Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938
Author : Alkim Ozaygen
This study explores data captured on the Internet related to OA scholarly books to provide a detailed overall picture of the dissemination of these books beginning from the point they were made OA.
To uncover the factors that impact on the digital uses of OA books, it explores relationships between book characteristics and the characteristics and motivations of the groups using and sharing books in digital landscapes.
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In times of public crises, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals’ publication process is one of the main factors hindering quick delivery of new information.
While proper editorial assessment and peer review obviously require some time, turnaround times for medical journals can be up to several months, which is undesirable in the era of a crisis. Following initiatives of medical journals and scholarly publishers to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have indeed managed to speed up their publication process for Covid-19 related articles.
It studies the duration of 14 medical journals’ publication process both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing a total of 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed drastically accelerated the publication process for Covid-19 related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic. Compared to articles published in the same journals before the pandemic, turnaround times have decreased on average by 49%.
The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in the number of days required for peer review. For articles not related to Covid-19, no acceleration of the publication process is found.
While the acceleration of journals’ publication process is laudable from the perspective of quick information dissemination, it also raises concerns relating to the quality of the peer review process and the quality of the resulting publications.
Authors : Harshdeep Singh, Robert West, Giovanni Colavizza
Wikipedia’s contents are based on reliable and published sources. To this date, little is known about what sources Wikipedia relies on, in part because extracting citations and identifying cited sources is challenging. To close this gap, we release Wikipedia Citations, a comprehensive dataset of citations extracted from Wikipedia.
A total of 29.3M citations were extracted from 6.1M English Wikipedia articles as of May 2020, and classified as being to books, journal articles or Web contents. We were thus able to extract 4.0M citations to scholarly publications with known identifiers — including DOI, PMC, PMID, and ISBN — and further labeled an extra 261K citations with DOIs from Crossref.
As a result, we find that 6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one journal article with an associated DOI. Scientific articles cited from Wikipedia correspond to 3.5% of all articles with a DOI currently indexed in the Web of Science. We release all our code to allow the community to extend upon our work and update the dataset in the future.
Authors : Olatz Arrizabalaga, David Otaegui, Itziar Vergara, Julio Arrizabalaga, Eva Méndez
Background
The COVID-19 outbreak has made funders, researchers and publishers agree to have research publications, as well as other research outputs, such as data, become openly available.
In this extraordinary research context of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, publishers are announcing that their coronavirus-related articles will be made immediately accessible in appropriate open repositories, like PubMed Central, agreeing upon funders’ and researchers’ instigation.
Methods
This work uses Unpaywall, OpenRefine and PubMed to analyse the level of openness of articles about COVID-19, published during the first quarter of 2020. It also analyses Open Access (OA) articles published about previous coronavirus (SARS CoV-1 and MERS CoV) as a means of comparison.
Results
A total of 5,611 COVID-19-related articles were analysed from PubMed. This is a much higher amount for a period of 4 months compared to those found for SARS CoV-1 and MERS during the first year of their first outbreaks (335 and 116 articles, respectively).
Regarding the levels of openness, 88.8% of the SARS CoV-2 papers are freely available; similar rates were found for the other coronaviruses. Deeper analysis showed that (i) 67.4% of articles belong to an undefined Bronze category; (ii) 76.4% of all OA papers don’t carry any license, followed by 10.4% which display restricted licensing. These patterns were found to be repeated in the three most frequent publishers: Elsevier, Springer and Wiley.
Conclusions
Our results suggest that, although scientific production is much higher than during previous epidemics and is open, there is a caveat to this opening, characterized by the absence of fundamental elements and values on which Open Science is based, such as licensing.
Authors : Carlo Galli, Maria Teresa Colangelo, Stefano Guizzardi
Most academic journals have a fairly consistent look: they are structured similarly, their text is divided into similar sections; for example, they have an abstract at the beginning of the manuscript, and their text is usually organized in two columns.
There may be different reasons for this similarity, ranging from the need to contain publication costs by using less page space to conforming to an internationally well-accepted format that may be perceived as the hallmark of academic articles.
We surveyed 35 medical journals founded before 1960 and looked for their change in format over time and how this was experienced by and explained to readers.
We then discussed what recent research has shown about the effects of layout on reading, looking for further explanations as to why this format was so successful.
URL : Striving for Modernity: Layout and Abstracts in the Biomedical Literature
Auteurs/Authors : Françoise Rousseau-Hans, Christine Ollendorff, Vincent Harnais
Le consortium Couperin publie les résultats de son enquête sur les pratiques de publication et d’accès ouvert des chercheurs français, réalisée dans le cadre du « Plan national de la science ouverte » annoncé par la Ministre de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation en juillet 2018. Ce document est le rapport complet de l’étude.
Authors : Martin Poulter, Nick Sheppard
In its first 30 years the world wide web has revolutionized the information environment. However, its impact has been negative as well as positive, through corporate misuse of personal data and due to its potential for enabling the spread of disinformation.
As a large-scale collaborative platform funded through charitable donations, with a mission to provide universal free access to knowledge as a public good, Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world.
This paper explores the role of Wikipedia in the information ecosystem where it occupies a unique role as a bridge between informal discussion and scholarly publication.
We explore how it relates to the broader Wikimedia ecosystem, through structured data on Wikidata for instance, and openly licensed media on Wikimedia Commons.
We consider the potential benefits for universities in the areas of information literacy and research impact, and investigate the extent to which universities in the UK and their libraries are engaging strategically with Wikimedia, if at all.
URL : Wikimedia and universities: contributing to the global commons in the Age of Disinformation
DOI : Wikimedia and universities: contributing to the global commons in the Age of Disinformation