scientific communication – Page 187

The Case for Open Access Publishing This…

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The Case for Open Access Publishing :

“This article presents some of the main efficiency and fairness arguments in favor of open access publishing. It discusses how general open access could affect research and editorial practice. It ends with a discussion of the feasibility of open access and how a move to open access publishing could happen.

This article contains a discussion of some of the core issues related to the economics of open access journal publishing. By “open access,” I refer to full open access, which simply means that all published academic articles of a particular journal are available for download by anyone over the Internet free of charge. In this limited space, I primarily cover issues where I think I have something to say. The article contains a mix of my personal views as an academic, as an economist, and as an editor of a minor open access journal.

The issues I raise relate both to economic efficiency and to fairness. I will point to the general benefits of open access and in particular to the distribution to poor countries. I base the discussion on my own experience in publishing an open access journal. I end the discussion by some thoughts on the realism and feasibility of a general transition to open access. My experience is primarily from economics, but clearly, it has some relevance for other social science disciplines as well as for the humanities. I think, however, that the issue of open access in disciplines such as medicine, where commercial interests are much more important, has to be approached differently. For readers who want to go deeper into the various aspects of the economics of open access publishing, I recommend the two symposia in Economic Analysis and Policy (2009) and in Nature (2004) and a report on the costs and benefits of open access publishing (Houghton et al. 2009). All these are appropriately available online, free of charge.”

URL : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1528-3585.2012.00490.x/full

Supporting Open Access nationwide To support Croatian…

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Supporting Open Access nationwide :

“To support Croatian scholarly publishing environment, and inspired by global open access movement, the portal of Croatian scientific journals HRČAK (http://hrcak.srce.hr) was introduced in 2006 offering an open access publishing platform for Croatian journals. Today, HRČAK gathers about 290 scholarly and professional Croatian journals. This paper is focused on the currency and visibility of the journals included in HRČAK, giving accurate statistical data about HRČAK repository, its growth and development. Collaboration with Croatian publishers, namely those are mainly academic and research institutions or professional societies, on the continuous work of raising the quality of Croatian scientific journals is presented in this paper. HRČAK journals are available for harvesting using OAI-PMH protocol and papers are distributed through many different repositories, archives, databases and search engines. The future plans include work on full-text documents, inclusion of the additional types of publications and formats, harvesting process improvements, additional functionalities and standardization.”

URL : http://bib.irb.hr/prikazi-rad?&lang=EN&rad=591272

Exploring Publishing Patterns at a Large Research University…

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Exploring Publishing Patterns at a Large Research University: Implications for Library Practice :

“Objective : The research project sought to explore the value of data on publication patterns for decision-making regarding scholarly communications and collection development programs at a research-intensive post-secondary institution, the University of Utah in the United States.

Methods : Publication data for prolific University of Utah authors were gathered from Scopus for the year 2009. The availability to University of Utah faculty, staff, and students of the journals in which University of Utah authors published was determined using the University of Utah Libraries’ catalogue; usage was estimated based on publisher-provided download statistics and requests through interlibrary loan; and costs were calculated from invoices, a periodicals directory, and publisher websites and communications. Indicators of value included the cost-per-use of journals to which the University of Utah Libraries subscribed, a comparison of interlibrary loan costs to subscription costs for journals to which the University of Utah Libraries did not subscribe, the relationship between publishing venue and usage, and the relationship between publishing venue and cost-per-use.

Results : There were 22 University of Utah authors who published 10 or more articles in 2009. Collectively, these authors produced 275 articles in 162 journals. The University of Utah provided access through library subscriptions to 83% of the journals for which access, usage, and cost data were available, with widely varying usage and at widely varying costs. Cost-per-use and a comparison of interlibrary loan to subscription costs provided evidence of the effectiveness of collection development practices. However, at the individual journal title level, there was little overlap between the various indicators of journal value, with the highest ranked, or most valuable, journals differing depending on the indicator considered. Few of the articles studied appeared in open access journals, suggesting a possible focus area for the scholarly communications program.

