27 Tuesday May 2014
A Thomson ISI / Web of Science study is reported in Nature, dated 26th May 2014, as “Do Open Access journals have impact?”. They concluded that…
“Open Access journals [a selection of 190 titles, “core scientific publications”] can have similar impact to other journals, and prospective authors should not fear publishing in these journals merely because of their access model.”
16 Friday May 2014
CultureCase, a new UK overlay service that provides a short plain-English summary of selected academic research on the impacts and effects of the arts and arts policy. There are OA links where possible, but most of the outbound links are to research that’s behind a paywall — which shows why these summaries may be especially useful for bootstrapping arts organisations which need to “make the case” for culture to sceptical bureaucrats. Though, in my experience, one does ideally need access to the original papers and reports since much arts advocacy research tends to rest on shaky foundations. Once you track back the estimates and ‘received wisdom’ factoids to their sources, the case being made can start to totter. This is especially true when people are making numbers claims about the boost to cultural employment or regional tourism income.
CultureCase currently has no links to OA journals on their links page, so I’ve sent them the following list…
http://www.culturalpolicy.ie/index.php/ijamcp
Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy
http://apjacm.arts.unimelb.edu.au/issue/current
Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management
http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap.html
Working Paper Series, The Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies
http://www.cuocient.com/index.php/cl/
Current Opinion in Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
http://www.idunn.no/ts/nkt
Nordic Journal of Cultural Policy
http://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/oa/
Organizational Aesthetics
http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine
Arts Professional (UK, now free)
A Google search shows that CultureCase only have 27 OA articles at present, which can be found via a Google site: search. It would be useful if there was a http://www.culturecase.org/research-category/open-access/ tag which would collect all the open article records onto a single page.
The other problem is that they are linking to JSTOR and calling it ‘open access’ — but most people outside academia don’t have access to JSTOR, or only have very partial access.
30 Wednesday Apr 2014
“In 2013, the SciELO Network of national journal collections covered 16 countries, 15 in Ibero-America [South and Central America] plus South Africa, which as a whole, index around 1,000 journal titles and publish more than 40,000 articles a year…”
“A priority action line of SciELO is internationalization that, among other strategies, includes the gradual adoption of the English language for the communication of research with the aim of expanding its international visibility. All article texts must have at least the title, abstract and keywords in English. … journals are increasingly adopting English as either their only language of communication of journal content or are using a multilingual format together with Spanish or Portuguese.”
19 Wednesday Mar 2014
“What were librarians thinking of?” A question I often ask myself, as I glance at various pointless and fruitless busy-work projects. But now there’s a new survey of the views of “academic library directors in the U.S.”, which gives some insight. Scholarly Kitchen has a handy digest of the report…
In 2010, 41% of library directors said that, if given a 10% budget increase, they would like to spend at least some of it on discovery tools. In 2013 only 16% said the same thing.
03 Monday Mar 2014
Joseph Esposito has usefully had a peek inside a very expensive commercial market report titled Global Social Science & Humanities Publishing 2013-2014.
Social/Humanities publishing is found to be perhaps 25% of the size of Science/Technology/Medicine, at around $5bn. That actually strikes me as something of an achievement, when you consider that we have far smaller research funding inputs and a smaller technical/training infrastructure to call on. But perhaps the $5bn figure is given a strong boost by teacher training textbooks, social work manuals and the like?
Joseph highlights the report’s finding of a highly fragmented market. This market fragmentation is one of the reasons I’m skeptical about the success of a ‘one metadata to rule them all’ solution to OA indexing and discovery. It seems that DOAJ-listed OA journal titles can’t even find their way in full-text into the largest of commercial databases (such as EBSCO Complete) at higher levels than just over 20%. When last heard of the Web of Science / Scopus seemed to be barely scraping 1,000 OA titles indexed. One art history study found that Google Scholar could index only half the DOAJ’s OA art history titles. A dastardly conspiracy to keep OA titles out of these big indexes seems unlikely. So I suspect it’s largely due to many OA editors in the arts and humanities not giving a fig about providing the means to automatically index their content. Their widespread lack of something as basic as RSS feeds seems to confirm that. Add to that the fact that only 56% of DOAJ journals can supply the DOAJ with article metadata. Persuading non-librarian types to do something as simple tag all their back-issue content with some simple new machine-readable OA tag thus seems rather a long shot. Persuading mainstream publishers to do the same? Well… maybe, but what’s their incentive for that? Even if they do, will they allow mass harvesting of the OA articles? Nor are librarians likely to be of much use, after the fact of publication — since they seem to have mostly failed to apply even their own metadata standards to open content, and open repository metadata quality is reported to be dire.
22 Saturday Feb 2014
Posted in Official and think-tank reports
New White Paper from commercial publisher SAGE: Discoverability of Scholarly Content: Accomplishments, Aspirations and Opportunities, written after the moment…
“in 2013, [when commercial paywall] academic content providers around the world were forced to consider alternate methods of open-web discoverability when Google’s primary web search ceased its special treatment of access-controlled scholarly materials”
The consusus here and elsewhere seems to be ‘just add metadata’ to open content, and it will slot right into existing closed discovery systems. Good luck with that one, and don’t forget to shut the stable door.
Interesting comment spotted in the paper, in relation to the oft-heard complaint that Google uses closed proprietary search algorithms…
“The research also noted the variability among [academic library Web-scale] discovery services’ proprietary search algorithms, which — lacking transparency — disallows local customization, which libraries and end users expect.”
What it doesn’t mention is the quality of the ranking done by the proprietary search algorithms in services such as Summon. To see what I mean, try the dozy search | what is history carr | in Summon, then try it again in JURN.
18 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in Official and think-tank reports
New Innovating Pedagogy report from the UK’s Open University…
14 Sunday Apr 2013
Posted in Official and think-tank reports
“Perception Analysis of Scholarly E-Books in the Humanities at the Collegiate Level” (March 2013)…
* There does not seem to be a consensus among academic librarians regarding what is desirable in terms of humanities book offerings.
* Many librarians do not distinguish scholarly titles from academic titles. Librarians seem to lean toward known brands (e.g., EBSCO, JSTOR), irrespective of the content that these aggregators offer.
* Most libraries are still in the early stages of developing an e-book strategy, and many are unsure of which direction they should take.
* …there is no agreement amongst librarians as to which humanities content is considered necessary, which collections are essential, which aggregators to use or what fields to cover
* Most librarians surveyed believe that the various aggregators and publishers all offer the same (overlapping) content
That last one is pretty amazing.
02 Wednesday Jan 2013
A free online report/book, Chasing Sustainability on the Net (Juvenes Print Tampere, Finland, Oct 2012)…
“International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models”
For those not conversant with suit-speak, a “pure play” is an “internet only business”. Might there be some lessons in the report for academic and scholarly ejournals?
01 Tuesday Jan 2013
Posted in Official and think-tank reports
The AHRC’s final report Crowd-Sourcing Scoping Study: Engaging the Crowd with Humanities Research (Dec 2012)…
“[recording and saving] Ephemera and intangible cultural heritage form potentially the most productive category of asset for humanities crowd-sourcing…”