Étiquette : open access

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Impact of Institutional Repositories’ on Scholarly Practices of Scientists

Authors : Prachi Shukla, Naved Ahmad

Institutional Repositories (IRs) are established mainly to provide access to information resources which are otherwise not easily accessible in digital format. Many institutions across the world and particularly in India have successfully developed their own IRs but have not attempted to assess their importance and impact on the Users.

This study conveys the findings of the survey conducted at research centric CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) laboratories of India to determine the scientists’ and research scholars’ preference for publishing their research materials; to measure the impact of IRs on their scholarly practices and to recommend future changes for inviting more participation in an IR.

The study deduced that ‘Peer- Review scholarly Journals’ are preferred medium for publishing research content and ‘Increase in the access to grey literature’ is the most significant impact of IR on respondents.

The findings of this research paper provide insight to the IR managers and administrators of low-deposit and low-usage repositories about the contributors’ apprehensions. The study will also help them to define and adopt policies that will eventually enhance their IRs visibility and impact.

URL : https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/1631/

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Evolution of the scholarly mega-journal, 2006–2017

 Author : Bo-Christer Björk

Mega-journals are a new kind of scholarly journal made possible by electronic publishing. They are open access (OA) and funded by charges, which authors pay for the publishing services. What distinguishes mega-journals from other OA journals is, in particular, a peer review focusing only on scientific trustworthiness.

The journals can easily publish thousands of articles per year and there is no need to filter articles due to restricted slots in the publishing schedule. This study updates some earlier longitudinal studies of the evolution of mega-journals and their publication volumes.

After very rapid growth in 2010–2013, the increase in overall article volumes has slowed down. Mega-journals are also increasingly dependent for sustained growth on Chinese authors, who now contribute 25% of all articles in such journals.

There has also been an internal shift in market shares. PLOS ONE, which totally dominated mega-journal publishing in the early years, currently publishes around one-third of all articles. Scientific Reports has grown rapidly since 2014 and is now the biggest journal.

URL : Evolution of the scholarly mega-journal, 2006–2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4357

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Developing indicators on Open Access by combining evidence from diverse data sources

Authors : Thed van Leeuwen, Ingeborg Meijer, Alfredo Yegros-Yegros, Rodrigo Costas

In the last couple of years, the role of Open Access (OA) publishing has become central in science management and research policy. In the UK and the Netherlands, national OA mandates require the scientific community to seriously consider publishing research outputs in OA forms.

At the same time, other elements of Open Science are becoming also part of the debate, thus including not only publishing research outputs but also other related aspects of the chain of scientific knowledge production such as open peer review and open data.

From a research management point of view, it is important to keep track of the progress made in the OA publishing debate. Until now, this has been quite problematic, given the fact that OA as a topic is hard to grasp by bibliometric methods, as most databases supporting bibliometric data lack exhaustive and accurate open access labelling of scientific publications.

In this study, we present a methodology that systematically creates OA labels for large sets of publications processed in the Web of Science database. The methodology is based on the combination of diverse data sources that provide evidence of publications being OA.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02827v1

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Gathering the Needles: Evaluating the Impact of Gold Open Access Content With Traditional Subscription Journals

Authors : Alison Boba, Jill Emery

Utilizing the Project COUNTER Release 4 JR1-GOA report, two librarians explore these data in comparison to journal package subscriptions represented via the JR1 reports. This paper outlines the methodology and study undertaken at the Portland State University Library and the University of Nebraska Medical Center Library using these reports for the first time.

The initial outcomes of the study are provided in various Tables for 2014 and 2015. The intent of the study was to provide both institutions with a baseline from which to do further study. In addition, some ideas are given for how these reports can be used in vendor negotiations going forward.

URL : Gathering the Needles: Evaluating the Impact of Gold Open Access Content With Traditional Subscription Journals

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/uksg.291

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Harvesting the Academic Landscape: Streamlining the Ingestion of Professional Scholarship Metadata into the Institutional Repository

Authors : Jonathan Bull, Teresa Auch Schultz

INTRODUCTION

Although librarians initially hoped institutional repositories (IRs) would grow through researcher self-archiving, practice shows that growth is much more likely through library-directed deposit. Libraries must then find efficient ways to ingest material into their IR to ensure growth and relevance.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

Valparaiso University developed and implemented a workflow that was semiautomated to help cut down on the time needed to ingest articles into its IR, ValpoScholar. The workflow, which continues to be refined, makes use of practices and ideas used by other repositories to more efficiently collect metadata for items and upload them to the repository.

NEXT STEPS

The article discusses the pros and cons of this workflow and areas of ingesting that still need to be addressed, including adding full-text items, checking copyright policies, managing student staffing, and dealing with hurdles created by the repository’s software.

