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Five Years on - The Impact of the Budapest Open Access Initiative
No full textOpen Access was first defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative following a meeting organized by the Open Society Institute/Soros foundations. The subsequent Open Access movement has had a large impact on the scholarly communications system. This is seen in the growing number of Open Access journals and institutional and subject-based repositories which have developed over the past five years. The reaction of publishers to the movement has been mixed with individual publishers (both commercial and non-profit) experimenting with the model while large publishers\u27 associations have generally shown resistance. However, the movement continues to gain strength as research funding agencies adopt Open Access mandates to the research they support
Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access
No full textFor national advisory services in the UK (UKOLN, CETIS, and OSS Watch), varieties of openness (open source software, open standards, and open access to research publications and data) present an interesting challenge. Higher education is often keen to embrace openness, including new tools such as blogs and wikis for students and staff. For advisory services, the goal is to achieve the best solution for any individual institution\u27s needs, balancing its enthusiasm with its own internal constraints and long term commitments. For example, open standards are a genuine good, but they may fail to gain market acceptance. Rushing headlong to standardize on open standards may not be the best approach. Instead a healthy dose of pragmatism is required. Similarly, open source software is an excellent choice when it best meets the needs of an institution, but not perhaps without reference to those needs. Providing open access to data owned by museums sounds like the right thing to do, but progress towards open access needs to also consider the sustainability plan for the service. Regrettably institutional policies and practices may not be in step with the possibilities that present themselves. Often a period of reflection on the implications of such activity is what is needed. Advisory services can help to provide this reflective moment. UKOLN, for example, has developed of a Quality Assurance (QA) model for making use of open standards. Originally developed to support the Joint Information Systems Committee\u27s (JISC) digital library development programmes, it has subsequently been extended across other programmes areas. Another example is provided by OSS Watch\u27s contribution to the development of JISC\u27s own policy on open source software for its projects and services. The JISC policy does not mandate the use of open source, but instead guides development projects through a series of steps dealing with IPR issues, code management, and community development, which serve to enhance any JISC-funded project that takes up an open source development methodology. CETIS has provided a range of services to support community awareness and capability to make effective decisions about open standards in e-learning, and has informed the JISC policy and practices in relation to open standards in e-learning development. Again, rather than a mandate, the policy requires development projects to become involved in a community of practice relevant to their domain where there is a contextualised understanding of open standards
Sharing the Know-how of a Latin American Open Access only e-journal: The Case of the Electronic Journal of Biotechnology
No full textScientific communication is essential for the advancement of science and in generating benefits for the general society. Also it is fundamental in strengthening the knowledge society with a positive effect on innovation and economic growth. The Open Access journals have demonstrated to be important in providing a reliable and a more accessible mean in communicating science. An example as such, is that they are evaluated by the ISI Thomson Scientific -recognized as an authority for evaluating journals- following the same rigorous selection process as journals in print media. The measurement of the impact factors in the electronic publications demonstrates that these receive a smaller citation level than print journals, ranking in general in the lower half of journals in their subject category. Moreover, the low usage of the electronic media demonstrates a lack of confidence of authors in this new mean of communication. In this sense, editors have to provide answers to some unsolved issues regarding e-publications in order to make these journals more reliable and confident to the scholarly community. The journals edited in Latin America with international visibility represent 0.63% of the total number of publications covered by the ISI Web of Science. In the year 2005, there were 44 Latin American journals covered by the Science Citation Index, of which 89% of these are considered Open Access publications. In that same year, these publications reached an impact factor average of 0.447 in comparison with the impact factor average of 1.588 for all the journals of Open Access at world-wide level. The Electronic Journal of Biotechnology is the only Open Access Latin American journal edited exclusively in the electronic format which is covered by the ISI Science Citation Index. The experience of this journal shows that with commitment to international diversity, quality, academic rigor of the peer review process, transparency, responsibility to scientists, innovation and international cooperation, a high level of visibility and accessibility can be obtained, as demonstrated by an average of more than 83,000 readers during year 2006 and an impact factor of 0.725, which is over the mean value of Latin American journals, offering an unique opportunity to fulfill the ever increasing public demand for science information
Developing National Open Access Policies: Ukrainian Case Study
No full textSince January 2007 Ukraine has a law mandating open access to publicly funded researches. It was widely supported by most of the Parliament members. And it is already the second parliamentary inquiry mandating the Cabinet of Ministers to take actions on creating favourable conditions for developing open access repositories in archives, libraries, museums, scientific and research institutions with open access condition to state funded researches. And for the second time the implementation of this law was interrupted by the political crises. Grass root initiatives of Ukrainian Universities and libraries as well as the political support from the principle legislative body in the country have still not resulted into a single well-functioning institutional/national repository. The poster highlights the developments that have taken place, actions for the years to come and recommendations for the countries that are in circumstances that can be compared to Ukraine
Centralized Content Portals: iTunes and the Publishing Industry
No full textThis paper addresses new questions around media performance as a result of the rise of centralized content portals such as iTunes or MySpace. We first describe the rise of centralized content portals in different media industries, and discuss how these portals are creating a dominant position for themselves by using lock-in strategies. Then we describe the concept of media market performance, and discuss two important media performance concepts: access and diversity. Using scenario analysis, this paper describes three learning scenarios that outline the effects of different configurations of centralized content portals on behavior of publishers, users and advertisers, and through that content on access to and diversity of content
