Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Semantic representation of scientific literature: bringing claims, contributions and named entities onto the Linked Open Data cloud

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Motivation

Finding relevant scientific literature is one of the essential tasks researchers are facing on a daily basis. Digital libraries and web information retrieval techniques provide rapid access to a vast amount of scientific literature. However, no further automated support is available that would enable fine-grained access to the knowledge ‘stored’ in these documents. The emerging domain of Semantic Publishing aims at making scientific knowledge accessible to both humans and machines, by adding semantic annotations to content, such as a publication’s contributions, methods, or application domains.

However, despite the promises of better knowledge access, the manual annotation of existing research literature is prohibitively expensive for wide-spread adoption. We argue that a novel combination of three distinct methods can significantly advance this vision in a fully-automated way: (i) Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Rhetorical Entity (RE) detection; (ii) Named Entity (NE) recognition based on the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud; and (iii) automatic knowledge base construction for both NEs and REs using semantic web ontologies that interconnect entities in documents with the machine-readable LOD cloud.

Results

We present a complete workflow to transform scientific literature into a semantic knowledge base, based on the W3C standards RDF and RDFS. A text mining pipeline, implemented based on the GATE framework, automatically extracts rhetorical entities of type Claims and Contributions from full-text scientific literature. These REs are further enriched with named entities, represented as URIs to the linked open data cloud, by integrating the DBpedia Spotlight tool into our workflow.

Text mining results are stored in a knowledge base through a flexible export process that provides for a dynamic mapping of semantic annotations to LOD vocabularies through rules stored in the knowledge base. We created a gold standard corpus from computer science conference proceedings and journal articles, where Claim and Contribution sentences are manually annotated with their respective types using LOD URIs. The performance of the RE detection phase is evaluated against this corpus, where it achieves an average F-measure of 0.73. We further demonstrate a number of semantic queries that show how the generated knowledge base can provide support for numerous use cases in managing scientific literature.

URL : Semantic representation of scientific literature: bringing claims, contributions and named entities onto the Linked Open Data cloud

Alternative location : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.37

Open Scholarship Practices Reshaping South Africa’s Scholarly Publishing Roadmap

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South African higher education institutions are the largest producers of research output on the African continent. Given this status, South African researchers have a moral obligation to share their research output with the rest of the continent via a medium that minimizes challenges of access; open scholarship is that medium. The majority of South African higher education libraries provide an open access publishing service. However, in most of these cases this service is via engagement with the green open access route, that is, institutional repositories (IR).

Some of the libraries have piloted and adopted gold open access services such as publishing of “diamond” gold open access journals and supporting article processing charges. The experiment with publishing open monographs is a new venture. This venture must be viewed against the backdrop of the need for open educational resources (OERs). OER is an area that is very much in a fledgling stage and is gaining traction, albeit, at a slow pace.

The growth of IRs, the growth in support for gold open access including the library acting as a publisher, the experimentation with open monographs, and OERs are all shaping South Africa’s scholarly publishing roadmap.

URL : Open Scholarship Practices Reshaping South Africa’s Scholarly Publishing Roadmap

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications3040263

The cost of reading research. A study of Computer Science publication venues

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What does the cost of academic publishing look like to the common researcher today? Our goal is to convey the current state of academic publishing, specifically in regards to the field of computer science and provide analysis and data to be used as a basis for future studies. We will focus on author and reader costs as they are the primary points of interaction within the publishing world.

In this work, we restrict our focus to only computer science in order to make the data collection more feasible (the authors are computer scientists) and hope future work can analyze and collect data across all academic fields.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00127

The implications of the new UK Open Access policies on the ownership of copyright in academic publishing

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The issue of who owns the copyright in works produced by academics during employment is not new. The practice is that academics, as authors – copyright creators, are routinely assigning the copyright for free to academic publishers in order to have their works published even though the production of such works might be said to be in the course of employment and therefore the copyright belonging to the employer (the university). A literature review will show only one side of the coin where – unsurprisingly – intellectual property (IP) scholars agree that they own the copyright in the works published during employment.

