Étiquette : scientific communication

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Heading for the Open Road Costs and Benefits…

Heading for the Open Road: Costs and Benefits of Transitions in Scholarly Communications :

« This paper reports on a study — overseen by representatives of the publishing, library and research funder communities in the UK — investigating the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different but realistic scenarios for moving towards that end over the next five years, including gold and green open access, moves towards national licensing, publisher-led delayed open access, and transactional models. It then compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK. The scenarios, the comparisons between them, and the modelling on which they are based, amount to a benefit-cost analysis to help in appraising policy options over the next five years. Our conclusion is that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to gold open access, while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed circa £2,000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence. »

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2011-1/index.html?000529

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Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success Research Report Version 1.0

Over the past five years, libraries have begun to expand their role in the scholarly publishing value chain by offering a greater range of pre-publication and editorial support services. Given the rapid evolution of these services, there is a clear community need for practical guidance concerning the challenges and opportunities facing library-based publishing programs.

Recognizing that library publishing services represent one part of a complex ecology of scholarly communication, Purdue University Libraries, in collaboration with the Libraries of Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Utah, secured an IMLS National Leadership Grant under the title “Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success.” The project, conducted between October 2010 and September 2011, seeks to advance the professionalism of library-based publishing by identifying successful library publishing strategies and services, highlighting best practices, and recommending priorities for building capacity.

The project has four components: 1) a survey of librarians designed to provide an overview of current practice for library publishing programs (led by consultant October Ivins); 2) a report presenting best practice case studies of the publishing programs at the partner institutions (written by consultant Raym Crow); 3) a series of workshops held at each participating institution to present and discuss the findings of the survey and case studies; and 4) a review of the existing literature on library publishing services. The results of these research threads are pulled together in this project white paper.

URL : http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_research/136/

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Openness as infrastructure

The advent of open access to peer reviewed scholarly literature in the biomedical sciences creates the opening to examine scholarship in general, and chemistry in particular, to see where and how novel forms of network technology can accelerate the scientific method. This paper examines broad trends in information access and openness with an eye towards their applications in chemistry.

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197551/

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Report on Integration of Data and Publications …

Report on Integration of Data and Publications :

« Scholarly communication is the foundation of modern research where empirical evidence is interpreted and communicated as published hypothesis driven research. Many current and recent reports highlight the impact of advancing technology on modern research and consequences this has on scholarly communication. As part of the ODE project this report sought to coalesce current though and opinions from numerous and diverse sources to reveal opportunities for supporting a more connected and integrated scholarly record. Four perspectives were considered, those of the Researcher who generates or reuses primary data, Publishers who provide the mechanisms to communicate research activities and Libraries & Data enters who maintain and preserve the evidence that underpins scholarly communication and the published record. This report finds the landscape fragmented and complex where competing interests can sometimes confuse and confound requirements, needs and expectations. Equally the report identifies clear opportunity for all stakeholders to directly enable a more joined up and vital scholarly record of modern research. »

URL : http://www.libereurope.eu/sites/default/files/ODE-ReportOnIntegrationOfDataAndPublication.pdf

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The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals A…

The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals: A Study of College and University Libraries in Indiana :

« Objectives: This study examines what factors are considered by college and university libraries in Indiana when making the decision to cancel subscriptions to print journals when an electronic equivalent is available. The study also looks at who the primary decision makers are in this regard. Libraries at public and private institutions of varying sizes were included in the study.

Methods : An online survey was sent to seventy-three libraries in the consortium, Academic Libraries of Indiana. Structured interviews with administrators at nine libraries were also conducted.

Results: Academic libraries in Indiana use subscription cost, redundancy of formats, student preference, budget reductions and usage as the primary factors in canceling print journal subscriptions in favor of their electronic counterparts. There is also a preference for the electronic format for new subscriptions even when a print version is also available.

Conclusions: The study indicates that subscription cost is the most important consideration in the journal cancelation process with other factors also having an effect on the preference of libraries for electronic versions of journals. The study also shows that libraries at public and private colleges and universities are at different stages of moving away from print to an online-only journal format. At the same time, there is consensus that a small collection of print titles will still be needed. The primary decision-makers are librarians, faculty, and library administrators. »

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/10330

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Open access institutional repositories for scholarly communication: A developing country perspective

Scholarly communication is the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavours. Nowadays, Open Access Repositories (OARs) and Open Access (OA) has become the emerging ways to share research output, academic result and disseminating information to the academic community for better usability and visibility.

The purpose of this present study is to discuss the role of OAIR (Open Access Institutional Repository) in scholarly communication and focused how does developing country like Bangladesh may be benefited through this system.

The major focus of the present study is to familiar with different initiatives of building OAIR and Open Access (OA) in Bangladesh. In pursuing the above objectives, the present research posed the following research questions (RQs) that will guide the study as well. How OAIR can be used as an effective tool for scholarly communication?

What is the present status of the OAIR and OA initiatives in Bangladesh and what are the prospects of OAIR in Bangladesh? An analysis of the appropriate literature was carried out, focusing on papers explicitly referring to changing roles of OAIR. The study performed online searches and substantial amount of literature has been reviewed. Literature collected through internet, personal visits, and secondary sources of information has been analyzed.

Findings reveal that OAIR is very important for the scholarly communication and Bangladesh is not far behind to get the fullest advantages of the OAIR. It is suggested some directions for building OAIR and OA initiatives in Bangladesh.

It is believed that faculty and research scholars will be able to publish their research output in the proposed IR to visible their scholarly research output globally. This study no doubt will foster more research on OAIR for the improvement of Open Access scenarios in Bangladesh.

URL : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anup_Das7/publication/249774716_Open_Access_and_Institutional_Repositories_-_A_Developing_Country_Perspective_A_case_study_of_India/links/00b7d52bbf9f967a64000000.pdf

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An Open Access Future? Report from the eurocancercoms project

« In 2010, the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) as a member of the Eurocancercoms FP7 project conducted a survey on professional communication activities across its European membership with particular reference to the use of the internet and barriers to communication. Over half of the survey respondents were working in basic cancer research, a further third in translational research and the remaining respondents in epidemiology or medical oncology. From a range of interesting information and opinions, the survey revealed that the internet is used by 94% of cancer researchers for professional activities every day with the majority accessing PubMed and online journals daily or 2-3 times a week. These simple statistics place access to published research findings online at the centre of support for cancer researchers’ work: a crucial sharing of information which can accelerate progress in the scientific battle with cancer.

While the survey had not focussed on Open Access specifically, comment banks and discussions at consensus meetings following the publication of the survey results highlighted the issue of access to subscription journals, the barrier to essential and urgent information that a ‘paywall’ creates, and the need for free access. A second survey picking up on the issue of Open Access publishing has now been completed. This paper shares the results of that survey, which was again conducted across the European membership of EACR, and cross references responses with selected data from the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) 2011 which was undertaken across all academic disciplines. The SOAP data is freely accessible and can be mined for information by anyone who wishes to use it. A number of questions were included in the survey that mirrored those used by SOAP, allowing the direct comparison of results. In this article a comparison has been made between the responses provided by cancer researchers and the 7,433 respondents to the SOAP survey from the Biological Sciences. (Over 43,000 responses were received across all disciplines to the SOAP survey.)

As a conclusion and invitation to further discussion, this paper also contributes to the debate around subscription and Open Access publishing, supporting the case for accelerating the progress towards Open Access publishing of cancer research articles as a particularly supportive way of assisting all researchers to make unhindered progress with their work. »

URL : http://www.eacr.org/about/20110820_Open%20Access%20Future.pdf