Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

From Stacks to the Web the Transformation of…

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From Stacks to the Web: the Transformation of Academic Library Collecting :

“The existence of a ubiquitous and cheap worldwide communication’s network that increasingly makes documents easily and freely available will require a transformation of academic library collecting practice. It will be driven by a number of specific developments including: the digitization of content; the development of print repositories; the development of e-readers and print-on-demand publishing; the growth of open access; challenges to establish academic publishing organizations; and the growth of new forms of scholarship based on openness and social productivity. If academic libraries are to be successful, they will need to: deconstruct legacy print collections; move from item-by-item book selection to purchase-on-demand and subscriptions; manage the transition to open access journals; focus on curating unique items; and develop new mechanisms for funding national infrastructure”

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2012/01/09/crl-309.abstract

Résultats de l’enquête sur les usages et pratiques des comportements de publications au sein des communautés de l’OSUG

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Afin de mieux connaître les usages et pratiques des comportements de publications au sein des communautés scientifiques de l’Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG), un questionnaire a été diffusé sous format numérique en juin 2011.

Une première partie représente les comportements globaux des chercheurs dans les différents aspects de la publication. La deuxième et la troisième partie abordent les pratiques liées, respectivement, à l’Open Access et aux archives ouvertes, ainsi que les perceptions de ces deux modèles alternatifs dans le secteur de la publication.

La dernière partie fait une rapide synthèse du profil type des répondants et présente les mots-clés récoltés pour chaque laboratoires composant l’OSUG.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00655737/fr/

Achieving rigor and relevance in online multimedia scholarly…

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Achieving rigor and relevance in online multimedia scholarly publishing :

“This paper discusses the importance of relevance and rigor in scholarly publishing in a new media–rich world. We defend that scholarship should be useful and engaging to audiences through the use of new media, and at the same time scholarly publishers must develop and maintain methods of ensuring content accuracy and providing quality controls in the production of scholarly multimedia products. We review examples and a case study of existing scholarly publishing venues that attempt to maintain quality control standards while embracing innovative multimedia formats. We also present lessons learned from the case experience and challenges that face us in the scholarly publication of multimedia.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3762/3119

A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open…

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A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals :

“Background: The emergence of the Internet has triggered tremendous changes in the publication of scientific peer-reviewed journals. Today, journals are usually available in parallel electronic versions, but the way the peer-review process works, the look of articles and journals, and the rigid and slow publication schedules have remained largely unchanged, at least for the vast majority of subscription-based journals. Those publishing firms and scholarly publishers who have chosen the more radical option of open access (OA), in which the content of journals is freely accessible to anybody with Internet connectivity, have had a much bigger degree of freedom to experiment with innovations.

Objective: The objective was to study how open access journals have experimented with innovations concerning ways of organizing the peer review, the format of journals and articles, new interactive and media formats, and novel publishing revenue models.

Methods: The features of 24 open access journals were studied. The journals were chosen in a nonrandom manner from the approximately 7000 existing OA journals based on available information about interesting journals and include both representative cases and highly innovative outlier cases.

Results: Most early OA journals in the 1990s were founded by individual scholars and used a business model based on voluntary work close in spirit to open-source development of software. In the next wave, many long-established journals, in particular society journals and journals from regions such as Latin America, made their articles OA when they started publishing parallel electronic versions. From about 2002 on, newly founded professional OA publishing firms using article-processing charges to fund their operations have emerged. Over the years, there have been several experiments with new forms of peer review, media enhancements, and the inclusion of structured data sets with articles. In recent years, the growth of OA publishing has also been facilitated by the availability of open-source software for journal publishing.

Conclusions: The case studies illustrate how a new technology and a business model enabled by new technology can be harnessed to find new innovative ways for the organization and content of scholarly publishing. Several recent launches of OA journals by major subscription publishers demonstrate that OA is rapidly gaining acceptance as a sustainable alternative to subscription-based scholarly publishing.”

URL : http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e115/

Longitudinal Trends in the Performance of Scientific Peer…

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Longitudinal Trends in the Performance of Scientific Peer Reviewers :

“Study objective : We characterize changes in review quality by individual peer reviewers over time.

