, and comparisons with other countries. SURFfoundation also invited others to make use of the SOAP data, to make their own analyses.

We followed the approach of the SURFfoundation and made the first overview of the SOAP survey results, tailored to the situation in 11 EIFL partner countries: Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine. »

URL : http://www.eifl.net/news/results-soap-survey-eifl-partner-countries