Étiquette : scientific communication

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Looking Into Pandora’s Box: The Content Of Sci-Hub And Its Usage

Author : Bastian Greshake

Despite the growth of Open Access, illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications.

So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions.

The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013.

These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these.

Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected.

Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record.

A further analysis of these openly available data resources will undoubtedly be valuable for the investigation of academic publishing.

URL : Looking Into Pandora’s Box: The Content Of Sci-Hub And Its Usage

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/124495

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EN

Transitioning from a Conventional to a ‘Mega’ Journal: A Bibliometric Case Study of the Journal Medicine

Authors : Simon Wakeling, Peter Willett, Claire Creaser, Jenny Fry , Stephen Pinfield, Valerie Spezi

Open-Access Mega-Journals (OAMJs) are a relatively new and increasingly important publishing phenomenon. The journal Medicine is in the unique position of having transitioned in 2014 from being a ‘traditional’ highly-selective journal to the OAMJ model.

This study compares the bibliometric profile of the journal Medicine before and after its transition to the OAMJ model. Three standard modes of bibliometric analysis are employed, based on data from Web of Science: journal output volume, author characteristics, and citation analysis.

The journal’s article output is seen to have grown hugely since its conversion to an OAMJ, a rise driven in large part by authors from China. Articles published since 2015 have fewer citations, and are cited by lower impact journals than articles published before the OAMJ transition.

The adoption of the OAMJ model has completely changed the bibliometric profile of the journal, raising questions about the impact of OAMJ peer-review practices. In many respects, the post-2014 version of Medicine is best viewed as a new journal rather than a continuation of the original title.

URL : Transitioning from a Conventional to a ‘Mega’ Journal: A Bibliometric Case Study of the Journal Medicine

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications5020007

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EN

Evaluating and Promoting Open Data Practices in Open Access Journals

Authors : Eleni Castro, Mercè Crosas, Alex Garnett, Kasey Sheridan, Micah Altman

In the last decade there has been a dramatic increase in attention from the scholarly communications and research community to open access (OA) and open data practices.

These are potentially related, because journal publication policies and practices both signal disciplinary norms, and provide direct incentives for data sharing and citation. However, there is little research evaluating the data policies of OA journals.

In this study, we analyze the state of data policies in open access journals, by employing random sampling of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Open Journal Systems (OJS) journal directories, and applying a coding framework that integrates both previous studies and emerging taxonomies of data sharing and citation.

This study, for the first time, reveals both the low prevalence of data sharing policies and practices in OA journals, which differs from the previous studies of commercial journals’ in specific disciplines.

URL : Evaluating and Promoting Open Data Practices in Open Access Journals

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EN

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

Authors : Silvio Peroni, Francesco Osborne, Angelo Di Iorio, Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, Francesco Poggi, Fabio Vitali, Enrico Motta

Purpose

This paper introduces the Research Articles in Simplified HTML (or RASH), which is a Web-first format for writing HTML-based scholarly papers; it is accompanied by the RASH Framework, i.e. a set tools for interacting with RASH-based articles. The paper also presents an evaluation that involved authors and reviewers of RASH articles, submitted to the SAVE-SD 2015 and SAVE-SD 2016 workshops.

Design

RASH has been developed in order to: be easy to learn and use; share scholarly documents (and embedded semantic annotations) through the Web; support its adoption within the existing publishing workflow.

Findings

The evaluation study confirmed that RASH can already be adopted in workshops, conferences and journals and can be quickly learnt by researchers who are familiar with HTML.

Research limitations

The evaluation study also highlighted some issues in the adoption of RASH, and in general of HTML formats, especially by less technical savvy users. Moreover, additional tools are needed, e.g. for enabling additional conversion from/to existing formats such as OpenXML.

Practical implications

RASH (and its Framework) is another step towards enabling the definition of formal representations of the meaning of the content of an article, facilitate its automatic discovery, enable its linking to semantically related articles, provide access to data within the article in actionable form, and allow integration of data between papers.

