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Autogeneous authorization framework for open access information management with topic maps
No full textConventional content management systems (CMSes) consider user management, specifically authorization to modify content objects to be orthogonal to any evolution of content within the system. This puts the burden on a system administrator or his delegates to organize an authorization scheme appropriate for the community the CMS is serving. Arguably, high quality content - especially in open access publications with little or no a priori content classification ? can only be guaranteed and later sustained, if the fields of competence of authors and editors parallel the thematic aspect of the content. In this work we propose to abandon the above-mentioned line of demarcation between object authorization and object theming, and describe a framework which allows to evolve content and its ontological aspect in lockstep with content ownership
A rapidly growing electronic publishing trend: audiobooks for leisure and education
No full textThis contribution focuses on the relatively new phenomenon of the purely commercial availability of audiobooks, sometimes also called ?spoken books?, ?talking books? or ?narrated books?. Having the text of a book read aloud and recorded has been for a very long time the favourite solution to make books and other texts accessible for persons with a serious reading impairment such as blindness or low vision. Specialised production centres do exist in most countries of the world for producing these talking books. But now a growing number of commercial groups have found out that there is a booming market for these products as people slowly get used to leisure listening to books instead of reading them. Some companies claim already having over 40.000 titles in spoken format in their catalogue. Major differences and possible synergies between the two worlds are discussed
Characteristics shared by the scientific electronic journals of Latin America and the Caribbean
No full textOur objective is to analyze the use that Latin American peer-reviewed journals make of the tools and opportunities provided by electronic publishing, particularly of those that would make them evolve to be more than ?mere photocopies? of their printed counterparts. While doing these, we also set out to discover if there were any Latin American journals that use these technologies in an effective way, comparable to the most innovative journals in existence. We extracted a sample of 125 journals from the LATINDEX ? Regional System of Scientific Journals of Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal ? electronic resources index, and compared along five dimensions: (1) Non-linearity, (2) use of multimedia, (3) linking to external resources (?multiple use?), (4) interactivity, and (5) use of metadata, search engines, and other added resources. We have found that very few articles in these journals (14%) used non-linear links to navigate between different sections of the article. Almost no journals (3%) featured multimedia contents. About one in every four articles (26%) published in the journals analyzed had their references or bibliographic items enriched by links that connected to the original documents quoted by the author. The most common form of interaction was user!journal, in the form of question forms (17% of journals) and new issue warnings (17% of journals). Some, however (5%) had user!user interaction, offering forums and response to published articles by the readership. About 35% of the journals have metadata within their pages, and 50% offer search engines to their users. One of the most pressing problems for these journals it the wrong use of rather simple technologies such as linking: 49% of the external resource links were mismarked in some way, with a full 24% being mismarked by spelling or layout mistakes. Latin American journals still present a number of serious limitations when using electronic resources and techniques, with text being overwhelmingly linear and underlinked, e-mail to the editors being the main means of contact, and multimedia as a scarce commodity. We selected a small sample of journals from other regions of the world, and found that they offer significantly more non-linearity (p = 0.005 < 0.1), interactive features (p = 0.005 < 0.1), use of multimedia (p = 0.04 < 0.1) and linking to external documents (p = 0.007 < 0.1). While these are the current characteristics of Latin American journals, a number of very notable exceptions speak volumes of the potential of these technologies to improve the quality of Latin American scholarly publishing
African universities in the knowledge economy: a collaborative approach to researching and promoting open communications in higher education
No full textThis paper will describe the informal collaborative approach taken by a group of donor funders and researchers in southern and eastern Africa aimed at consolidating the results and increasing the impact of a number of projects dealing with research communications and access to knowledge in higher education in southern and eastern Africa. The projects deploy a variety of perspectives and explore a range of contexts, using the collaborative potential of online resources and social networking tools for the sharing of information and results. The paper will provide a case study of donor intervention as well as analysing the methodologies, approaches and findings of the four projects concerned. The paper will explore the ways in which the projects and their funders have had to address the issues of the global dynamics of knowledge, of the changes in research practices being brought about by information and communication technologies; and of the promises that this could hold for improved access to knowledge in Africa. Finally, the conclusions of the paper address the complex dynamics of institutional change and national policy intervention and the ways in which a collaborative approach can address these
AbstractMaster?
