Open Access E-Books in the Field of Health Sciences: A Scientometric Study

Authors : Fayaz Ahmad Loan, Ufaira Yaseen Shah

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for open access e-books. It provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed e-books published under an open access business model.

The present study aims to assess the scientometric trends of the open access e-books in the field of the Health Sciences available through the Directory of Open Access Books. In order to fulfil the set objectives, the relevant details of the Health Sciences e-books were collected.

The results reveal that 916 e-books are available in the field of the Health Sciences through the Directory of Open Access. The highest number of e-books is contributed in General Medicine (40.61%, 372) and in the English language (83.84%, 768). These e-books also contain current information as the majority (88.32%, 809) of these are published from 2011 onwards by the reputed publishers like Frontiers Media, SciELO, Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, and Oxford University Press etc.

The Directory of Open Access Books was selected as a source for data collection whereas the Health Sciences was selected as the field of study. Therefore, the finding can’t be generalised across directories and subjects.

URL : Open Access E-Books in the Field of Health Sciences: A Scientometric Study

Alternative location : https://ijism.ricest.ac.ir/index.php/ijism/article/view/1272

Les Sciences Humaines et Sociales, moteurs de l’accès ouvert : la preuve par Cybergeo

Auteurs/Authors : Christine Kosmopoulos, Denise Pumain

En mai 2016 Cybergeo : Revue européenne de géographie fêtait à l’Auditorium Marie Curie (CNRS, Paris) ses 20 années d’existence. Première revue nativement numérique en sciences sociales, Cybergeo s’inscrit en pionnière de la diffusion scientifique en libre accès.

Forte de ses 20 ans d’expérience, elle apporte la preuve qu’un modèle alternatif de diffusion de l’information scientifique est possible, ouvert et contrôlé par la communauté scientifique mondiale. Elle témoigne également du très fort impact de l’accès ouvert en sciences lorsqu’il s’accompagne d’une attention soutenue à l’innovation.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/cybergeo/29209

Open Education Science

Authors : Tim van der Zee, Justin Reich

Scientific progress is built on research that is reliable, accurate, and verifiable. The methods and evidentiary reasoning that underlie scientific claims must be available for scrutiny.

Like other fields, the education sciences suffer from problems such as failure to replicate, validity and generalization issues, publication bias, and high costs of access to publications—all of which are symptoms of a nontransparent approach to research. Each aspect of the scientific cycle—research design, data collection, analysis, and publication—can and should be made more transparent and accessible.

Open Education Science is a set of practices designed to increase the transparency of evidentiary reasoning and access to scientific research in a domain characterized by diverse disciplinary traditions and a commitment to impact in policy and practice.

Transparency and accessibility are functional imperatives that come with many benefits for the individual researcher, scientific community, and society at large—Open Education Science is the way forward.

URL : Open Education Science

Alternative location : http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2332858418787466

Challenges and opportunities in the evolving digital preservation landscape: reflections from Portico

Authors: Kate Wittenberg, Sarah Glasser, Amy Kirchhoff, Sheila Morrissey, Stephanie Orphan

There has been tremendous growth in the amount of digital content created by libraries, publishers, cultural institutions and the general public. While there are great benefits to having content available in digital form, digital objects can be extremely short-lived unless proper attention is paid to preservation.

Reflecting on our experience with the digital preservation service Portico, we provide background on Portico’s history and evolving practice of sustainable preservation of the digital artifacts of scholarly communications.

We also provide an overview of the digital preservation landscape as we see it now, with some thoughts on current requirements for preservation, and thoughts on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

URL : Challenges and opportunities in the evolving digital preservation landscape: reflections from Portico

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.421

Health science libraries in Sweden: new directions, expanding roles

Authors : Lotta Haglund, Annikki Roos, Petra Wallgren-Björk

Librarians in Sweden are facing huge challenges in meeting the demands of their organisations and users. This article looks at four key areas: coping with open science/open access initiatives; increasing demands from researchers for support doing systematic reviews; understanding user experiences in Swedish health science libraries; and the consequences of expanding roles for recruitment and continuing professional development.

With regard to changing roles, there is an increasing shift from the generalist towards the expert role. The authors raise the issue as to how to prepare those new to the profession to the changing environment of health science libraries.

URL : Health science libraries in Sweden: new directions, expanding roles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12229

Understanding Open Knowledge in China: A Chinese Approach to Openness?

Authors: Lucy Montgomery, Xiang Ren

This paper examines the development of open knowledge in China through two case studies: the development of Chinese open access (OA) journals, and national-level OA repositories.

Open access and open knowledge are emerging as a site of both grass-roots activism, and top-down intervention in the practices of scholarship and scholarly publishing in China. Although the language, vision and strategies of the global open knowledge movement are undoubtedly present, so too are the messy realities of open access and open knowledge innovation in a local context.

In attempting to position open access developments in China within a diverse and contested global landscape of open knowledge innovation we draw on Moore’s (2017) conception of open access as a boundary object: an object that is understood differently within individual communities but which maintains enough structure to be understood between communities (Moore 2017; Star and Griesemer 1989).

Viewed as a boundary object, the concept of open knowledge is making it possible for China to engage with the global open knowledge movement, as a beneficiary of the innovation of others, and as an open knowledge innovator in its own right.

URL : Understanding Open Knowledge in China: A Chinese Approach to Openness?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/csci.106

Disentangling Gold Open Access

Authors : Daniel Torres-Salinas, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Henk F. Moed

This chapter focuses on the analysis of current publication trends in gold Open Access (OA). The purpose of the chapter is to develop a full understanding on country patterns, OA journals characteristics and citation differences between gold OA and non-gold OA publications.

For this, we will first review current literature regarding Open Access and its relation with its so-called citation advantage. Starting with a chronological perspective we will describe its development, how different countries are promoting OA publishing, and its effects on the journal publishing industry.

We will deepen the analysis by investigating the research output produced by different units of analysis. First, we will focus on the production of countries with a special emphasis on citation and disciplinary differences. A point of interest will be identification of national idiosyncrasies and the relation between OA publication and research of local interest.

This will lead to our second unit of analysis, OA journals indexed in Web of Science. Here we will deepen on journals characteristics and publisher types to clearly identify factors which may affect citation differences between OA and traditional journals which may not necessarily be derived from the OA factor.

Gold OA publishing is being encouraged in many countries as opposed to Green OA. This chapter aims at fully understanding how it affects researchers’ publication patterns and whether it ensures an alleged citation advantage as opposed to non-gold OA publications.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04535