Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

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

Online Access and the Scientific Journal Market An…

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Online Access and the Scientific Journal Market: An Economist’s Perspective (Draft Report for the National Academy of Sciences) :

In Section 1 of the report I will focus on the most basic unit of analysis – the scientific journal as a communication platform – and then discuss the behavior of publishers, authors, libraries, etc. Once this is accomplished, I can address the questions identified earlier: in Section 2, the journals crisis, and in Section 3, the impact of online access on citations. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the main conclusions of the report, considers the policy implications and offers some directions for future research.”

URL : https://commons.georgetown.edu/blogs/copyrightnrc/files/NRC-Copyright-McCabe-NAS-Report-draft2.pdf

Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal…

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Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking :

“Academic journal ranking serves as an important criterion for the scholarly community to assess research quality and for librarians to select the best publications for collection development. Because of the complexity of publication behaviors, various approaches have been developed to assist in journal ranking, of which comparing the rates of citation using citation indexes to rate journals has been popularly practiced and recognized in most academic disciplines. ISI’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is among the most used rankings, which “offers a systematic, objective means to critically evaluate the world’s leading journals, with quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data.” Yet, citation-based journal rankings, such as JCR, have included few open access journals on their lists. Of these limited OA journals, many were either recently converted into open access or are publicly available with conditions. The relative exclusion of OA journals creates two deficiencies for scholarly communication.First, these rankings may not accurately portray the full picture of journal publications to reflect an on-going advancement in scholarship. Second, they may discourage the open access movement by marginalizing the majority of OA journals. In fact, some OA journals have successfully built reputations, attracting high-quality articles and sizable numbers of citations.

This research is an attempt to add selected OA journals to the journal quality rankings using library and information science (LIS) as an example. It is helpful to detect the position of OA journals in journal rankings so that scholars can recognize the progresses of OA publishing and make active contributions to support the OA movement. Such rankings will also encourage librarians and information professionals to improve the existing library publishing enterprise and make continuous efforts for journal practices.”

URL : http://infodocket.com/2011/05/19/preprint-positioning-open-access-journals-in-a-lis-journal-ranking/

Use made of open access journals by Indian…

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Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings :

“Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving.”

URL : http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/10may2011/1297.pdf

DINI Certificate Document and Publication Services 2010…

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DINI Certificate “Document and Publication Services” 2010 :

“In summer 2010 the DINI working group for Electronic Publishing released the third edition of the DINI Certificate “Document and Publication Services” and by this adapted the well-established criteria catalogue for scholarly repository services to current developments. Now, the English version of the DINI Certificate 2010 has been made available to the public.

The global scientific communication system is subject to a fundamental transition process. Due to new opportunities arising from the internet and other information and communication technologies and also to the changing requirements of scholars and scientists, new means and channels for scientific communication develop. A leading development is the global Open Access movement committed to the idea of freely available scientific and scholarly publications.

To support the numerous developments in Germany and to set common standards for publication infrastructures DINI’s Electronic Publishing working group embraced this topic early on and in 2002 published its first recommendations for “Electronic Publishing in Higher Education”. Based on these documents, the working group formulated criteria and formalized them in the DINI Certificate “Document and Publication Services”. Following the 2004 and 2007 editions, 2010 is the third version of the document. The certificate describes technical, organisational and legal aspects that should be considered in the process of setting up and operating a scholarly repository service and puts considerable interest in Open Access. The aim of DINI is to move forward towards a standardised and interoperable repository landscape to improve the visibility and linkages of scientific publications. During the years the DINI certificate has gained reputation as standard-setting authority for repositories.

The latest edition of the DINI certificate addresses particularly the following aspects:
– The growing importance of the “golden road” to Open Access.
– The increased demand for interoperability with comprehensive services.
– The growing technical virtualization of Document and Publication Services (hosting of services).
– A comprehensive view of the scientific and scholarly research processes.”

URL : https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5803.html

Journal tendering for societies: a brief guide

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Hundreds of societies publish journals in collaboration with publishers. Some may be considering how and whether to renegotiate or go out to tender. Some may be considering whether they can/should/wish to change the business model of the journal (e.g. by a move to Open Access). Other societies may be considering using an external publisher for the first time.

This guide, based on our experience, is written for all of these. In their negotiations with publishers learned societies – especially smaller ones – may have difficulty articulating their requirements and assessing the publishers’ offerings. This is true where they wish to compare the newer models with typical “conventional” models, or simply compare different conventional offerings.

The reasons are complex and include:

  • lack of knowledge of the publishing industry on the part of the society’s executive staff (who cannot always find the time to acquire the knowledge);
  • the “author/research funder pays” models, which, whilst becoming more prevalent in the domains of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), appear (but may not actually be) rather less feasible in other domains.

This guide draws on the experience of one learned society, the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), in reviewing the publishing arrangements for its journal Research in Learning Technology, between September and December 2010.

URL : http://repository.alt.ac.uk/887/