Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Access to Scientific Publications The Scientist’s Perspective …

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Access to Scientific Publications: The Scientist’s Perspective :

“Background : Scientific publishing is undergoing significant changes due to the growth of online publications, increases in the number of open access journals, and policies of funders and universities requiring authors to ensure that their publications become publicly accessible. Most studies of the impact of these changes have focused on the growth of articles available through open access or the number of open-access journals. Here, we investigated access to publications at a number of institutes and universities around the world, focusing on publications in HIV vaccine research – an area of biomedical research with special importance to the developing world.

Methods and Findings : We selected research papers in HIV vaccine research field, creating: 1) a first set of 50 most recently published papers with keywords “HIV vaccine” and 2) a second set of 200 articles randomly selected from those cited in the first set. Access to the majority (80%) of the recently published articles required subscription, while cited literature was much more accessible (67% freely available online). Subscriptions at a number of institutions around the world were assessed for providing access to subscription-only articles from the two sets. The access levels varied widely, ranging among institutions from 20% to 90%. Through the WHO-supported HINARI program, institutes in low-income countries had access comparable to that of institutes in the North. Finally, we examined the response rates for reprint requests sent to corresponding authors, a method commonly used before internet access became widespread. Contacting corresponding authors with requests for electronic copies of articles by email resulted in a 55-60% success rate, although in some cases it took up to 1.5 months to get a response.

Conclusions : While research articles are increasingly available on the internet in open access format, institutional subscriptions continue to play an important role. However, subscriptions do not provide access to the full range of HIV vaccine research literature. Access to papers through subscriptions is complemented by a variety of other means, including emailing corresponding authors, joint affiliations, use of someone else’s login information and posting requests on message boards. This complex picture makes it difficult to assess the real ability of scientists to access literature, but the observed differences in access levels between institutions suggest an unlevel playing field, in which some researchers have to spend more efforts than others to obtain the same information.”

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0027868
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027868

The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals A…

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The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals: A Study of College and University Libraries in Indiana :

“Objectives: This study examines what factors are considered by college and university libraries in Indiana when making the decision to cancel subscriptions to print journals when an electronic equivalent is available. The study also looks at who the primary decision makers are in this regard. Libraries at public and private institutions of varying sizes were included in the study.

Methods : An online survey was sent to seventy-three libraries in the consortium, Academic Libraries of Indiana. Structured interviews with administrators at nine libraries were also conducted.

Results: Academic libraries in Indiana use subscription cost, redundancy of formats, student preference, budget reductions and usage as the primary factors in canceling print journal subscriptions in favor of their electronic counterparts. There is also a preference for the electronic format for new subscriptions even when a print version is also available.

Conclusions: The study indicates that subscription cost is the most important consideration in the journal cancelation process with other factors also having an effect on the preference of libraries for electronic versions of journals. The study also shows that libraries at public and private colleges and universities are at different stages of moving away from print to an online-only journal format. At the same time, there is consensus that a small collection of print titles will still be needed. The primary decision-makers are librarians, faculty, and library administrators.”

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/10330

Implementing Open Access Policy: First Case Studies

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When implementing open access, policy pioneers and flagship institutions alike have faced considerable challenges in meeting their own aims and achieving a recognized success.

Legitimate authority, sufficient resources and the right timing are crucial, but the professionals charged with implementing policy typically still need several years to accomplish significant progress.

This study defines a methodological standard for evaluating the first generation of open access policies. Evaluating implementation establishes evidence, enables reflection, and may foster the emergence of a second generation of open access policies.

While the study is based on a small number of cases, these case studies cover most of the pioneer institutions, present the most significant issues and offer an international overview.

Each case is reconstructed individually on the basis of public documents and background information, and supported by interviews with professionals responsible for open access implementation.

This article presents the highlights from each case study. The results are utilized to indicate how a second generation of policies might define open access as a key component of digital research infrastructures that provide inputs and outputs for research, teaching and learning in real time.

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1927772

Wikis in scholarly publishing Scientific research is…

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Wikis in scholarly publishing :

“Scientific research is a process concerned with the creation, collective accumulation, contextualization, updating and maintenance of knowledge. Wikis provide an environment that allows to collectively accumulate, contextualize, update and maintain knowledge in a coherent and transparent fashion. Here, we examine the potential of wikis as platforms for scholarly publishing. In the hope to stimulate further discussion, the article itself was drafted on Species ID – http://species-id.net; a wiki that hosts a prototype for wiki-based scholarly publishing – where it can be updated, expanded or otherwise improved.”

URL : http://iospress.metapress.com/content/q42617538838t6j2/

Paper Tigers Rethinking the Relationship between Copyright and…

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Paper Tigers: Rethinking the Relationship between Copyright and Scholarly Publishing :

“Discontent is growing in academia over the practices of the proprietary scholarly publishing industry. Scholars and universities criticize the expensive subscription fees, restrictive access policies, and copyright assignment requirements of many journals. These practices seem fundamentally unfair given that the industries’ two main inputs – articles and peer-review – are provided to it free of charge. Furthermore, while many publishers continue to enjoy substantial profit margins, many elite university libraries have been forced to triage their collections, choosing between purchasing monographs or subscribing to journals, or in some cases, doing away with “non-essential” materials altogether. The situation is even more dire for non-elite schools, individual scholars, and members of the general public. There is a growing sense within the scholarly community that change is needed, but change, thus far, has come slowly.

