Étiquette : Scholarly Publishing

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Deconstructing the Durham Statement: The Persistence of Print Prestige During the Age of Open Access

Author : Sarah Reis

In the seven years following the promulgation of the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, law journals have largely responded to the call to make articles available in open, electronic formats, but not to the call to stop print publication and publish only in electronic format.

Nearly all of the flagship law reviews at ABA-accredited institutions still insist on publishing in print, despite the massive decline in print subscribers and economic and environmental waste.

The availability of a law journal in print format remains a superficial indicator of prestige and quality to law professors, student editors, and law school administrations. A shift from print publication to electronic-only publication is not as simple as having a law journal merely cancel its print runs, but rather requires several fundamental changes to the publication process.

Many law journals must also greatly improve their websites before electronic-only publication can truly replace print publication. The Durham Statement was drafted by law library directors from top law schools across the country.

Law librarians today must assist in facilitating the transition if we ever expect to see a world of electronic-only publication of law journals.

This paper argues that the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review must be the first law reviews to transition to electronic-only publication, after which other law journals will follow suit.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2785307

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EN

Science Concierge: A Fast Content-Based Recommendation System for Scientific Publications

Authors : Titipat Achakulvisut, Daniel E. Acuna, Tulakan Ruangrong , Konrad Kording

Finding relevant publications is important for scientists who have to cope with exponentially increasing numbers of scholarly material. Algorithms can help with this task as they help for music, movie, and product recommendations.

However, we know little about the performance of these algorithms with scholarly material. Here, we develop an algorithm, and an accompanying Python library, that implements a recommendation system based on the content of articles.

Design principles are to adapt to new content, provide near-real time suggestions, and be open source. We tested the library on 15K posters from the Society of Neuroscience Conference 2015.

Human curated topics are used to cross validate parameters in the algorithm and produce a similarity metric that maximally correlates with human judgments. We show that our algorithm significantly outperformed suggestions based on keywords.

The work presented here promises to make the exploration of scholarly material faster and more accurate.

URL : Science Concierge: A Fast Content-Based Recommendation System for Scientific Publications

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158423

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Obstacles to Scholarly Publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Case Study of Vietnamese Scholars

Authors : Phuong Dzung Pho, Thi Minh Phuong Tran

Publishing scientific research is very important in contributing to the knowledge of a discipline and in sharing research findings among scientists. Based on the quantity and quality of publications, one can evaluate the research capacity of a researcher or the research performance of a university or a country.

However, the number of quality publications in Vietnam is very low in comparison with those in the other countries in the region or in the world, especially in the fields of social sciences and humanities.

Employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, the current study investigates university lecturers’ attitudes towards research and publication and the obstacles to local and international publication at one of the main universities in social sciences and humanities in Vietnam.

The study found the main barriers to publication are funding and time for research and publication, among many other obstacles. From the analysis of the data, the study would also argue that lecturers’ obstacles to publication may vary across faculties (or disciplines), ages, qualifications, education, research and publication experience.

The findings in this study may be applied to other institutions in Vietnam or in other countries where English is used as a foreign language.

URL : Obstacles to Scholarly Publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Case Study of Vietnamese Scholars

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications4030019

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EN

The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example

Authors : Jyrki Ilva, Markku Antero Laitinen, Jarmo Saarti

The Open Access movement in scientific publishing has been gathering momentum in the European Union and its member states, partly due to the policies of some of its main research funders.

Already we have seen encouraging research results on the effects of openness on the dissemination of scientific outputs. As business models of Open Access publishing are still under development, the aim of our paper is to assess the statistical tools and data that the Finnish libraries currently have for comparing the costs associated with different modes of disseminating scientific publications.

We will also analyse the potential costs associated with Open Access publishing models and compare them with the current cost structure of – mostly – paywalled (PW) access.

The discussion will include a description of current Finnish Open Access policies and their funding models. The financial analysis will be based on the statistical data found in the national Research Library Statistics database and the Finnish National Research Publications database, Juuli.

