Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web :
“The growing flood of scholarly literature is exposing the weaknesses of current, citation–based methods of evaluating and filtering articles. A novel and promising approach is to examine the use and citation of articles in a new forum: Web 2.0 services like social bookmarking and microblogging. Metrics based on this data could build a “Scientometics 2.0,” supporting richer and more timely pictures of articles’ impact. This paper develops the most comprehensive list of these services to date, assessing the potential value and availability of data from each. We also suggest the next steps toward building and validating metrics drawn from the social Web.”
URL : http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2874/2570
The Accessibility of Open Access Materia…
The Accessibility of Open Access Materials in Libraries :
“Librarians often champion open access (OA) as a sustainable alternative to the current scholarly communications system, which is widely accepted as being in a state of crisis. However, there has been little insight into how far libraries are making this support tangible by providing access to OA publications in their OPACs and other library pathways. This study conducted a large-scale survey of US library holdings to determine the extent that records of journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals are held by WorldCat-affiliated Academic libraries. It then followed up with a questionnaire inquiring into the attitudes and practices of librarians from 100 libraries that were ranked highest out of the total population in terms of their holdings of DOAJ journals. The main objective of the study was to develop a better understanding of the factors influencing the incorporation of OA materials into a university library’s holdings, where and by what means they typically appear on library websites, and how librarians feel about having these materials in their collections. Our findings suggest that the majority (54%) of WorldCat-affiliated US academic libraries have at least one record for a DOAJ journal in their holdings. It additionally suggests that librarians from institutions holding high numbers of DOAJ records generally have very positive attitudes towards OA, even though most of the respondents from these institutions were largely unaware that their holdings were more heavily weighted towards DOAJ records than at comparable institutions. Regarding library selection of OA titles, a journal’s subject matter was highlighted as a more important consideration than its access model. Additional findings suggest that large publishers of OA journals tend to have a higher representation in library holdings than smaller independent publishers. ”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18766/
Diffusion des documents et données numériques pour la recherche des fonds scientifiques des sciences humaines et sociales :
Les fonds documentaires et plus largement les données sources pour la recherche dans les Sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) ont commencé à prendre le tournant du numérique, de plus en plus de données, servant à faire de la recherche en SHS, sont nativement numériques.
Il s’agit de mettre en œuvre une importante politique de conservation et de diffusion numérique des fonds, acquis la plupart du temps sur fonds publics depuis plus de 40 ans. Cela implique de la numérisation, de la redocumentarisation, de développer des accès multiples tout en assurant l’interopérabilité des données et en plaçant ces fonds dans le web de données.
Depuis 2005, les choses ont évoluées dans le bon sens, mais l’informatisation des fonds documentaires reste faible, il s’agit maintenant d’atteindre une masse critique, de gérer un passage à l’échelle supérieure afin de positionner les données des SHS dans l’extension du web que sera dans quelques années le web de données. Le web à 20 ans, il est devenu l’espace la diffusion des publications scientifiques (revues, sites, ouvrages, colloques, etc.) qui ont été les premières à l’utiliser comme vecteur de diffusion massive.
Mais, pour le moment, il reste relativement vide de « données brutes » : il est temps d’inter-connecter les publications et fonds documentaires, mais aussi les fonds entre eux, afin de construire des espaces de données plus larges, mondiaux, dans le cadre de l’open access quand cela est possible afin d’offre aux scientifiques de demain des corpus de données numériques, documentés, accessibles, interopérables et pérennes.
Cette note expose le potentiel, les réalisations en cours et trace des perceptives opérationnelles et fonctionnelles pour la mise en œuvre d’un projet de conservation et de diffusion numérique des fonds documentaires et des données « brutes » de la recherche en SHS.
Rebooting the CS Publication Process : M…
Rebooting the CS Publication Process :
Many computer science academics have been grousing about failures in our publication process. This
paper catalogs many of the specific complaints that are raised and proposes some radical new solutions
based on the assumption that, by eliminating physical paper entirely and going with a centralized system
to manage papers, we can rethink the entire process: paper submission, revision and publication. Fur-
thermore, having all of the metadata standardized and easily available, ranking algorithms can be easily
conceived to aid in tenure cases and departmental rankings.
URL : http://bit.ly/aeuLa0
Post Title
Interactive Open Access Publishing and Peer Review: The Effectiveness and Perspectives of Transparency and Self-Regulation in Scientific Communication and Evaluation :
The traditional forms of scientific publishing and peer review do not live up to the demands of efficient communication and quality assurance in today’s highly diverse and rapidly evolving world of science. They need to be advanced by interactive and transparent forms of review, publication and discussion that are open to the scientific community and to the public.
The advantages of open access, public peer review and interactive discussion can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional publishing and peer review. Since 2001 the viability of this approach is demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ( ACP) and a growing number of sister journals of the European Geosciences Union ( EGU) and Copernicus Publications.
The achievements and statistics of these journals and their publishers clearly prove both the scientific benefits and the financial sustainability of open access. Future perspectives are outlined with regard to critical rationalism, open societies and the global information commons.
URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2009-3_4/index.html?000479
Economic Implications of Alternative Pub…
Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models: Self-archiving and Repositories :
A knowledge economy has been defined as one in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge has come to play the predominant part in the creation of wealth. It is not simply about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge; it is also about the more effective use and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of economic activities. One key question is whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that might better serve researchers and more effectively communicate and disseminate research findings.
Building on previous work, this paper looks at the costs and potential benefits of alternative models for scientific and scholarly publishing, describing the approach and methods used and summarising the findings of a study undertaken for JISC in the United Kingdom. It concludes that different publishing models can make a material difference to the costs faced by and benefits realised from research communication, and it seems likely that more open access would have substantial net benefits.
URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2009-3_4/index.html?000478
Factors influencing the adoption of open…
Factors influencing the adoption of open access scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities :
Open access – a means for free availability of scholarly content via the Internet – is an emerging opportunity for wider and unlimited access to scholarly literature. Scholarly communication, through open access journals and self-arching, are the two main approaches of open access publishing. However, this mode of scholarly communication is not widely utilised in developing countries such as Tanzania. This paper discusses the factors that influence the adoption of open access for scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities based on a study conducted from 2007 to 2010. A survey questionnaire targeted 544 researchers selected through stratified random sampling from a population of 1088
university researchers at six public universities in Tanzania. In addition, 69 policy makers from the six universities were interviewed. It was evident from the findings that the majority of both the policy makers and researchers were aware of open access. However, most of the researchers accessed free online content more (62%) than they disseminated their scholarly content (20%) through open access. Researchers’ Internet usage skills and self-efficacy, social influence, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and the respondents’ general perceptions about open access were identified as the positive factors likely to facilitate open access adoption in Tanzanian public universities. The current poor research conditions and researchers’ low Internet self-efficacy such as inadequate information search skills were cited as the main hindrances for researchers to use open access outlets to access scholarly content. Additionally, inadequate online publishing skills, and the slow Internet connectivity are the
main issues that deterred researchers to disseminate the research findings through open access outlets. The paper recommends that institutional policies on scholarly communication should be revised to incorporate the use of open access publishing. Furthermore, universities should accelerate the establishment of institutional repositories, advocacy campaigns and training directed to researchers, policy makers, readers and information managers of scholarly content, and the improvement of Internet speed at universities through subscription to more bandwidth so as to meet the demand from the scholarly community.
URL : http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/138-dulle-en.pdf