Conclusions : Knowledge of publication patterns provides an additional source of data to support collection development decisions and scholarly communications programming. As the estimated value of a journal is dependent on the factor being studied, gathering knowledge on a number of factors and from a variety of sources can lead to more informed decision-making. Efforts should be made to expand data considered in areas of scholarly communications and collection development beyond usage to incorporate publishing activities of institutionally affiliated authors.”

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/17122

Open by default: a proposed copyright license and waiver agreement for open access research and data in peer-reviewed journals

Posté le 11 septembre 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

Copyright and licensing of scientific data, internationally, are complex and present legal barriers to data sharing, integration and reuse, and therefore restrict the most efficient transfer and discovery of scientific knowledge. Much data are included within scientific journal articles, their published tables, additional files (supplementary material) and reference lists. However, these data are usually published under licenses which are not appropriate for data.

Creative Commons CC0 is an appropriate and increasingly accepted method for dedicating data to the public domain, to enable data reuse with the minimum of restrictions. BioMed Central is committed to working towards implementation of open data-compliant licensing in its publications. Here we detail a protocol for implementing a combined Creative Commons Attribution license (for copyrightable material) and Creative Commons CC0 waiver (for data) agreement for content published in peer-reviewed open access journals.

We explain the differences between legal requirements for attribution in copyright, and cultural requirements in scholarship for giving individuals credit for their work through citation. We argue that publishing data in scientific journals under CC0 will have numerous benefits for individuals and society, and yet will have minimal implications for authors and minimal impact on current publishing and research workflows.

We provide practical examples and definitions of data types, such as XML and tabular data, and specific secondary use cases for published data, including text mining, reproducible research, and open bibliography. We believe this proposed change to the current copyright and licensing structure in science publishing will help clarify what users — people and machines — of the published literature can do, legally, with journal articles and make research using the published literature more efficient.

We further believe this model could be adopted across multiple publishers, and invite comment on this article from all stakeholders in scientific research.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/5/494/abstract

Scientific knowledge dissemination in Danish seed communities of…

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Scientific knowledge dissemination in Danish seed communities of practice :

“Danish agriculture and seed science have a history of successful collaboration spanning more than a hundred years. In this study, we interviewed 26 growers, consultants, and scientists from the Danish seed community focusing on their current knowledge status and on their views on improving scientific knowledge communication. Theoretically, we consider these actors participants in different communities of practice relating to the production of seeds (Seed-CoP), and we conclude that strong network collaboration is present among Danish seed-CoP effectuated by the valuable work undertaken by the consultants. We discovered a divergence in knowledge dissemination among the growers – an innovative group of growers with a high demand for new scientific knowledge versus a majority of growers content with the level of knowledge provided by the consultants. ‘Time’ was recognized as an important parameter, as only the innovative growers prioritized time allocation for additional knowledge search. To improve scientific knowledge dissemination and interdisciplinary collaboration among Danish seed-CoP we recommend a combination of face-to-face and online communication processes.”

URL : http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/11/03/Jcom1103%282012%29A02

The persistence of error: a study of retracted articles on the Internet and in personal libraries

Posté le 10 août 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

Objective

To determine the accessibility of retracted articles residing on non-publisher websites and in personal libraries.

Methods

Searches were performed to locate Internet copies of 1,779 retracted articles identified in MEDLINE, published between 1973 and 2010, excluding the publishers’ website. Found copies were classified by article version and location. Mendeley (a bibliographic software) was searched for copies residing in personal libraries.

Results

Non-publisher websites provided 321 publicly accessible copies for 289 retracted articles: 304 (95%) copies were the publisher’ versions, and 13 (4%) were final manuscripts. PubMed Central had 138 (43%) copies; educational websites 94 (29%); commercial websites 24 (7%); advocacy websites 16 (5%); and institutional repositories 10 (3%). Just 15 (5%) full-article views included a retraction statement. Personal Mendeley libraries contained records for 1,340 (75%) retracted articles, shared by 3.4 users, on average.

Conclusions

The benefits of decentralized access to scientific articles may come with the cost of promoting incorrect, invalid, or untrustworthy science. Automated methods to deliver status updates to readers may reduce the persistence of error in the scientific literature.”

URL : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411255/