In this Article, I attempt to neutralize the part of the problem that deals with copyright issues by showing that, at least with respect to copyright, scholarly publishers are “paper tigers”: the legal basis of their copyright claims is less secure than is commonly assumed. In so doing, I hope to offer universities an alternative approach to promoting change within scholarly publishing.

In Part I, I explain how, despite customary practice and common (mis)understanding, universities in fact own the copyrights in faculty-created works under the work-for-hire doctrine.13 While a common law “teacher exception” existed at one time to exempt teachers from the operation of the work-for-hire doctrine, Congress’ failure to codify the exception in the 1976 revisions to the Copyright Act extinguished the old common law rule. In Part II, I describe how, in response, universities developed various policy “solutions” in an attempt to circumvent the application of the work-for-hire doctrine. However, these solutions fail to satisfy the requirements set forth in the Copyright Act. I argue that while these policy failures have damaging implications for the proprietary scholarly publishing industry, the potential effect on the public’s interest in open access to scholarly works is quite promising. In Part III, I explore some of the implications of this revised understanding of the law and address concerns expressed by some scholars and commentators that faculty-creators will be harmed by university ownership of copyright. Finally, I conclude with a series of recommendations that universities could undertake to reduce reliance on the proprietary scholarly publishing industry and empower faculty while promoting open access.”

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1893590

A research study into Practices Policies Plans and…

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A research study into Practices, Policies, Plans…..and Promises :

“This is a research study commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium on the topic of Content Mining of Journal Articles. Content mining is defined as the automated processing of large amounts of digital content for purposes of information retrieval, information extraction and meta‐analysis. This study, carried out between February and May 2011, aims to provide an overview of
current practices, players, policies, plans and expectations for text mining and data mining of content
in academic journals. The research consisted of a series of 29 interviews with experts and people working on content mining and was concluded by a survey among scholarly publishers.

Overall, experts expect a further acceleration of text and data mining into scholarly content, sparked by a greater availability of digital content corpuses, the ever increasing computer capabilities, improved user‐friendliness of software tools and easier access to content. Semantic annotation of content is expected by some to develop into a new standard for STM content, facilitating better and
deeper search and browse facilities into related articles ‐‐ even if use cases and business propositions
are at present in infancy stage only and not yet fully developed.

This optimism on Journal Article Mining is generally shared by publishers across the board who expect an increase in publishers mining their own content. Half of the publishers surveyed also already see an increase in mining requests from third parties. The mining requests that publishers receive are not very frequent (mostly less than 10 per year, a good share even less than 5 per year) and come mostly from Abstracting and Indexing services and from corporate customers. Respondents also note a fair amount of illegal crawling and downloading that suggest unreported mining activities.

Publishers tend to treat mining requests from third parties in a liberal way, certainly so for mining requests with a research purpose. Publishers are less permissive if the mining results can replace or compete with the original content. Few publishers have a publicly available mining policy, the large majority handles mining requests on a case‐by‐case basis. Approximately 30 % of publisher respondents allow any kind of mining of their content without restrictions, in most cases as part of their Open Access policies. For the other publishers, nearly all require information about the intent and purpose of the mining request.

Regarding measures to make content mining easier across multi‐publishers content, the interviews generated a broad spectrum of possible improvements: from the creation of one shared content mining platform across publishers, and commonly agreed permission rules for research based mining requests, to collaboration with (national) libraries and standardization of mining‐friendly content formats including basic, common ontologies. Of these options, the suggestion for more cross publisher standardization of content formats received most support in the survey, especially from the (self declared) mining experts. Collaboration with libraries was least popular, while one content mining platform received a good response overall, but faced less positive responses from those respondents who have expertise or experience in content mining.

The survey results were cross analyzed for differences in responses from small and large publishers, for different types of publishers and for experts versus non‐experts. Size and type of publishers showed no statistically significant deviations, except that larger publishers (with more than 50
journals) receive more mining requests, do more mining of their own content and more often have publicly available explicit permission guidelines for content mining. Differences between expert and non‐experts responses were most prominent regarding solutions to make content mining easier: experts were more articulate in their opinions with a higher rating for standardization of content formats and a lower rating for the creation of one shared content mining platform. Experts were more negative than non‐experts about collaboration with libraries.”

URL : http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PRCSmitJAMreport20June2011VersionofRecord.pdf

Has the Revolution in Scholarly Communication Lived Up…

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Has the Revolution in Scholarly Communication Lived Up to Its Promise? :

“In the late 1990s the need for an overhaul in the approach to scholarly publishing was recognized. A drastic change would revise the economic model on which publishing was based, give authors rights to their own works in open access repositories and enable consumers across the world to access scholarly materials, building a flow of valuable information for the common good. The revolution has yet to materialize, though small but welcome achievements have been made. The open access business model has gained a foothold with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and scientists receiving grants through the National Institutes of Health must submit manuscripts to the PubMed Central digital archive. Several universities mandate that faculty members deposit their scholarly articles in institutional repositories, and the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity promotes open publishing by supporting authors. Librarians are both part of the problem and part of the solution. Instead of worrying about paying rising subscription fees, they could use their position to influence authors to take advantage of open access channels despite publish-or-perish pressures. Recent legislative and presidential initiatives, geared to disseminating publicly funded research, may be effective in moving open access closer to transforming the traditional system of scholarly communication.”

URL : http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-11/JunJul11_Hahn_Burright_Nickisch.html