Archives des mots-clés : open access

Open data to evaluate academic researchers: an experiment with the Italian Scientific Habilitation

Posté le par

Authors : Angelo Di Iorio, Silvio Peroni, Francesco Poggi

The need for scholarly open data is ever increasing. While there are large repositories of open access articles and free publication indexes, there are still a few examples of free citation networks and their coverage is partial.

One of the results is that most of the evaluation processes based on citation counts rely on commercial citation databases. Things are changing under the pressure of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), whose goal is to campaign for scholarly publishers to make their citations as totally open.

This paper investigates the growth of open citations with an experiment on the Italian Scientific Habilitation, the National process for University Professor qualification which instead uses data from commercial indexes.

We simulated the procedure by only using open data and explored similarities and differences with the official results. The outcomes of the experiment show that the amount of open citation data currently available is not yet enough for obtaining similar results.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03287

Improving the discoverability and web impact of open repositories: techniques and evaluation

Posté le par

Author : George Macgregor

In this contribution we experiment with a suite of repository adjustments and improvements performed on Strathprints, the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, institutional repository powered by EPrints 3.3.13.

These adjustments were designed to support improved repository web visibility and user engagement, thereby improving usage. Although the experiments were performed on EPrints it is thought that most of the adopted improvements are equally applicable to any other repository platform.

Following preliminary results reported elsewhere, and using Strathprints as a case study, this paper outlines the approaches implemented, reports on comparative search traffic data and usage metrics, and delivers conclusions on the efficacy of the techniques implemented.

The evaluation provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to technical aspects of a repository can result in significant improvements to repository visibility, resulting in a greater web impact and consequent increases in content usage.

COUNTER usage grew by 33% and traffic to Strathprints from Google and Google Scholar was found to increase by 63% and 99% respectively. Other insights from the evaluation are also explored.

The results are likely to positively inform the work of repository practitioners and open scientists.

URL : https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/14180

Few Open Access Journals are Plan S Compliant

Posté le par

Authors : Jan Erik Frantsvåg, Tormod Eismann Strømme

Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S compliant.

We suspected this was not so, and set out to explore this using DOAJ’s journal metadata. We conclude that an overwhelmingly large majority of open access journals are not Plan S compliant, and that it is small HSS publishers not charging APCs that are least compliant and will face major challenges with becoming compliant.

Plan S need to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC-based journals.

URL : Few Open Access Journals are Plan S Compliant

Alternative location : https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201901.0165/v3

Library publisher resources: Making publishing approachable, sustainable, and values-driven

Posté le par

Authors : Jenny Hoops, Sarah Hare

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) defines library publishing as the “creation, dissemination, and curation of scholarly, creative, and/or educational works” by college and university libraries.

While providing a publishing platform, hosting, and services for editorial teams is key to any library publishing initiative, library publishing is also centered on furthering core library values.

Thus library publishing activities are mission-driven, centered on education, and focused on finding and promoting sustainable approaches to open access publishing and building cooperative open infrastructure.

URL : Library publisher resources: Making publishing approachable, sustainable, and values-driven

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.80.2.74

The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega journal

Posté le par

Authors : Barbara McGillivray, Mathias Astell

How does usage of an article relate to the number of citations it accrues? Does the timeframe in which an article is used (and how much that article is used) have an effect on when and how much that article is cited?

What role does an article’s subject area play in the relationship between usage and citations? This paper aims to answer these questions through an observational study of usage and citation data collected about a multidisciplinary, open access mega journal, Scientific Reports.

We find that while the direct correlation between usage and citations is only moderate at best, the relationship between how early and how much an article is used and how early it is cited is much clearer. What is more, we find that when an article is cited earlier it is also cited more often, leading to the assertion that if an article is more highly accessed early on, it is more likely to be cited earlier and more often.

As Scientific Reports is a multidisciplinary journal covering all natural and clinical sciences, this study was also able to look at the differences across subject areas and found some interesting variations when comparing the major subject areas covered by the journal (i.e. biological, Earth, physical and health sciences).

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01333

Open-access policy and data-sharing practice in UK academia

Posté le par

Author : Yimei Zhu

Data sharing can be defined as the release of research data that can be used by others. With the recent open-science movement, there has been a call for free access to data, tools and methods in academia. In recent years, subject-based and institutional repositories and data centres have emerged along with online publishing.

Many scientific records, including published articles and data, have been made available via new platforms. In the United Kingdom, most major research funders had a data policy and require researchers to include a ‘data-sharing plan’ when applying for funding.

However, there are a number of barriers to the full-scale adoption of data sharing. Those barriers are not only technical, but also psychological and social. A survey was conducted with over 1800 UK-based academics to explore the extent of support of data sharing and the characteristics and factors associated with data-sharing practice.

It found that while most academics recognised the importance of sharing research data, most of them had never shared or reused research data. There were differences in the extent of data sharing between different gender, academic disciplines, age and seniority.

It also found that the awareness of Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Open-Access (OA) policy, experience of Gold and Green OA publishing, attitudes towards the importance of data sharing and experience of using secondary data were associated with the practice of data sharing.

A small group of researchers used social media such as Twitter, blogs and Facebook to promote the research data they had shared online. Our findings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of open science and offer recommendations to academic institutions, journals and funding agencies.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551518823174

La coopération entre l’archive ouverte HAL AMU et les Presses universitaires de Provence : une dynamique au service de la science ouverte et de la bibliodiversité

Posté le par

Auteurs/Authors : Isabelle Gras, Charles Zaremba

Cette collaboration s’inscrit dans le cadre de la politique soutenue par la gouvernance d’AMU en faveur de l’open access, qui a notamment permis le déploiement de l’archive ouverte institutionnelle HAL AMU (Bertin, 2014).

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/4982