The value of scholarly reading in the life…

The value of scholarly reading in the life sciences :

“Surveys of academic staff in six universities in the U.K. provide insights for publishers and universities into scholarly article, book, and other publication reading patterns of academics and differences based on academic discipline of readers. These surveys were part of the 2011 UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of the Library Study funded by JISC Collections and based on Tenopir and King Studies conducted since 1977. Reading patterns of life and environmental scientists differ from other disciplines, in particular social sciences. Scholarly articles, especially those obtained from the library’s e-journal collections, are vital to the work of all academic disciplines. Life and environmental scient-ists come into contact with multiple sources of information every day, including social media, and the biggest limitation scientists describe when it comes to finding and obtaining articles is cost and time. Knowing more about academic reading patterns help publishers and librarians design more effective journal systems and services now and into the future.”

URL : http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/IEE/article/view/4484

Use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook by PhD Students for Scholarly Communication: A UK study

This study explores scholarly use of social media by PhD researchers through mix-methods of qualitative interviews, participant observation and content analysis of a case study #phdchat.

We found that blogs, Twitter and Facebook are among the most popular social media tools being used by researchers. They can be used by PhD students and early career researchers to benefit their scholarly communication practice, promote their professional profiles, disseminate their work to a wider audience quickly, and gain feedbacks and support from peers across the globe.

There are also difficulties and potential problems such as the lack of standards and incentives, the risks of idea being pinched and plagiarism, lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain using social media tool and the potential huge amount of time and effort needed to invest.

We found that respondents link different social media tools together to maximise the impact of the content disseminated, as well as to create a personal learning network (PLN) connected with people across the globe.

For privacy issue, the participants use different identities on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is usually set as private with access for friends only and Twitter is public and used for professional purposes.

However, Facebook page and groups can be public which are used to build a community and disseminate information without revealing much content from individual member’s personal profile.”

URL : https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/item/?pid=uk-ac-man-scw:187789

Collaboration scientifique et citations des articles Quelles pratiques…

Collaboration scientifique et citations des articles : Quelles pratiques dans les revues médicales ? :

“Objectifs : La meilleure façon de caractériser la collaboration scientifique est d’étudier la co-signature des articles. Deux indicateurs sont intéressants : le nombre d’auteurs et son caractère international. L’objectif est d’étudier la corrélation entre ces deux indicateurs et le nombre de citations.

Méthodes : Nous avons sélectionné deux journaux de pharmacie et médecine afin de comparer les pratiques. Nous avons utilisé un échantillon d’environ 800 articles publiés entre 2002 et 2005 dont nous avons collecté les citations jusqu’en 2010. Nous avons transformé nos variables numériques, nombre d’auteurs et nombre de citations, en variables qualitatives.

Résultats : Les variables «auteurs» et «citations» ne sont pas indépendantes.

Conclusions. Les articles les moins cités sont souvent publiés par un seul auteur ou par une équipe très réduite alors que le caractère international des articles est un facteur qui en général augmente le nombre de citations. Cette micro-analyse a permis également de mieux appréhender certaines pratiques éditoriales.”

URL : http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00775307

Science 3.0: Corrections to the “Science 2.0” paradigm

The concept of “Science 2.0” was introduced almost a decade ago to describe the new generation of online-based tools for researchers allowing easier data sharing, collaboration and publishing.

Although technically sound, the concept still does not work as expected. Here we provide a systematic line of arguments to modify the concept of Science 2.0, making it more consistent with the spirit and traditions of science and Internet.

Our first correction to the Science 2.0 paradigm concerns the open-access publication models charging fees to the authors. As discussed elsewhere, we reiterate that the monopoly of such publishing models increases biases and inequalities in the representation of scientific ideas based on the author’s income.

Our second correction concerns post-publication comments online, which are all essentially non-anonymous in the current Science 2.0 paradigm.

We conclude that scientific post-publication discussions require special anonymization systems.

