Étiquette : scientific communication

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

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