Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Digitization, Internet publishing and the revival of scholarly monographs: An empirical study in India

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“This research shows the growing utility of internet-based digital models in reviving the crisis-stricken traditional print monograph publishing. The rising prices of scientific journals in the past three decades forced academic and research libraries to resort to cutbacks on monograph budgets. The declining sales to libraries and rising production costs led to a significant drop in global demand for print monographs, rendering monograph publishing financially unattractive. Combining the flexibility of digitized content with the global reach of the Internet, three emerging digital models — print on demand, bundled e-books, and e-consortia — are beginning to revamp the monograph publishing business.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4932

Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

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“Background: Research is published in indexed, online scholarly journals so that published knowledge can be easily found and built upon by others. Most scholars rely on relatively few online indexing service providers to search for relevant scholarly content. It is under-appreciated that the quality of indexing can vary across different journals and that this can have an adverse effect on the quality of research.

Objective: In this short paper I compare the recall of commonly used online indexers; Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Microsoft Academic Search and Mendeley Search against a selection of over 20,000 papers published in two different high-volume journals: PLOS ONE and Zootaxa.

Results: When using Google Scholar, content in Zootaxa has low recall for search terms that are known to occur in it, significantly lower than the near-perfect recall of the same terms in PLOS ONE. All other indexers tend to have lower recall than Google Scholar except Scopus which outperformed Google Scholar for recall on Zootaxa searches. I also elaborate why Dark Research is undesirable for optimal scientific progress with some recommendations for change.

Conclusion: This research is a basic proof-of-concept which demonstrates that when searching for published scholarly content, relevant studies can remain hidden as ’Dark Research’ in poorly-indexed journals, even despite expertise-informed efforts to find the content. The technological capability to do full text indexing on all modern scholarly journal content certainly exists, it is perhaps just publisher-imposed access-restrictions on content that prevents this from happening.”

URL : Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily discoverable online

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.773v1

Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

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The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject.

We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced.

We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.

URL : Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

Episciences IAM: un projet éditorial entre rupture et continuité

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“Avec le lancement de deux revues scientifiques, Episciences IAM (Informatics and Applied Mathematics) s’engage dans la voie des épi-journaux. Le principe du projet est de publier des résultats scientifiques labellisés par des revues du meilleur niveau. Il s’agit de contribuer à l’édition en Open Access pour un accès libre plus équitable. Au moyen d’une plateforme technique, des contributions scientifiques déjà en archive ouverte sont soumises à un processus d’évaluation et de validation scientifiques. Conçu à terme comme une infrastructure de recherche inter-établissements, le projet Episciences IAM s’appuie sur la plateforme Episciences, développée et hébergée par le CCSD du CNRS.”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/37934

Perception du libre accès et facteurs d’appropriation des archives ouvertes en contexte français: étude comparée de deux communautés disciplinaires contrastées

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“Cette proposition s’intéresse aux facteurs d’appropriation des archives ouvertes pour deux communautés scientifiques distinctes (économie, sciences de la mer), dans le contexte français. S’appuyant sur deux études de terrains contrastés, ce travail interroge notamment la variable disciplinaire ainsi que la complémentarité entre logiques de communauté et logiques institutionnelles, permettant de dégager des apports structurels transférables à d’autres contextes.”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/37822

Cartographie des connaissances pour une visibilité scientifique numérique des universités africaines : le cas de l’Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Ucad)

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“Cet article présente les enjeux de la visibilité numérique de l’activité scientifique des universités africaines. Il part d’un constat selon lequel celles-ci sous le poids de la massification et du rétrécissement des moyens négligent un pan entier de leur mission : la recherche. Ceci contraste avec ce besoin de visibilité scientifique, gage de reconnaissance internationale. À partir d’une étude bibliométrique, cet article analyse l’état de déliquescence de la recherche à l’UCAD tout en essayant de démontrer l’opportunité qu’offrent l’édition numérique et l’Open Access.”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/37916

Performance of Mandated Institutional Repositories

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“More and more Institutional Repositories are developed to promote the Green Open Access of research output (especially peer-reviewed journal articles). Since 2001, some institutions became adopting mandate policies aiming to mandate self-archiving by authors affiliated to these institutions This study was conducted in April, 2014 based on institutional mandates indexed by ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Repositories’ Mandatory Archiving Policies). A robot was developed to harvest IRs and check the status of articles (Open Access, Restricted Access or Metadata Only) and to extract the deposit date of article full-texts in IR. This study aims to analyse the performance of mandated institutional repositories from all over the world, especially in terms of deposit rates and deposit latency (difference between date of deposit and date of publication).”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/38075