Open Access monographic publishing in th…

Open Access monographic publishing in the humanities :

“In recent years, it has become widely recognized that in the case of monographs, the traditional business model for books is losing its sustainability. Academic publishers have been forced to become more selective in the books they publish, and authors, in particular young researchers and first time authors, have found it harder to find a press willing to publish their work. In response to the economic restraints of printed monographs, many publishers and academic institutes, in particular research libraries, have started to experiment with digital and Open Access publication of monographs.

OAPEN is the first international project to develop an Open Access model for publishers and stakeholders in scholarly communication. OAPEN stands for Open Access Publishing in European Networks. It is a 30 month project co-funded by the European Union, to develop and implement an Open Access (OA) publication model for peer reviewed academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS).”

URL : http://iospress.metapress.com/content/l6wg61l0mg6426w8/

Open access to scholarly communications:…

Open access to scholarly communications: advantages, policy and advocacy :

“The Open Access (OA) movement regards OA modes of disseminating research as the unequivocal future of scholarly communication. Proponents of the open access movement itself have, over the last ten years, carried out systematic research to show how OA can tangibly benefit researchers, institutions and society at large. Even so, the number of research papers being uploaded to OA institutional repositories remains relatively low, frequently based on concerns which often contradict the facts. Policies for OA have been introduced to encourage author uptake, and these are also discussed here. Briefly delineating aspects of these phenomena, this paper will then move on to outline and discuss advocacy for OA in organisations, and whether this should be “downstream”, in the form of informational campaigns, or “upstream”, in the form of top-down change management. This paper seeks to make a contribution to these issues in the OA sphere, by brining into the debate strands from the literature of the sociology of science and management science that will hopefully elucidate aspects of author reactions to OA, and the perceived changes that its adoption gives rise to.”

URL : http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1419/

How and why scholars cite on Twitter

Scholars are increasingly using the microblogging service Twitter as a communication platform. Since citing is a central practice of scholarly communication, we investigated whether and how scholars cite on Twitter.

We conducted interviews and harvested 46,515 tweets from a sample of 28 scholars and found that they do cite on Twitter, though often indirectly. Twitter citations are part of a fast-moving conversation that participants believe reflects scholarly impact. Twitter citation metrics could augment traditional citation analysis, supporting a “scientometrics 2.0”.

URL : http://clintlalonde.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/201_Final_Submission.pdf

Case Study: Re-Engineering an Institutio…

Case Study: Re-Engineering an Institutional Repository to Engage Users :

“When institutional repositories were introduced, many libraries embraced them as a means to support and further the cause of open access and the dissemination of scholarly communication. As has been widely reported, however, faculty did not embrace the concept, and repositories generally have not filled up as envisioned. We pose the question: is it possible to design an institutional repository that faculty and graduate students find useful and attractive enough to change their ingrained habits and incorporate into their work routines? The University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries is engaged in finding out. Based on two major user research studies, the team at Rochester determined that a number of crucial features were needed to attract end user interest: the system must become part of the workflow during the research and writing phase, it must support collaboration with users outside the institution, it must provide quantifiable evidence of use, and it needs to allow the users to control and showcase their work. Based on their research, the River Campus Libraries developed a new open source institutional repository software system called IR+. With IR+, Rochester is testing the findings from their research, to see if a repository that goes beyond the collection of finished scholarly works and engages academics in the creation stages of their research will prove to be a more successful model.”

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928310909~frm=titlelink

Institutional Repository Interaction Wit…

Institutional Repository Interaction With Research Users: A Review of Current Practice :

“The article reviews research that has examined scholarly users and institutional repository interaction within the wider scholarly communications environment. The focus is on research users as repository content creators and as eventual content users. The text explores how institutional motivations for implementing repositories match against user needs, and how consultation with users might be conducted. Some examples of innovative tailored services resulting from user needs analysis are described. The benefits of early consultation are highlighted, as well as the importance of tailoring advocacy to the needs of specific scholarly subject contexts. Understanding and engaging users mean that the benefits of repositories are more likely to be more fully realized. The article then sets out some of the current and future challenges for repository development. This includes briefly looking at opportunities for institutional and subject repositories to work together in complementary ways and consideration of research data requirements. Finally, the key area of integration is considered, first, in terms of embedding repositories in research practice, so that they become part of the researcher’s daily work environment; and second, repository integration with other institutional information systems is explored to enable the sharing of repository content across other services.”

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928307770~frm=titlelink

Towards Scholarly Communication 2.0: Pee…

Towards Scholarly Communication 2.0: Peer-to-Peer Review & Ranking in Open Access Preprint Repositories :

“In this paper we present our unified peer-to-peer review model for Open Access preprint repositories. Its objective is to improve the efficiency and effectivity of digital scholarly communication. The key elements of this model are standardized quality assessment instruments, public and private communication channels, special rankings and novel incentives. The model allows scholars to proficiently evaluate both the manuscripts and their peer reviews. These scrutinized manuscripts and peer reviews will then be made available to the relevant parties. These standardized quality assessments allow for new quality metrics for papers and peer reviews. The Reviewer Impact, which represents the peer review proficiency and peer review output of scholars, is one such metric. The model includes diverse rankings for scholars to appear in to receive better odds of having their own manuscripts noticed, read, peer reviewed and cited. Their specific ranking is proportional to their Reviewer Impact and the overall quality of their manuscripts. The Open Access preprint repository model is a suitable foundation for our model because of its high degree of accessibility, but little to no certification of its deposited manuscripts. With this combination we envision a novel, Open Access, peer-to-peer scholarly communication model that functions independently of, but not incompatibly with, the traditional journal publishing model: Scholarly Communication 2.0.”

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1681478