URL : Harvesting the Academic Landscape: Streamlining the Ingestion of Professional Scholarship Metadata into the Institutional Repository

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2201

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Opening Academic Publishing – Development and application of systematic evaluation criteria

Authors : Anna Björk, Juho-Matti Paavola, Teemu Ropponen, Mikael Laakso, Leo Lahti

This report summarizes the development of a standardized scorecard for evaluating the openness of academic publishers. The assessment was completed in January 2018 as part of the Open Science and Research Initiative of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

The project complements the previous reports published by the Open Science and Research Initiative and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, which have covered (i) the openness of universities and polytechnics, (ii) the overall situation of OA publishing costs in Finland, and (iii) research organization and research funding organizations, including selected European research funders.

The project mapped and evaluated the openness of selected major academic publishers: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Chemical Society (ACS), Elsevier, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins (LWW), Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell. The dimensions of publisher openness were summarized in a scorecard of seven key factors, providing a new tool for systematic and standardized evaluation.

We used data from the publisher websites to compare the key factors of openness, and the publishers were given a chance to provide comments on the collected information. As complementary sources, we utilized data from commonly acknowledged, open databases: Directory of OA Journals (DOAJ), Gold OA Journals 2011-2016 (GOAJ2), Scopus (title list + Scimago), and Sherpa / Romeo.

The main results include the scorecard and the evaluation of openness of the selected major academic publishers. These are based on seven key factors: (i) Fraction of open access (OA) journals and their articles of the total publication output, (ii) costs of OA publishing (article processing charges, APC), (iii) use of Creative Commons (CC) licensing, (iv) self-archiving policies, (v) access to text and data mining (TDM), (vi) openness of citation data, and (vii) accessibility of information relating to OA practices.

To take a look beyond the publisher level into journal level practices we also sampled individual journals. We use the samples to discuss the distribution of journals according to APCs, their licensing and three impact metrics (CiteScore 2016, Scimago Journal & Country Ranks (SJR) 2016, and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2016).

The evaluation of the selected publishers with the scorecard indicates, for example, that the fraction of OA journals and their articles of the total publication output runs low within this group. In our sample of journals, the most expensive OA journals also seem to bear the highest impact metrics.

A definite view on the matter, however, would require more extensive data and further research. We
conclude by discussing key aspects and complexities in quantitative evaluation and in the design of a standardized assessment of publisher openness, and note also further factors that could be included in future versions of the scorecard.

URL : Opening Academic Publishing – Development and application of systematic evaluation criteria

Alternative location : https://avointiede.fi/documents/10864/12232/OPENING+ACADEMIC+PUBLISHING+.pdf/a4358f81-88cf-4915-92db-88335092c992

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Utilisation of open access institutional repositories in Zimbabwe’s public universities

Author : Mass Masona Tapfuma

Despite the establishment of institutional repositories (IRS) in Zimbabwe’s public universities, content for these repositories remains untangible. The purpose of this study was to explore the utilisation of IRs in the universities.

The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology (UTAUT) model was used to understand individuals behaviours’ towards acceptance of technologies. The pragmatist paradigm guided the study employing the mixed methods research (MMR) approach combining quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Triangulation was used to obtain a deeper understanding of the research problem. Eight public universities were surveyed including all levels of academics, research directors, library directors and IR/faculty librarians. A census, stratified and systematic sampling techniques were adopted to constitute the sample of the study.

A survey was carried out aided by questionnaires and interviews. Document analysis (policies and so forth) and bibliometric analysis were also employed including attending a Zimbabwe University Libraries Consortium (ZULC) workshop.

The findings of the study revealed a high awareness of OA/IRs by the academic community but content deposits were very low despite the existence of research and OA/IR policies (in some of the universities) which mandated deposit of research funded by the universities. A national repository was also established by the Research Council of Zimbabwe to link all repositories in the country while ZULC was lobbying for the development of a national OA policy. T

he study concluded that Zimbabwe’s university libraries faced numerous challenges in marketing and promoting of repositories, therefore, the concept of IRs remains in the infancy stage. It was recommended that: the libraries should intensify OA/IR education efforts; incentivise scholars/academics and library staff; resolve IPR issues and strengthen deposit mandates.

The study would contribute to practice in the establishment, running, management and promotion of repositories and policy makers will be informed and guided in the development and implementation of OA policies and regulatory frameworks leading to the establishment of the requisite infrastructure for OA/IR establishment in all academic institutions in the country, the national repository and the national content harvesting systems. Further research to probe the causes of low deposit rates and why scholars prefer depositing elsewhere is recommended.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10413/14893