Access to Free e-journals via Library Portals: The Experience of the Shahid Chamran Ahwaz University in Iran as a Case Study
No full textJournals as one of the most important information carriers are useful resources for libraries and information centers. As publishers more fully actualize the e-journal, it soon will be as insufficient to offer only print journals as it is to provide only print abstracts and indexes. Using journals especially scholarly journals, scientists can contact together in scientific communities. Impact of information technologies on journals has changed the format of these resources into electronic and has facilitated information storage and retrieval. Free e-journals are alternatives for non free e-journals and are useful for libraries that can not afford expensive costs to provide subscription-based e-journals. If libraries really support Free e-journals, then one would assume that we would be pretty aggressive about making free content readily available to our users through library systems and access points (e.g. ILS, knowledge base, web site). Finding free and non free e-journals in the web environment is more difficult than finding print journals, since they rarely are found in bibliographic resources, so their locating and retrieval is difficult. Librarians are responsible for information organization and retrieval and they must corporate in designing search engines and web pages to offer electronic articles that are needed for users. Portals are one of the tools that can be used for accessibility of free and non free e-journals to users. Portals as website are windows to World Wide Web and often have a search engine, links to useful pages, news or other services. In this article various literature and experiences about access to electronic journals via web pages has been reviewed. We decided to create a special portal of free e-journals for postgraduate students, masters & researchers of Shahid Chamran Ahwaz University to use of these resources. So, we provided a list of Shahid Chamran Ahwaz University courses and on the basis of this list, we selected free e-journals of each course via Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) . DOAJ has become ?the? Open Access journal site for libraries because it is of a manageable size, Many librarians may think it is comprehensive, It is well organized and easy to harvest. In this survey, Researcher could extract 198 journals from this website that all of them were peer reviewed. Since we wanted to design a portal for free e-journals, we added selected journals to webpage that was linked to Shahid Chamran Ahwaz University Central Library website. This webpage was called free e-journals portal. All students and Masters could access to their needed articles freely. In this article we will discuss about importance of open access or free e-journals and their role in scholarly communication. Finally we will offer free e-journals portal of Shahid Chamran Ahwaz University Central Library as a tool for access to open access articles
Introducing the e-newspaper - Audience Preferences and Demands
No full textThis paper adds to the overall understanding of new media adoption in general and the promotion of the e-newspaper in particular by empirically studying the preferences and demands of the potential users. The e-newspaper is a newspaper published on e-paper technology. The findings in this paper is based on the results from two studies, i.e. an online questionnaire with 3626 respondents and an evaluation in real life settings with 10 families over a two week period. Our initial hypothesis was that: users confronted with a vision of new technology and services are more positive to adopt than users with actual use experience of technology and services in an early stage of development with inherent technology problems. The research question of the paper is: How does use experience influence perceptions of preferences and demands for the e-newspaper? The findings showed that the hypothesis proved to be false, the test persons that have an actual use experience of the e-newspaper, despite the shortcomings in the device and service, were more positive to adopt than the respondents that have experienced concept movies and prototypes with more advanced functionality and interface
Digitization of Scientific Journals in Serbia
No full textA digitization project in progress carried out by the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade (http://www.mi.sanu.ac.yu) and the Faculty of Mathematics, Belgrade (http://www.matf.bg.ac.yu) is de?s?cri?bed. The projects aim is to build a database and an electronic presentation of digitized scientific books and jour?nals printed in Serbia, particularly in mathematical sciences (mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, computer science and physics) and to make them searchable and available in the full-text mode on the Internet
The Digital Scholar\u27s Workbench
No full textIn this paper I present the reasoning behind the development of a new end-to-end publishing system for academic writers. The story starts with investigating digital preservation of word processing documents. What file formats are suitable for long-term preservation of text? I believe that the answer is a high-quality structured XML format like DocBook XML or TEI. The next question is how do we get word processing documents into that format without incurring a prohibitive cost? Conversion is possible, but it requires human intervention at some point. It would be far too expensive to have archivists editing every document by hand on ingest, so how can we get authors to do the necessary work, particularly as most academics aren\u27t at all interested in digital preservation of their work? The answer I propose is to offer them more than just an archiving solution. Instead of just getting preservation, they get a full end-to-end digital publishing solution, the digital scholar\u27s workbench, tailored to their needs for document interoperability, collaboration and publication in multiple formats? oh, and they get preservation too
Towards a Semantic Turn in Rich-Media Analysis
No full textTypical application scenarios in the area of rich-media management, such as the continuous digitisation of the media production processes, the search and retrieval tasks in a growing amount of information stored in professional and semi-professional audio-visual archives, as well as the availability of easy-to-use hard- and software tools for the production of rich-media material in the consumer area, lead to an increasing demand for a meaning-based management of digital audio-visual assets. This ?semantic turn? in rich-media analysis requires a semantic enrichment of content along the digital content life cycle and value chain: The semantic enrichment of content can be achieved manually (which is expensive) or automatically (which is error-prone). In particular, automatic semantic enrichment must be aware of the gap between meaning that is directly retrievable from the content and meaning that can be inferred within a given interpretative context. Each solution has its benefits and drawbacks. Our paper discusses the relevance of semantic analysis of rich-media in certain application scenarios, compares two possible approaches, a semi-automatic and an automatic approach, and presents a case study for an automatic solution. Following the observations of the case study, we come up with recommendations for the improvement of the semantic enrichment by an manual annotation step