We further analyze the reasons of the failure of the current post-publication peer-review models and suggest what needs to be changed in “Science 3.0” to convert Internet into a large “journal club”.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2522

Neither digital or open Just researchers Views on…

Neither digital or open. Just researchers: Views on digital/open scholarship practices in an Italian university :

“How do university researchers consider attributes such as ‘digital’ and ‘open’ as regards to their research practices? This article reports a small–scale interview project carried out at the University of Milan, aiming to probe whether and to what extent actual digital research practices are affecting cultures of sharing in different subject areas and are prompting emergent approaches such as open publishing, open data, open education and open boundary between academia and society. Most of the 14 interviewed researchers seem not to see any clear benefit to move to further technological means or new open practices and call for institutional support and rules. However, a few profiles of ‘digital, networked and open’ researchers stand out and show both a self–legitimating approach to new modes of knowledge production and distribution and a particular sensitiveness towards values and perspectives driven by ‘openness’ in digital networks.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3881

Doctoral Students in New Zealand Have Low Awareness…

Doctoral Students in New Zealand Have Low Awareness of Institutional Repository Existence, but Positive Attitudes Toward Open Access Publication of Their Work :

“Objective : To investigate doctoral students’ knowledge of and attitudes toward open access models of scholarly communication and institutional repositories, and to examine their willingness to comply with a mandatory institutional repository (IR) submission policy.

Design : Mixed method, sequential exploratory design.

Setting : A large, multi-campus New Zealand university that mandates IR deposit of doctoral theses.

Subjects :Two doctoral students from each of four university colleges were interviewed. All 901 doctoral students were subsequently sent a survey, with 251 responding.

Methods : Semi-structured interviews with eight subjects selected by purposive sampling, followed by a survey sent to all doctoral students. The authors used NVivo 8 for analysis of interview data, along with a two-phase approach to coding. First, they analyzed transcripts from semi-structured interviews line-by-line to identify themes. In the second phase, authors employed focused coding to analyze the most common themes and to merge or drop peripheral themes. Themes were mapped against Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory and social exchange theory constructs to aid interpretation. The results were used to develop a survey with a fixed set of response choices. Authors then analyzed survey results using Excel and SurveyMonkey, first as a single data set and then by discipline.

Main Results : The authors found that general awareness of open access was high (62%), and overall support for open access publication was 86.3%. Awareness of IRs as a general concept was much lower at 48%. Those subject to a mandatory IR deposit policy for doctoral theses overwhelmingly indicated willingness to comply (92.6%), as did those matriculating prior to the policy (83.3%), although only 77.3% of all respondents agreed that deposit should be mandatory. Only 17.6% of respondents had deposited their own work in an IR, while 31.7% reported directly accessing a repository for research. The greatest perceived benefits of IR participation were removal of cost for readers, ease of sharing research, increased exposure and citing of one’s work, and professional networking. The greatest perceived risks were plagiarism, loss of ability to publish elsewhere, and less prestige relative to traditional publication. The reason most given for selecting a specific publication outlet was recommendation of a doctoral supervisor. Disciplinary differences in responses were not sizable. For additional interpretation, the authors applied Rogers’s diffusion of innovations theory to determine the extent to which IRs are effective innovations. The authors posit that repositories will become a more widely adopted innovations as awareness of IRs in general increases, and through increased awareness that IR content is discoverable through major search engines such as Google Scholar, thus improving usability and increasing dissemination of research. Using the social exchange theory framework, the authors found that respondents’ expressed willingness to deposit their work in IRs demonstrated altruistic motives for sharing their research freely with others, appreciation for the reciprocity of gaining access to others’ research, and awareness of the potential direct reward of having their work cited more often.

Conclusion : Authors identified that lack of awareness, rather than resistance to deposit, as the main barrier to IR depository participation. Major benefits perceived for participating included the public good of knowledge sharing and increased exposure for one’s work. Concerns included copyright and plagiarism issues. These findings have implications for communication and marketing campaigns to promote doctoral students’ deposit of their work in institutional repositories. While respondents reported low direct use of IRs for conducting research, the vast majority reported using Google Scholar, and so may have unknowingly accessed open access repository content. This finding suggests that attention be given to enhanced metadata for optimizing discoverability of IR content through general search engines.”

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/18122