Use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook by PhD Students for Scholarly Communication: A UK study

This study explores scholarly use of social media by PhD researchers through mix-methods of qualitative interviews, participant observation and content analysis of a case study #phdchat.

We found that blogs, Twitter and Facebook are among the most popular social media tools being used by researchers. They can be used by PhD students and early career researchers to benefit their scholarly communication practice, promote their professional profiles, disseminate their work to a wider audience quickly, and gain feedbacks and support from peers across the globe.

There are also difficulties and potential problems such as the lack of standards and incentives, the risks of idea being pinched and plagiarism, lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain using social media tool and the potential huge amount of time and effort needed to invest.

We found that respondents link different social media tools together to maximise the impact of the content disseminated, as well as to create a personal learning network (PLN) connected with people across the globe.

For privacy issue, the participants use different identities on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is usually set as private with access for friends only and Twitter is public and used for professional purposes.

However, Facebook page and groups can be public which are used to build a community and disseminate information without revealing much content from individual member’s personal profile.”

URL : https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/item/?pid=uk-ac-man-scw:187789

Academic Publishing and Open Access With the…

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Academic Publishing and Open Access :

“With the spread of the internet and new opportunities for publishing academic works digitally at virtually no costs, the traditional copyright model has recently been put under critical review which is for at least two reasons: First and foremost, a vast increase in subscription prices for academic journals has forced (university) libraries to significantly cut their journal portfolios. Second, copyright seems negligible in academia as researchers are motivated by reputation gains and CV effects rather than direct financial returns from publishing their works. As a consequence, the promotion of Open Access (OA) to scientific research is claimed as the perceived future of academic publishing in the information age.

This paper critically reviews the OA debate by discussing theoretical and empirical arguments on the role of copyright in publishing scientific outcomes. A brief historical perspective introduces to the changed environmental conditions for scholarly publishing, pointing to a new trade-off in the digital age. By framing the debate in a broader literature stream and related issues, we provide with caveat for further research and a glimpse of possible future scenarios. It is shown that copyright may be both a blessing and a curse in establishing an effective framework for scientific progress.”

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2198400

Assemblée générale extraordinaire des revues diffusées sur Cairn.info : Les revues SHS et l’Open Access

Ouverture de la journée – Contexte et objectifs

Marc Minon, Ouverture de la journée from Cairn.info on Vimeo.

L’Open Access : les origines du mouvement, ses motivations, ses modalités

Gh Chartron.00 from Cairn.info on Vimeo.

Les questions juridiques liées à l’Open Access – Analyse du texte de la recommandation de la Commission Européenne du 17 juillet 2012

Jean Martin, Les questions juridiques liées à l’Open Access from Cairn.info on Vimeo.

La position de la France sur l’Open Access

Michel Marian, La position de la France sur l’Open Access from Cairn.info on Vimeo.

Le modèle auteur-payeur : définition, avantages, difficultés éventuelles de mise en place

Jean-Marc Quilbé, Le modèle auteur-payeur : définition, avantages, difficultés éventuelles de mise en place from Cairn.info on Vimeo.

Freemium, Platinium : les autres modèles de financement des revues

Pierre Mounier, Jean-Christophe Peyssard, Freemium, Platinium : les autres modèles de financement des revues from Cairn.info on Vimeo.

Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce

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“Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled “Big Deal” packages, are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been called “unsustainable journal price escalation.” It is also inhibiting the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.

The “Big Deal” practices are worth studying for several general reasons. The degree to which publishers succeed in diminishing the role of libraries may be an indicator of the degree and speed at which universities transform themselves. More importantly, these “Big Deals” appear to point the way to the future of the whole economy, where progress is characterized by declining privacy, increasing price discrimination, increasing opaqueness in pricing, increasing reliance on low-paid or upaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on customer inertia.”

URL : http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

What Do Journals Do? – Voluntary Public Goods and the Doomsday of Commercial Science Publishing

Commercial (and non-commercial) science publishing has evolved as a solution to a number of problems in the market for research results. It has reduced transaction costs by bringing together authors and readers, which is just the simple advantage of market intermediaries. It has delivered added value to readers by filtering out bad work.

It has added value to authors by delivering signals of high quality work. It has added value by sorting, relieving readers from the necessity to identify relevant work in some field of interest. And it has contributed to the value of published work by delivering guidance from reviewers to authors.

But technological changes already have and will continue to erase the value of these services. These services can be provided in much better quality and at much lower costs via open access science networks like SSRN.

All we need to make this work are some simple technical improvements and a few new but simple modes of peer interaction. My conjecture is that commercial science publishing will not survive for more than a couple of years.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2189631

Managing your assets in the publication economy

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“The issue this article aims to address is the fact that publications may nowadays be used to assess impact and quality of research in ways academics may not be fully aware of. During recent years, scholarly publications have gained in importance, not primarily as the traditional vehicle for the dissemination of new scientific findings, but as a foundation for assessing the production and impact of organizations, research groups and individual researchers. This means that publications as artefacts per se are starting to play a new important role in the scientific community and that researchers need to be aware of how publication and citation counts are being used to assess their research and the outreach, impact and reputation of their mother organization. University rankings, for instance, often have some parameters based on the publishing of the ranked institution. This article is thus not about scientific writing as such; it focuses on what happens to your publication after the publishing has taken place and on aspects to take into account while planning the publishing of your article, report or book.”

URL : http://confero.ep.liu.se/issues/2013/v1/130117/