Methods : Editors at a specialty journal in the top 11% of Institute of Scientific Information journals rated the quality of every review, using a validated 5-point quality score. Linear mixed-effect models were used to analyze rating changes over time, calculating within-reviewer trends plus predicted slope of change in score for each reviewer. Reviewers at this journal have been shown comparable to those at other journals.

Results : Reviews (14,808) were performed by 1,499 reviewers and rated by 84 editors during the 14-year study. Ninety-two percent of reviewers demonstrated very slow but steady deterioration in their scores (mean –0.04 points [–0.8%] per year). Rate of deterioration was unrelated to duration of reviewing but moderately correlated with mean reviewer quality score (R=0.52). The mean score of each reviewer’s first 4 reviews predicted subsequent performance with a sensitivity of 75% and specificity of 47%. Scores of the group stayed constant over time despite deterioration because newly recruited reviewers initially had higher mean quality scores than their predecessors.

Conclusion : This study, one of few tracking expert performance longitudinally, demonstrates that most journal peer reviewers received lower quality scores for article assessment over the years. This could be due to deteriorating performance (caused by either cognitive changes or competing priorities) or, to a partial degree, escalating expectations; other explanations were ruled out. This makes monitoring reviewer quality even more crucial to maintain the mission of scientific journals.”

URL : http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(10)01266-7/fulltext

Toward a new model of scientific publishing discussion…

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Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal :

“The current system of publishing in the biological sciences is notable for its redundancy, inconsistency, sluggishness, and opacity. These problems persist, and grow worse, because the peer review system remains focused on deciding whether or not to publish a paper in a particular journal rather than providing (1) a high-quality evaluation of scientific merit and (2) the information necessary to organize and prioritize the literature. Online access has eliminated the need for journals as distribution channels, so their primary current role is to provide authors with feedback prior to publication and a quick way for other researchers to prioritize the literature based on which journal publishes a paper. However, the feedback provided by reviewers is not focused on scientific merit but on whether to publish in a particular journal, which is generally of little use to authors and an opaque and noisy basis for prioritizing the literature. Further, each submission of a rejected manuscript requires the entire machinery of peer review to creak to life anew. This redundancy incurs delays, inconsistency, and increased burdens on authors, reviewers, and editors. Finally, reviewers have no real incentive to review well or quickly, as their performance is not tracked, let alone rewarded. One of the consistent suggestions for modifying the current peer review system is the introduction of some form of post-publication reception, and the development of a marketplace where the priority of a paper rises and falls based on its reception from the field (see other articles in this special topics). However, the information that accompanies a paper into the marketplace is as important as the marketplace’s mechanics. Beyond suggestions concerning the mechanisms of reception, we propose an update to the system of publishing in which publication is guaranteed, but pre-publication peer review still occurs, giving the authors the opportunity to revise their work following a mini pre-reception from the field. This step also provides a consistent set of rankings and reviews to the marketplace, allowing for early prioritization and stabilizing its early dynamics. We further propose to improve the general quality of reviewing by providing tangible rewards to those who do it well.”
URL : http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2011.00055/full

Mathematicians’ Views on Current Publishing Issues A Survey…

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Mathematicians’ Views on Current Publishing Issues: A Survey of Researchers :

This article reports research mathematicians’ attitudes about and activity in specific scholarly communication areas, as captured in a 2010 survey of more than 600 randomly-selected mathematicians worldwide. Key findings include:

  • Most mathematicians have papers in the arXiv, but posting to their own web pages remains more common;
  • A third of mathematicians have published papers in open access (OA) journals, with speed of publication being seen as the primary advantage over traditional journals, but there is substantial philosophical opposition to OA journal models that charge author fees;
  • Tenure and promotion criteria influence publishing decisions even among most tenured faculty members;
  • Mathematicians want to keep more rights to their publications than they have been allowed, but they have a high success rate in negotiating with publishers for more;
  • Online collaboration tools, such as Google Groups, are not yet widely used for research but their use is expected to rise in the near future.

Reasons behind the mathematics culture of openness were also explored.”

URL : http://www.istl.org/11-fall/refereed4.html