Étiquette : scientific communication

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The four pillars of scholarly publishing The future…

The four pillars of scholarly publishing: The future and a foundation :

« With the rise of electronic publishing and the inherent paradigm shifts for so many other scientific endeavours, it is time to consider a change in the practices of scholarly publication in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. To facilitate the speed and quality of science, the future of scholarly communication will rest on four pillars – an ecosystem of scholarly products, immediate and open access, open peer review, and full recognition for participating in the process. These four pillars enable us to build better tools to facilitate the discovery of new relevant work for individual scientists, one of the greatest challenges of our time as we cope with the current deluge of scientific information. By incorporating these principles into future publication platforms, we argue that science and society will be better served than by remaining locked into a publication formula that arose in the 1600s. It has served its purpose admirably and well, but it is time to move forward. With the rise of the Internet, scholarly publishing has embraced electronic distribution. But the tools afforded by the Internet and other advancing technologies have profound implications for scholarly communication beyond just distribution. We argue that, to best serve science, the process of scholarly communication must embrace these advances and evolve. Here we consider the current state of the process in ecology and evolutionary biology and propose directions for change. We identify four pillars for the future of scientific communication: (1) an ecosystem of scholarly products; (2) immediate and open access; (3) open peer review; and (4) full recognition for participating in the process. These four pillars will guide the development of better tools and practices for discovering and sharing scientific knowledge in a modern networked world. Things were far different when the existing system arose in the 1600s, and though it has served its purpose admirably and well, it is time to move forward. »

URL : https://peerj.com/preprints/11/

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Are elite journals declining Previous work indicates…

Are elite journals declining? :

« Previous work indicates that over the past 20 years, the highest quality work have been published in an increasingly diverse and larger group of journals. In this paper we examine whether this diversification has also affected the handful of elite journals that are traditionally considered to be the best. We examine citation patterns over the past 40 years of 7 long-standing traditionally elite journals and 6 journals that have been increasing in importance over the past 20 years. To be among the top 5% or 1% cited papers, papers now need about twice as many citations as they did 40 years ago. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s elite journals have been publishing a decreasing proportion of these top cited papers. This also applies to the two journals that are typically considered as the top venues and often used as bibliometric indicators of « excellence », Science and Nature. On the other hand, several new and established journals are publishing an increasing proportion of most cited papers. These changes bring new challenges and opportunities for all parties. Journals can enact policies to increase or maintain their relative position in the journal hierarchy. Researchers now have the option to publish in more diverse venues knowing that their work can still reach the same audiences. Finally, evaluators and administrators need to know that although there will always be a certain prestige associated with publishing in « elite » journals, journal hierarchies are in constant flux so inclusion of journals into this group is not permanent. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.6460

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Metajournals A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and…

Metajournals. A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and data aggregation :

« While the EU is building an open access infrastructure of archives (e.g. OpenAIRE) and it is trying to implement it in the Horizon 2020 program, the gap between the tools and the human beings – researchers, citizen scientists, students, ordinary people – is still wide. The necessity to dictate open access publishing as a mandate for the EU funded research – ten years after the BOAI – is an obvious symptom of it: there is a chasm between the net and the public use of reason. To escalate the advancement and the reuse of research, we should federate the multitude of already existing open access journals in federal open overlay journals that receive their contents from the member journals and boost it with their aggregation power and their semantic web tools. The article contains both the theoretical basis and the guidelines for a project whose goals are:
1. making open access journals visible, highly cited and powerful, by federating them into wide disciplinary overlay journals;
2. avoiding the traps of the “authors pay” open access business model, by exploiting one of the virtue of federalism: the federate journals can remain little and affordable, if they gain visibility from the power of the federal overlay journal aggregating them;
3. enriching the overlay journals both through semantic annotation tools and by means of open platforms dedicated to host ex post peer review and experts comments;
4. making the selection and evaluation processes and their resulting data as much as possible public and open, to avoid the pitfalls (e. g, the serials price crisis) experienced by the closed access publishing model. It is about time to free academic publishing from its expensive walled gardens and to put to test the tools that can help us to transform it in one open forest, with one hundred flowers – and one hundred trailblazers. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19101/

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Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central…

Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central reduces journal readership–retrospective cohort analysis :

« Does PubMed Central-a government-run digital archive of biomedical articles-compete with scientific society journals? A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles (5999 treatment, 7224 control) published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals in nutrition, experimental biology, physiology, and radiology between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text hypertext markup language (HTML) article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in portable document format (PDF) article downloads from the journals’ websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles (treatment) become freely available from the PubMed Central repository. In addition, the effect of PubMed Central on reducing PDF article downloads is increasing over time, growing at a rate of 1.6% per year. There was no longitudinal effect for full-text HTML downloads. While PubMed Central may be providing complementary access to readers traditionally underserved by scientific journals, the loss of article readership from the journal website may weaken the ability of the journal to build communities of interest around research papers, impede the communication of news and events to scientific society members and journal readers, and reduce the perceived value of the journal to institutional subscribers. »

URL : http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2013/04/02/fj.13-229922.full.pdf

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Les Sciences Humaines et Sociales peuvent-elles se permettre d’être gratuites ?

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Non classé

Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh…

Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh: A New Paradigm of Scholarly Communication :

« Nowadays, open access (OA) in its diverse forms constitutes the most interesting and promising model for the research output of an academic or research institution. The purpose of the present study is to discuss the situation of OA in the developing world, with a focus on Bangladesh. The study also addresses why OA is important for developing countries and which initiatives have been taken in Bangladesh. Finally, we discuss some challenging issues of OA and suggestions on how to overcome these issues. It is rather obvious that developing countries have always faced a lack of research information and were unable to afford sufficient subscriptions to journals. The other side of the picture is the poor dissemination of the research outcome in the developing world. In Bangladesh, only three organizations have their institutional repository and have a reasonable number of local OA journals. We will identify some problems that impede the process of building open access IR, or more generally an OA environment in Bangladesh. We are convinced, however, that we will witness in the near future a sustainable growth of open access initiatives, with more open access literature and digital repositories. »

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8245

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EN

The ethics of open access publishing

Should those who work on ethics welcome or resist moves to open access publishing? This paper analyses arguments in favour and against the increasing requirement for open access publishing and considers their implications for bioethics research. In the context of biomedical science, major funders are increasingly mandating open access as a condition of funding and such moves are also common in other disciplines.

Whilst there has been some debate about the implications of open-access for the social sciences and humanities, there has been little if any discussion about the implications of open access for ethics. This is surprising given both the central role of public reason and critique in ethics and the fact that many of the arguments made for and against open access have been couched in moral terms.

In what follows I argue that those who work in ethics have a strong interest in supporting moves towards more open publishing approaches which have the potential both to inform and promote richer and more diverse forms of public deliberation and to be enriched by them. The importance of public deliberation in practical and applied ethics suggests that ethicists have a particular interest in the promotion of diverse and experimental forms of publication and debate and in supporting new, more creative and more participatory approaches to publication.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/14/16/abstract