Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Science Dissemination using Open Access

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The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available.

The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet.

Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included. The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN (Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).

URL : https://issuu.com/sdu-ictp/docs/openaccess

Research productivity-visibility-accessibility and scholarly communication in Southern African universities

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The project for the revitalisation of Southern Africa’s higher education sector is dependent on, among other things, the capacity of the region’s universities to produce research, to communicate that research to a broad public audience and to use the research output in the process of educating future generations of graduates. Given this context, research output in the great majority of Southern African universities is barely visible.

While the introduction of new digital media may offer greater accessibility and expanded opportunities for the visibility of scholarly communication, this may be insufficient to meet the needs of the many scholars and other actors who seek to build on existing bodies of knowledge, whether to advance society or in order to create knowledge for its own sake.

This article reports the findings of two 2008 studies – The state of public science in the SADC region and Opening access to knowledge in Southern African universities. Working within a frame which understands knowledge produced in universities as a public good, this article examines the issues at play in terms of the productivity-visibility-accessibility of scholarly communications in regional higher education.

The conclusion discusses a possible approach to improve such productivity-visibility-accessibility, through the adoption of a strategic vision of open access to knowledge and through consideration of two breakthroughs pertinent to achieving a vision of revitalised higher education in the region.

URL : http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/19768?show=full

Access to Africa’s knowledge: Publishing…

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Access to Africa’s knowledge: Publishing development research and measuring value :
This paper reviews, critically, the discourse of research publication policy and the directives of the regional and global organisations that advise African countries with respect to their relevance to African scholarly communication. What emerges is a readiness to use the concepts and language of the public good, making claims for the power of technology to resolve issues of African development. However, when it comes to implementing scholarly publication policies, this vision of technological
power and development-focused scientific output is undermined by a reversion to a conservative research culture that relies on competitive systems for valuing and accrediting scholarship, predicated upon the systems and values managed by powerful global commercial publishing consortia.
The result is that the policies put in place to advance African research effectively act as an impediment to ambitions for a revival of a form of scholarship that could drive continental growth. While open access publishing models offer solutions to the marginalisation of African research, the paper argues that what is also needed is a re-evaluation of the values that underpin the recognition of scholarly publishing, to better align with the continent’s articulated research goals.
URL : http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/AJIC10-Gray.pdf

Challenges in the study of Cuban scienti…

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Challenges in the study of Cuban scientific output :
Cuban scientific output at macro level has not been frequently studied in the literature on scientometrics. The current paper explores the different metric approaches to the Cuban scientific activity carried out by national and international authors. Also, the article develops a scientometric study of the Cuban scientific production as included in Scopus during the period 1996-2007, using socio-economic indicators combined with bibliometric indicators supported by the SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Web of Science and Scopus are compared as information sources. Results confirm the possibility to use Scopus to obtain an objective picture of the Cuban science behaviour during the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the XXI century. The SCImago Journal & Country Rank, in this case, offers an important set of indicators. The combination of these indicators with those related to socio-economic aspects of activities in Science and Technology, allow the authors to show a perspective of the Cuban science system evolution during the period analyzed. The inclusion in Scopus of less-cited journals published in Spanish language and its impact on productivity and citation-based indicators is also discussed. Our investigation found an increasing growth of the Cuban scientific production during the whole period, which is in correspondence to the country efforts and expenditures in Research and Development activities.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18598/

Mapping the structure and evolution of e…

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Mapping the structure and evolution of electronic publishing as a research field using co-citation analysis :
Electronic publishing can be defined as making full-texts of journal articles and books available through the network. Although e-publishing has been in existence for over 30 years in various forms such as CD-ROMs, it owes much of its current level of development to the Internet and the Web. This paper attempts to chart the evolution of e-publishing as a research field over the last 31 years using CiteSpace, an information visualization tool. It maps the intellectual structure of e-publishing based on 493 articles that appeared in professional literature on the subject between 1979 and 2009. Document co-citation and author co-citation patterns and patterns of noun phrases and keywords of papers on e-publishing are visualized through a number of co-citation maps. Maps show the major research strands and hot topics in e-publishing such as “open access” and would improve our understanding of
the e-publishing as a research field.
URL : http://bit.ly/adHgKU