Étiquette : scientific communication

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Imagining a University Press System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age

Author : Clifford Lynch

I outline a possible future system of many distributed university presses mainly focused on the editorial production of scholarly monographs, supported by a very small number of digital platforms for managing and delivering these monographs as a database rather than transactionally to academic and research libraries. I also touch on the ongoing evolution of various types of scholarly books into (often much more costly) networked information resources and the implications this has for the overall dissemination of scholarship and the roles of university presses.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.207

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Scaling Vectors: Thoughts on the Future …

Scaling Vectors: Thoughts on the Future of Scholarly Communication :

« This essay proposes that bold new forms of experimentation and bookishness are necessary if we are to advance (and perhaps save) scholarly publishing in the humanities. Possible issues facing presses are considered through consideration of two examples in scholarly publishing that involve the author. The first example, the experimental journal Vectors, highlights the advantages and limits of certain types of multimodal scholarly communication for the humanities. The second example, the new Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, points toward new methods of workflow and publishing that link archives, scholars, and presses. The essay ends with a list of key questions that presses will need to address as various stakeholders collectively expand what we understand humanities publishing to be. »

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.208

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Research Publication Characteristics and…

Research Publication Characteristics and Their Relative Values: A Report for the Publishing Research Consortium :

« Scholars consider many factors when judging the potential quality of articles and deciding which articles to read. These factors may also influence their perception of the overall quality of the article. The goal of this project is to examine and measure the relative values of selected research publication characteristics to scientists and scholars and to understand the trade-offs readers make between these characteristics. Since readers cannot know the intrinsic value of an article before reading it, they must use other clues to judge its quality and to estimate what value it may have to them. For example, how important is the author reputation or type of journal in relation to other characteristics, or how important is online accessibility to the reader? »

URL : http://www.publishingresearch.net/PRCTenopiretalWord2010ResearchPublicationCharacteristics_000.docx

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An analysis of open access schorlarly co…

An analysis of open access schorlarly communication Tanzanian public universities :

« The aim of this study was to investigate factors affecting the adoption of open access in research activities within Tanzanian public universities in order to device mechanisms of enhancing the use of this mode of scholarly communication. The study adopted the UTAUT model to formulate an open access research model comprising of six constructs and five moderators for guidance of this investigation. A triangulation approach for data gathering was adopted. In the first instance, a semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 398 respondents selected using the stratified random sampling from a population of 1088 university researchers from six public universities in Tanzania. The interview involving 63 policy makers and structured records review were also conducted to complement the questionnaire survey. The descriptive and binary logistic regression statistics of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) were used for data analysis. The study established that majority of the policy makers (90.5%) and researchers (72.1%) were aware of open access. Attitude, awareness, effort expectancy, and performance expectancy were established as the key determinants for researchers’ behavioural intention of open access usage while age, awareness, behavioural intention, facilitating conditions and social influence were found to significantly affect researchers’ actual usage of open access. It was concluded that researchers’ and policy makers’ general perceptions about open access were very positive signifying the acceptance of this mode of scholarly communication in the study area. Current poor research conditions and researchers’ low Internet self-efficacy such as inadequate information search and online publishing skills were cited as the main hindrances for researchers to use open access in scholarly communication. The study recommends institutionalisation of open access publishing in Tanzanian public universities and other similar research institutions so as to improve the dissemination of research output emanating from such institutions. Six areas for further research to establish more insights regarding the feasibility for open access development in the country are also recommended. »

URL : http://uir.unisa.ac.za/dspace/handle/10500/3684

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Le libre accès : entre idéal et nécessit…

Le libre accès : entre idéal et nécessité :

« Les débats qui se développent autour de la question du libre accès sont bien souvent menés comme des combats idéologiques, mobilisant des registres d’expression militants autour des notions de biens publics. La très grande visibilité de ces débats occulte deux éléments qui pourraient en relativiser la portée. L’analyse du développement des initiatives de libre accès montre que la dimension politique de la question est loin d’être prédominante dans toutes les disciplines et varie considérablement selon les communautés. Par ailleurs, les modifications profondes que le développement des réseaux numériques entraîne dans les pratiques de communication scientifique pourraient rendre moins pertinente l’approche volontariste et militante du libre accès. La multiplication du nombre de documents disponibles, l’effacement relatif des frontières entre les différents modes de publication, l’abaissement des barrières d’accès à la publication contribuent à relativiser la portée des dispositifs de fabrication de rareté artificielle et à soumettre progressivement le système de communication scientifique à un régime d’économie de l’attention. Il est dès lors possible que le secteur de l’édition scientifique connaisse une évolution comparable à celle des secteurs de la presse et de l’édition musicale. »

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00534136/fr/

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The Anatomy of an Electronic Discussion …

The Anatomy of an Electronic Discussion List for Librarians, KUTUP-L: Bibliometric and Content Analyses of Postings :

« Electronic discussion lists are widely used as a professional and scientific communication tool since late 1980s. Analysis of messages sent to discussion lists provides useful information on professional as well as scientific communication patterns. In this paper, we present the findings of a bibliometric analysis of some 20,000 messages sent to KUTUP‐L, an electronic discussion list for Turkish librarians, between 1994 and 2008. We test if the distributions of messages and their authors conform to Pareto, Price and Lotka laws. We then analyze the contents of 977 messages based on a stratified sample. Findings indicate that the number of messages sent to KUTUP‐L has increased over the years along with the number of authors. Two thirds (1,232) of about 1,900 list members posted at least one message to the list while the rest preferred to be so called “lurkers”. Some 35 authors posted almost half (49%) the messages while 20% of the authors posted 83% of all messages. The distribution of messages to authors conform to Price (“the square root of all authors would post half the messages”) and Pareto laws (so called “80/20 rule”), respectively. Of the 1,232 authors, one third (as opposed to 60% predicted by Lotka’s Law) sent only one message to the list. Results of content analysis show that 40% of messages sent to the list were off‐topic. Issues about or related with information management services (32%), library and information science (23%) and professional and scientific communication (19%) were discussed more often in the list. The intent analysis of the postings shows that three quarters of the messages were initiatory while the rest were reflexive. That’s to say that the majority of messages posted on KUTUP‐L to initiate a discussion did not seem to generate enough interest for others to reflect upon them by sending follow up messages, suggesting that professional and scientific communication taking place on KUTUP‐L on certain subjects can be characterized as more of a one‐way communication than a participatory one. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18727/

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Cross-Disciplinary Writers’ Group Stimu…

Cross-Disciplinary Writers’ Group Stimulates Fresh Approaches to Scholarly Communication: A Reflective Case Study Within a Higher Education Institution in the North West of England :

« For the inexperienced writer it can be difficult to know how to start writing, while for those with some writing experience, it is often seen as a luxury for which there is precious little time to indulge. This reflective case study describes the role of a cross-disciplinary writers’ group, as a writing intervention, within a higher education institution in the North West of England. Established in 2006, the group has always had a librarian as part of its membership and has been informed by the literature on successful writers’ groups. Monthly meetings facilitate ongoing scholarly activity; we share group roles and seek to extend our knowledge of writing practice including writing conference abstracts, constructing an argument, collaborative writing projects, and negotiating authorship. At the inception of the writers’ group, members were seeking to develop their writing portfolio. We are now at various stages of our scholarly development, ranging from early career writers to well published authors and editors. The model of a collaborative writers’ group has provided a winning formula for those wishing to develop scholarly communications as part of their daily activities and has valuable lessons from which academic librarians might learn. »

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928309394~frm=titlelink