Online survey on scientific information in the digital…

Online survey on scientific information in the digital age :

“The public consultation ‘Online survey on scientific information in the digital age’ spurred great interest among different categories of stakeholders, with 1 140 responses received. The Commission received responses from 42 countries, including from all Member States except Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Slovakia, with 37 % of all responses submitted by German respondents.

Respondents were asked if there is no access problem to scientific publications in Europe: 84 % disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement. The high prices of journals/subscriptions (89 %) and limited library budgets (85 %) were signalled as the most important barriers to accessing scientific publications. More than 1 000 respondents (90 %) supported the idea that publications resulting from publicly funded research should, as a matter of principle, be in open access (OA) mode. An even higher number of respondents (91 %) agreed or agreed strongly that OA increased access to and dissemination of scientific publications. Self-archiving (‘green OA’) or a combination of self-archiving and OA publishing (‘gold OA’) were identified as the preferred ways that public research policy should facilitate in order to increase the number and share of scientific publications available in OA. Respondents were asked, in the case of self-archiving (‘green OA’), what the desirable embargo period is (period of time during which publication is not yet open access): a six-month period was favoured by 56 % of respondents (although 25 % disagree with this option).

As for the question of access to research data, the vast majority of respondents (87 %) disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement that there is no access problem for research data in Europe. The barriers to access research data considered very important or important by respondents were: lack of funding to develop and maintain the necessary infrastructures (80 %); the insufficient credit given to researchers for making research data available (80 %); and insufficient national/regional strategies/policies (79 %). There was strong support (90 % of responses) for research data that is publicly available and results
from public funding to be, as a matter of principle, available for reuse and free of charge on the Internet. Lower support (72 % of responses) was given for data resulting from partly publicly and partly privately funded research.

Responding to the question asking whether preservation of scientific information is at present sufficiently addressed, 64 % of the respondents disagreed or disagreed strongly. The main barriers signalled in this area were: uncertainty as to who is responsible for preserving scientific information (80 %); the quality and interoperability of repositories (78 %); and the lack of a harmonised approach to legal deposit (69 %).”

URL : http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/survey-on-scientific-information-digital-age_en.pdf

Revistas y producción científica de América Latina y el Caribe: su visibilidad en SciELO, RedALyC y SCOPUS

Este trabajo comparó la cobertura de revistas procedentes de América Latina y el Caribe incluidas en SciELO, RedALyC y SCOPUS, por país y por tema. Calculó el porcentaje de revistas en estas fuentes en relación con las registradas en el catálogo de LATINDEX. Estimó el volumen de la producción científica que registra visibilidad en las tres fuentes y su evolución en el período 2005-2009. Los resultados indicaron que las tres fuentes son complementarias. En promedio, el porcentaje de solapamiento de títulos es bajo y desigual la distribución de revistas por países. Ningún país registró en las fuentes estudiadas todas las revistas incluidas en LATINDEX. SCOPUS y SciELO están más equilibradas temáticamente que RedALyC, que mostró un marcado sesgo hacia las ciencias sociales. El volumen de producción científica visible en SCOPUS es muy superior al de SciELO y RedALyC, aunque su distribución por países es muy desigual. Las tres fuentes registran tendencias de crecimiento de la producción en el período analizado.

URL : http://aprendeenlinea.udea.edu.co/revistas/index.php/RIB/article/view/10366

PEER Economics Research Final Report This study…

PEER Economics Research – Final Report :

“This study considers the effect of large-scale deposit on scholarly research publication and dissemination (sharing of research outputs), beginning with the analysis of publishers and
institutions managing repositories and their sustainability. The study associates costs with specific activities, performed by key actors involved in research registration, certification, dissemination and digital management: authors, the scholarly community, editors, publishers, libraries, readers and funding agencies. Contrary to most of the existing literature, the study analyses cost structures of individual organizations. The focus of this study is therefore to provide context for the costs to specific organizations and to their choices in terms of scale and scope.”

URL : http://www.peerproject.eu/fileadmin/media/reports/PEER_Economics_Report.pdf

Résultats de l’enquête sur les usages et pratiques des comportements de publications au sein des communautés de l’OSUG

Afin de mieux connaître les usages et pratiques des comportements de publications au sein des communautés scientifiques de l’Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG), un questionnaire a été diffusé sous format numérique en juin 2011.