No full textAbstractMaster is a powerful search/data management software specifically designed to help quickly locate relevant medical articles indexed by the National Library of Medicine* (NLM), to help keep track searches, what one has read, catalog references and full text articles, to assist in the review and analysis of articles for referencing, publishing and research purposes. Basically, an electronic finder/cataloguer/ organizer for the sciences of medicine
Joining up \u27discovery to delivery\u27 services
No full textZetoc is a bibliographic current awareness service that provides discovery of relevant literature within the British Library?s Electronic Table of Contents of journal articles and conference papers. A researcher having discovered an article of interest will wish to read it, preferring to locate an electronic copy of an article to be delivered directly to their desktop. However, until now, Zetoc was essentially the British Library?s document delivery catalogue, containing details of journals that are published traditionally. The lack of open access articles in Zetoc, because there would be no reason to order and pay for copies of these articles, implied a deficiency in Zetoc as a current awareness and general article discovery service. This paper describes the introduction of open access article records into Zetoc by OAI-PMH harvesting from UK PubMed Central. The prototype concentrates on biomedicine and initially BioMed Central journals. But the paper discusses future extension to other disciplines, as well as general requirements for sharing bibliographic article records
Issues and challenges to development of institutional repositories in academic and research institutions in Nigeria
No full textOpen Access institutional repositories are electronic archives that may contain post-published articles, pre-published articles, thesis, manuals, teaching materials or other documents that the authors or their institutions wish to make publicly available without financial or other access barriers. Open Access institutional repositories provide an avenue for the promotion and dissemination of knowledge and institutional research outputs. It can also provide a better picture of the type of research being conducted at these institutions
Modeling scientific discourse - shifting perspectives and persistent issues
No full textWe review over 10 years of research at Elsevier and various Dutch academic institutions on establishing a new format for the scientific research article. Our work rests on two main theoretical principles: the concept of modular documents, consisting of content elements that can exist and be published independently and are linked by meaningful relations, and the use of semantic data standards allowing access to heterogeneous data. We discuss the application of these concepts in five different projects: a modular format for physics articles, an XML encyclopedia in pharmacology, a semantic data integration project, a modular format for computer science proceedings papers, and our current work on research articles in cell biology
Preserving the scholarly record with WebCite(R) (www.webcitation.org): an archiving system for long-term digital preservation of cited webpages
No full textScholars are increasingly citing electronic ?web references? which are not preserved in libraries or full text archives. WebCite is a new standard for citing web references. To ?webcite? a document involves archiving the cited Web page through www.webcitation.org and citing the WebCite permalink instead of (or in addition to) the unstable live Web page. Almost 200 journals are already using the system. We discuss the rationale for WebCite, its technology, and how scholars, editors, and publishers can benefit from the service. Citing scholars initiate an archiving process of all cited Web references, ideally before they submit a manuscript. Authors of online documents and websites which are expected to be cited by others can ensure that their work is permanently available by creating an archived copy using WebCite and providing the citation information including the WebCite link on their Web document(s). Editors should ask their authors to cache all cited Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) ?prospectively? before submitting their manuscripts to their journal. Editors and publishers should also instruct their copyeditors to cache cited Web material if the author has not done so already. Finally, WebCite can process publisher submitted ?citing articles? (submitted for example as eXtensible Markup Language [XML] documents) to automatically archive all cited Web pages shortly before or on publication. Finally, WebCite can act as a focussed crawler, caching retrospectively references of already published articles. Copyright issues are addressed by honouring respective Internet standards (robot exclusion files, no-cache and no-archive tags). Long-term preservation is ensured by agreements with libraries and digital preservation organizations. The resulting WebCite Index may also have applications for research assessment exercises, being able to measure the impact of Web services and published Web documents through access and Web citation metrics
Opening scholarship: strategies for integrating open access and open education
No full textThe objectives of this workshop are: (1.) Inform publishers and scholars involved in open access about recent developments in open education, including the Cape Town Declaration. (2.) Identify lessons from the success of the open access publishing movement that can be applied to open education, and brainstorm opportunities for action based on these lessons. (3.) Surface opportunities for long term synergies and interconnection between open access and open education, feeding into the broader agenda of open scholarship