Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Communication

Exploring the Effects of a Transition to Open…

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Exploring the Effects of a Transition to Open Access: Insights from a Simulation Study :

“The Open Access (OA) movement, which postulates gratis and unrestricted online access to publicly funded research findings, has significantly gained momentum in recent years. The two ways of achieving OA are self-archiving of scientific work by the authors (Green OA) and publishing in OA journals (Gold OA). But there is still no consensus which model should be supported in particular. The aim of this simulation study is to discover mechanisms and predict developments that may lead to specific outcomes of possible market transformation scenarios. It contributes to theories related to OA by substantiating the argument of a citation advantage of OA articles and by visualizing the mechanisms of a journal system collapsing in the long-term due to the continuation of the serials crisis. The practical contribution of this research stems from the integration of all market players: Decisions regarding potential financial support of OA models can be aligned with our findings – as well as the decision of a publisher to migrate his journals to Gold OA. Our results indicate that for scholarly communication in general, a transition to Green OA combined with a certain level of subscription-based publishing and a migration of few top journals is the most beneficial development.”

URL : http://www.is-frankfurt.de/publikationenNeu/ExploringtheEffectsofaTransiti4353.pdf

Use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook by PhD Students for Scholarly Communication: A UK study

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This study explores scholarly use of social media by PhD researchers through mix-methods of qualitative interviews, participant observation and content analysis of a case study #phdchat.

We found that blogs, Twitter and Facebook are among the most popular social media tools being used by researchers. They can be used by PhD students and early career researchers to benefit their scholarly communication practice, promote their professional profiles, disseminate their work to a wider audience quickly, and gain feedbacks and support from peers across the globe.

There are also difficulties and potential problems such as the lack of standards and incentives, the risks of idea being pinched and plagiarism, lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain using social media tool and the potential huge amount of time and effort needed to invest.

We found that respondents link different social media tools together to maximise the impact of the content disseminated, as well as to create a personal learning network (PLN) connected with people across the globe.

For privacy issue, the participants use different identities on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is usually set as private with access for friends only and Twitter is public and used for professional purposes.

However, Facebook page and groups can be public which are used to build a community and disseminate information without revealing much content from individual member’s personal profile.”

URL : https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/item/?pid=uk-ac-man-scw:187789

Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce

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“Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled “Big Deal” packages, are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been called “unsustainable journal price escalation.” It is also inhibiting the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.

The “Big Deal” practices are worth studying for several general reasons. The degree to which publishers succeed in diminishing the role of libraries may be an indicator of the degree and speed at which universities transform themselves. More importantly, these “Big Deals” appear to point the way to the future of the whole economy, where progress is characterized by declining privacy, increasing price discrimination, increasing opaqueness in pricing, increasing reliance on low-paid or upaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on customer inertia.”

URL : http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

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Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process.

It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications.

Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication.

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0050109

Freedom for scholarship in the internet age …

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Freedom for scholarship in the internet age :

“Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age examines distortion in the current scholarly communication system and alternatives, focusing on the potential of open access. High profits for a select few scholarly journal publishers in the area of science, technology, and medicine contrast with other portions of the scholarly publishing system such as university presses that are struggling to survive. Two major societal trends, commercialization and irrational rationalization, are explored as factors in the development of distortion in the system, as are potential alternatives, including the commons, state subsidy, DIY publishing, and publishing cooperatives. Original research presented or summarized includes the quarterly series The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, an empirical study of economic possibilities for transition to open access, interviews with scholarly monograph publishers, and an investigation into the potential for transition to open access in the field of communication. The similarities and differences between open access and various Creative Commons licenses are mapped and analyzed.

The conclusion features a set of recommendations for open access. Carefully transitioning the primary economic support for scholarly publishing (academic library budgets) from subscriptions to open access is seen as central to a successful transition. Open access changes the form of the commodity with respect to commercial publication, from the scholarly work per se to the publishing service; a major improvement that overcomes the trend towards enclosure of information, but not necessarily the dominance of the commercial sector. A multi-faceted approach is recommended as optimal to overcome potential vulnerabilities of any single approach to open access. The open access movement is advised to be aware of the less understood societal trend of irrational (or instrumental) rationality, a trend that open access initiatives are just as vulnerable to as subscriptions or purchase-based systems. The remedy for irrational rationality recommended is a systemic or holistic approach. It is recommended that open access be considered part of a potential for broader societal transformation, based on the Internet’s capacity to function as an enabler of many to many communication that could form the basis of either a strong democracy or a decentralized socialism.”

URL : http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/files/2012/12/Morrison-library-copy.pdf

Digital distribution of academic journals and its impact…

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Digital distribution of academic journals and its impact on scholarly communication: Looking back
after 20 years :

“It has been approximately 20 years since distributing scholarly journals digitally became feasible. This article discusses the broad implications of the transition to digital distributed scholarship from a historical perspective and focuses on the development of open access (OA) and the various models for funding OA in the context of the roles scholarly journals play in scientific communities.”

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc4/final.pdf

Umgang mit Open Access Publikationsgebühren – die Situation…

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Umgang mit Open-Access-Publikationsgebühren – die Situation in Deutschland in 2010 :

“Mit der dynamischen Entwicklung von Open Access gewinnt die Diskussion um den Umgang mit Gebühren, die für Open-Access-Publikationen anfallen, an Bedeutung. Die deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen widmen sich dieser Diskussion, seit 2008 auch im Rahmen der Schwerpunktinitiative „Digitale Information“. Im Jahr 2010 wurde in einer Umfrage unter Hochschulen und außeruniversitären Forschungsinstitutionen die Praxis im Umgang mit diesen Publikationsgebühren unter die Lupe genommen. Dabei wurde deutlich, dass sich die Wissenschaftsorganisationen des Themas annehmen und bestrebt sind, Mechanismen zu entwickeln, um ihren Angehörigen die Veröffentlichung in Open-Access-Zeitschriften, die sich durch Publikationsgebühren finanzieren, unkompliziert zu ermöglichen. Darüber hinaus zeigt der Blick auf die Open-Access-Strategien der Organisationen, dass diese die Transformation von einem subskriptionsbasierten hin zu einem Open-Access-basierten Publikationssystem vorantreiben. Die Ergebnisse der Umfrage machen jedoch auch die Herausforderungen deutlich. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die Landschaft der Open-Access-Zeitschriften, beschreibt die Aktivitäten und Entwicklungen in den Wissenschaftsorganisationen und stellt die Ergebnisse der Erhebung unter wissenschaftlichen Institutionen in Deutschland vor.”

“Along with the dynamic development of open access, the question of how to handle open access publication charges is increasingly discussed. German research organisations have been involved in this discussion as part of their activities within the Priority Initiative “Digital Information” of the “Alliance of German Science Organisations” since 2008. In 2010 they commissioned a survey among universities and research institutions, focusing on their practice in dealing with publication charges. As a result, it became clear that these organisations are aware of the issue. For their members, they seek to develop mechanisms to facilitate publishing in author fee-based open access journals. In general, an overview of the open access strategies of the organisations shows an ongoing transformation process from a subscription-based towards an open access publishing system. However, the survey results also point to challenges. The article gives an overview of open-access related activities and developments in German research organisations and presents the results of the survey on handling of open access publication charges among academic institutions in Germany.”

URL : http://www.egms.de/static/en/journals/mbi/2012-12/mbi000240.shtml