The other side of the coin is not usually discovered because employers are not IP experts and are not in the business of writing academic articles. However, the general belief of the management is that the universities own the copyright as employers. More recently, UK universities have to comply with new Open Access policies which basically requires that publicly-funded research should be freely accessible. The Gold Open Access model is preferred by many academic publishers whose business model relies on academics (actually their funders) paying article processing charges (APCs) while the Green Open Access model is preferred by the universities as being virtually free of any charges.

But since most of the research is publicly-funded, suddenly the issue of who owns the copyright in works produced by academics during employment becomes a very stringent one, not to mention expensive. This paper will discuss the problem of copyright ownership in academia and how the new Open Access policies might affect it. While it is possible to discuss copyright without mentioning Open Access, it would be quite difficult to discuss Open Access without mentioning copyright. A possible solution will be proposed and discussed in order to help universities comply with the new policies by using their preferred Green Open Access route.

URL : The implications of the new UK Open Access policies on the ownership of copyright in academic publishing

Alternative location : http://hdl.handle.net/1842/11682

Making Open Access work: The “state-of-the-art” in providing Open Access to scholarly literature

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Purpose

 The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of one of the most important and controversial areas of scholarly communication: Open Access publishing and dissemination of research outputs. It identifies and discusses recent trends and future challenges for various stakeholders in delivering Open Access (OA) to the scholarly literature.

Design/methodology/approach

 The study is based on a number of interrelated strands of evidence which make up the current discourse on OA, comprising the peer-reviewed literature, grey literature and other forms of communication (including blogs and e-mail discussion lists). It uses a large-scale textual analysis of the peer-reviewed literature since 2010 (carried out using the VOSviewer tool) as a basis for discussion of issues raised in the OA discourse.

Findings

 A number of key themes are identified, including the relationship between “Green” OA (deposit in repositories) and “Gold” OA (OA journal publication), the developing evidence base associated with OA, researcher attitudes and behaviours, policy directions, management of repositories, development of journals, institutional responses and issues around impact and scholarly communication futures. It suggests that current challenges now focus on how OA can be made to work in practice, having moved on from the discussion of whether it should happen at all.

Originality/value

 The paper provides a structured evidence-based review of major issues in the OA field, and suggests key areas for future research and policy development.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2015-0167

The quandary between communication and certification

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Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to understand individual academics’ perception, attitudes and participation in Open Access Publishing and open scholarship and revisit some principles and designs of openness in academic publishing from the perspective of creative end-users, which helps to increase the sustainability and efficiency of open models.

Design/methodology/approach

 This paper draws on a case study of China and empirical data collected through semi-structured interviews with a wide range of academics and stakeholders.

Findings

 A separation between the communication and certification functions of publishing is identified: open initiatives are valued for efficient and interactive communication while traditional publishing still dominates the legitimacy of research publications, which leads to the quandary of individual academics operating within the transitional landscape of scholarly communication.

Practical implications

Practical recommendations for sustainable and efficient openness are derived from discussions on the difficulties associated open/social certification and the shifting maxims that govern academics from “publish or perish” to “be visible or vanish”.

Originality/value

“Openness” is defined in broad sense integrating Open Access and open scholarship to comprehensively reflect individual academics’ views in the transitional landscape of academic publishing. The research findings suggest that new open approaches are needed to address the evolving tension and conflicts between communication and certification.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2015-0129

Open Access Publishing, academic research and scholarly communication

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Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the difference between Open Access and accessibility, to argue that accessibility is the most crucial feature, and to suggest some ways in which Open Access militates against accessibility.

Design/methodology/approach

Analysis of best practice by journals and monograph publishers is used to highlight the degree to which accessibility is enhanced by input from readers and editors. The expense of this, both real and hidden, is shown to be compatible only with difficulty with publishing methods where keeping costs low is essential, and Open Access alternatives that make available manuscripts “as submitted” are shown to make available less accessible scholarship.

Findings

Scholarship is markedly improved by referees and editors; the emphasis needs to be put on making available the most accessible scholarship, not on making more scholarship available.

Practical implications

Journals and publishers should concentrate on, and research councils and similar bodies insist upon, ensuring high quality critical review and editing, not cost-free access.

Originality/value

The debate on Open Access has put its emphasis in the wrong place. Rather than easier access to more scholarship, increased resource devoted to pre-publication review, revision and editing is the most important development to ensure the greatest advances in research and scholarship.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2015-0083