Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Online survey on scientific information in the digital…

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Online survey on scientific information in the digital age :

“The public consultation ‘Online survey on scientific information in the digital age’ spurred great interest among different categories of stakeholders, with 1 140 responses received. The Commission received responses from 42 countries, including from all Member States except Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Slovakia, with 37 % of all responses submitted by German respondents.

Respondents were asked if there is no access problem to scientific publications in Europe: 84 % disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement. The high prices of journals/subscriptions (89 %) and limited library budgets (85 %) were signalled as the most important barriers to accessing scientific publications. More than 1 000 respondents (90 %) supported the idea that publications resulting from publicly funded research should, as a matter of principle, be in open access (OA) mode. An even higher number of respondents (91 %) agreed or agreed strongly that OA increased access to and dissemination of scientific publications. Self-archiving (‘green OA’) or a combination of self-archiving and OA publishing (‘gold OA’) were identified as the preferred ways that public research policy should facilitate in order to increase the number and share of scientific publications available in OA. Respondents were asked, in the case of self-archiving (‘green OA’), what the desirable embargo period is (period of time during which publication is not yet open access): a six-month period was favoured by 56 % of respondents (although 25 % disagree with this option).

As for the question of access to research data, the vast majority of respondents (87 %) disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement that there is no access problem for research data in Europe. The barriers to access research data considered very important or important by respondents were: lack of funding to develop and maintain the necessary infrastructures (80 %); the insufficient credit given to researchers for making research data available (80 %); and insufficient national/regional strategies/policies (79 %). There was strong support (90 % of responses) for research data that is publicly available and results
from public funding to be, as a matter of principle, available for reuse and free of charge on the Internet. Lower support (72 % of responses) was given for data resulting from partly publicly and partly privately funded research.

Responding to the question asking whether preservation of scientific information is at present sufficiently addressed, 64 % of the respondents disagreed or disagreed strongly. The main barriers signalled in this area were: uncertainty as to who is responsible for preserving scientific information (80 %); the quality and interoperability of repositories (78 %); and the lack of a harmonised approach to legal deposit (69 %).”

URL : http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/survey-on-scientific-information-digital-age_en.pdf

Trends in Scholarly Communication and Knowledge Dissemination in the Age of Online Social Media

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It is no secret that Online Social Media (OSM) has become mainstream in recent years, and their adoption has skyrocketed. As a result of their growing popularity, numerous studies have been conducted on how the general public is using OSM.

However, very little work has been done on how scholars are using and adapting to these new tools in their professional life. In an attempt to fill this significant gap in the research literature, we recently conducted a comprehensive online survey to discover if, how and why scholars are using these new media for communication and knowledge dissemination.

In particular, we focussed on how academics in the social sciences use social media tools for professional purposes, and the implications that this might have on the future of scholarly communication and publishing practices in the age of online social media.

 

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