We will discuss the alternatives on how best to develop statistical tools to estimate the true costs of scientific publishing.

URL : The Costs of Open and Closed Access: Using the Finnish Research Output as an Example

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10137

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EN

Agreements between Industry and Academia on Publication Rights : A Retrospective Study of Protocols and Publications of Randomized Clinical Trials

Authors : Benjamin Kasenda, Erik von Elm, John J. You, Anette Blümle, Yuki Tomonaga, Ramon Saccilotto et al.

Background

Little is known about publication agreements between industry and academic investigators in trial protocols and the consistency of these agreements with corresponding statements in publications.

We aimed to investigate (i) the existence and types of publication agreements in trial protocols, (ii) the completeness and consistency of the reporting of these agreements in subsequent publications, and (iii) the frequency of co-authorship by industry employees.

Methods and Findings

We used a retrospective cohort of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) based on archived protocols approved by six research ethics committees between 13 January 2000 and 25 November 2003.

Only RCTs with industry involvement were eligible. We investigated the documentation of publication agreements in RCT protocols and statements in corresponding journal publications. Of 647 eligible RCT protocols, 456 (70.5%) mentioned an agreement regarding publication of results. Of these 456, 393 (86.2%) documented an industry partner’s right to disapprove or at least review proposed manuscripts; 39 (8.6%) agreements were without constraints of publication.

The remaining 24 (5.3%) protocols referred to separate agreement documents not accessible to us. Of those 432 protocols with an accessible publication agreement, 268 (62.0%) trials were published. Most agreements documented in the protocol were not reported in the subsequent publication (197/268 [73.5%]).

Of 71 agreements reported in publications, 52 (73.2%) were concordant with those documented in the protocol. In 14 of 37 (37.8%) publications in which statements suggested unrestricted publication rights, at least one co-author was an industry employee.

In 25 protocol-publication pairs, author statements in publications suggested no constraints, but 18 corresponding protocols documented restricting agreements.

Conclusions

Publication agreements constraining academic authors’ independence are common. Journal articles seldom report on publication agreements, and, if they do, statements can be discrepant with the trial protocol.

URL : Agreements between Industry and Academia on Publication Rights : A Retrospective Study of Protocols and Publications of Randomized Clinical Trials

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002046

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A Vision for Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures

Author : Costantino Thanos

The characteristics of modern science, i.e., data-intensive, multidisciplinary, open, and heavily dependent on Internet technologies, entail the creation of a linked scholarly record that is online and open.

Instrumental in making this vision happen is the development of the next generation of Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures (OCIs), i.e., enablers of an open, evolvable, and extensible scholarly ecosystem.

The paper delineates the evolving scenario of the modern scholarly record and describes the functionality of future OCIs as well as the radical changes in scholarly practices including new reading, learning, and information-seeking practices enabled by OCIs.

URL : A Vision for Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/2/13

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EN

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

Editors : Fernando Loizides, Birgit Schmidt

The field of electronic publishing has grown exponentially in the last two decades, but we are still in the middle of this digital transformation. With technologies coming and going for all kinds of reasons, the distribution of economic, technological and discursive power continues to be negotiated.

This book presents the proceedings of the 20th Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub), held in Göttingen, Germany, in June 2016.

This year’s conference explores issues of positioning and power in academic publishing, and it brings together world leading stakeholders such as academics, practitioners, policymakers, students and entrepreneurs from a wide variety of fields to exchange information and discuss the advent of innovations in the areas of electronic publishing, as well as reflect on the development in the field over the last 20 years.

Topics covered in the papers include how to maintain the quality of electronic publications, modeling processes and the increasingly prevalent issue of open access, as well as new systems, database repositories and datasets. This overview of the field will be of interest to all those who work in or make use of electronic publishing.

URL : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

Alternative location : http://ebooks.iospress.nl/ISBN/978-1-61499-648-4