Une première partie représente les comportements globaux des chercheurs dans les différents aspects de la publication. La deuxième et la troisième partie abordent les pratiques liées, respectivement, à l’Open Access et aux archives ouvertes, ainsi que les perceptions de ces deux modèles alternatifs dans le secteur de la publication.

La dernière partie fait une rapide synthèse du profil type des répondants et présente les mots-clés récoltés pour chaque laboratoires composant l’OSUG.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00655737/fr/

Achieving rigor and relevance in online multimedia scholarly…

Achieving rigor and relevance in online multimedia scholarly publishing :

“This paper discusses the importance of relevance and rigor in scholarly publishing in a new media–rich world. We defend that scholarship should be useful and engaging to audiences through the use of new media, and at the same time scholarly publishers must develop and maintain methods of ensuring content accuracy and providing quality controls in the production of scholarly multimedia products. We review examples and a case study of existing scholarly publishing venues that attempt to maintain quality control standards while embracing innovative multimedia formats. We also present lessons learned from the case experience and challenges that face us in the scholarly publication of multimedia.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3762/3119

A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open…

A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals :

Background: The emergence of the Internet has triggered tremendous changes in the publication of scientific peer-reviewed journals. Today, journals are usually available in parallel electronic versions, but the way the peer-review process works, the look of articles and journals, and the rigid and slow publication schedules have remained largely unchanged, at least for the vast majority of subscription-based journals. Those publishing firms and scholarly publishers who have chosen the more radical option of open access (OA), in which the content of journals is freely accessible to anybody with Internet connectivity, have had a much bigger degree of freedom to experiment with innovations.

Objective: The objective was to study how open access journals have experimented with innovations concerning ways of organizing the peer review, the format of journals and articles, new interactive and media formats, and novel publishing revenue models.

Methods: The features of 24 open access journals were studied. The journals were chosen in a nonrandom manner from the approximately 7000 existing OA journals based on available information about interesting journals and include both representative cases and highly innovative outlier cases.

Results: Most early OA journals in the 1990s were founded by individual scholars and used a business model based on voluntary work close in spirit to open-source development of software. In the next wave, many long-established journals, in particular society journals and journals from regions such as Latin America, made their articles OA when they started publishing parallel electronic versions. From about 2002 on, newly founded professional OA publishing firms using article-processing charges to fund their operations have emerged. Over the years, there have been several experiments with new forms of peer review, media enhancements, and the inclusion of structured data sets with articles. In recent years, the growth of OA publishing has also been facilitated by the availability of open-source software for journal publishing.

Conclusions: The case studies illustrate how a new technology and a business model enabled by new technology can be harnessed to find new innovative ways for the organization and content of scholarly publishing. Several recent launches of OA journals by major subscription publishers demonstrate that OA is rapidly gaining acceptance as a sustainable alternative to subscription-based scholarly publishing.”

URL : http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e115/

Toward a new model of scientific publishing discussion…

Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal :

“The current system of publishing in the biological sciences is notable for its redundancy, inconsistency, sluggishness, and opacity. These problems persist, and grow worse, because the peer review system remains focused on deciding whether or not to publish a paper in a particular journal rather than providing (1) a high-quality evaluation of scientific merit and (2) the information necessary to organize and prioritize the literature. Online access has eliminated the need for journals as distribution channels, so their primary current role is to provide authors with feedback prior to publication and a quick way for other researchers to prioritize the literature based on which journal publishes a paper. However, the feedback provided by reviewers is not focused on scientific merit but on whether to publish in a particular journal, which is generally of little use to authors and an opaque and noisy basis for prioritizing the literature. Further, each submission of a rejected manuscript requires the entire machinery of peer review to creak to life anew. This redundancy incurs delays, inconsistency, and increased burdens on authors, reviewers, and editors. Finally, reviewers have no real incentive to review well or quickly, as their performance is not tracked, let alone rewarded. One of the consistent suggestions for modifying the current peer review system is the introduction of some form of post-publication reception, and the development of a marketplace where the priority of a paper rises and falls based on its reception from the field (see other articles in this special topics). However, the information that accompanies a paper into the marketplace is as important as the marketplace’s mechanics. Beyond suggestions concerning the mechanisms of reception, we propose an update to the system of publishing in which publication is guaranteed, but pre-publication peer review still occurs, giving the authors the opportunity to revise their work following a mini pre-reception from the field. This step also provides a consistent set of rankings and reviews to the marketplace, allowing for early prioritization and stabilizing its early dynamics. We further propose to improve the general quality of reviewing by providing tangible rewards to those who do it well.”
URL : http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2011.00055/full