Social implications

RASH addresses the intrinsic needs related to the various users of a scholarly article: researchers (focussing on its content), readers (experiencing new ways for browsing it), citizen scientists (reusing available data formally defined within it through semantic annotations), publishers (using the advantages of new technologies as envisioned by the Semantic Publishing movement).

Value

RASH focuses strictly on writing the content of the paper (i.e., organisation of text + semantic annotations) and leaves all the issues about it validation, visualisation, conversion, and semantic data extraction to the various tools developed within its Framework.

URL : https://essepuntato.github.io/papers/rash-peerj2016.html

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FR

Introduction à l’écrilecture scientifique et aux modalités techniques de son augmentation

Auteurs/Authors : Evelyne Broudoux, Gérald Kembellec

L’objectif de cette introduction est de placer l’écrilecture numérique dans le contexte des humanités numériques afin de mieux saisir l’ancrage de ce procédé comme partie prenante de cette mise en mouvement disciplinaire.

L’écrilecture, y compris scientifique, est une pratique ancienne dont les procédés évoluent en même temps que les outils et qui structure la réflexion de générations de penseurs.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01494369

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FR

Enjeux des « revues hypermédiatisées » pour l’édition scientifique

Auteurs/Authors : Lise Verlaet, Hans Dillaerts

Au sein de cet article nous nous intéresserons aux nouvelles formes de revues scientifiques numériques. Les mutations induites par le numérique ont en effet un impact fondamental sur le secteur de la communication scientifique (Dillaerts, 2012).

Comme nous le démontrerons dans une première partie à travers l’exposé de l’état de l’art, ces dernières se limitent bien souvent dans un premier temps à une simple transposition de la version papier. Toutefois de nouveaux modèles de diffusion sont apparus, notamment le Libre Accès (accès gratuit avec la possibilité de réutiliser et redistribuer l’article) ou encore la science ouverte laquelle prône une démarche scientifique ouverte, des modèles de peer review innovants (open peer review et les méga-revues).

Fort de ces observations et constats, nous développerons ensuite le concept de « revue hypermédiatisée » que nous présenterons au regard du développement de la revue COSSI (Communication, Organisation, Société du Savoir et Information). Inspiré de l’idée de « site médiateur » (Davallon & Jeanneret, 2004), une revue hypermédiatisée propose une redocumentarisation (Pédauque, 2006 ; Salaün, 2007) de son corpus pour en dégager un sens inédit.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01476924

 

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EN

Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond

Author: Christine Fruin

INTRODUCTION

The U.K. library community has implemented collaborative strategies in key scholarly communication areas such as open access mandate compliance, and U.S. librarians could benefit from learning in greater detail about the practices and experiences of U.K. libraries with respect to how they have organized scholarly communication services.

METHODS

In order to better understand the scholarly communication activities in U.K. academic and research libraries, and how U.S. libraries could apply that experience in the context of their own priorities, an environmental scan via a survey of U.K. research libraries and in-person interviews were conducted.

RESULTS

U.K. libraries concentrate their scholarly communication services on supporting compliance with open access mandates and in the development of new services that reflect libraries’ shifting role from information consumer to information producer.

DISCUSSION 

Due to the difference in the requirements of open access mandates in the U.K. as compared to the U.S., scholarly communication services in the U.K. are more focused on supporting compliance efforts. U.S. libraries engage more actively in providing copyright education and consultation than U.K. libraries. Both U.K. and U.S. libraries have developed new services in the areas of research data management and library publishing.

CONCLUSION

There are three primary takeaways from the experience of U.K. scholarly communication practitioners for U.S. librarians: increase collaboration with offices of research, reconsider current organization and delegation of scholarly communication services, and increase involvement in legislative and policy-making activity in the U.S. with respect to access to research.

URL : Organization and Delivery of Scholarly Communications Services by Academic and Research Libraries in the United Kingdom: Observations from Across the Pond

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2157