11,211 research outputs found
Health sciences faculty perception and practices on OA scholarly communication
No full textThis study sought to investigate the faculty’s awareness, attitudes and use of open scholarly communication in Tanzanian health sciences universities. Based on a questionnaire survey, 415 faculty members were selected through a stratified random sampling from a population of 679 in
all eight health sciences universities in Tanzania. The response rate was 71.1%. The study found a high level of engagement with scholarly publishing, where senior members were more likely to participate in scholarly communication as journal authors, referee and editors. The majority of
respondents were aware about open access (OA) issues; however, a small proportion of faculty’s research materials was made available in OA. Senior faculty with more proficient technical skills are more likely to use OA than junior faculty. Major barriers to OA usage were related to ICT
infrastructure, awareness, skills, journal author pay model, and copyright and plagiarism concerns. This study recommends the following: universities to improve information and communication technology infrastructure, and develop institutional repositories and policies, and librarians to create awareness about OA, conduct information literacy programmes, and provide information services on copyright management issues and other related OA aspects. This is first comprehensive and detailed study focusing on the health sciences faculty use behaviour of OA initiatives in Tanzania, and reveals findings that are useful for planning and implementing OA initiatives in other institutions with similar conditions
Maximizing Research Impact Through Institutional and National Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates
No full textNo research institution can afford all the journals its researchers may need, so all articles are losing research impact (usage and citations). Articles made “Open Access,” (OA) by self-archiving them on the web are cited twice as much, but only 15% of articles are being spontaneously self-archived. The only institutions approaching 100% self-archiving are those that mandate it. Surveys show that 95% of authors will comply with a self-archiving mandate; the actual expe-rience of institutions with mandates has confirmed this. What institutions and funders need to mandate is that (1) immediately upon acceptance for publication, (2) the author’s final draft must be (3) deposited into the Institutional Repository. Only the depositing needs to be mandated; set-ting access privileges to the full-text as either OA or Restricted Access (RA) can be left up to the author. For articles published in the 93% of journals that have already endorsed self-archiving, access can be set as OA immediately; for the remaining 7%, authors can email the eprint in re-sponse to individual email requests automatically forwarded by the Repository
Ethics of Open Access to Biomedical Research: Just a Special Case of Ethics of Open Access to Research
No full textThe ethical case for Open Access (OA) (free online access) to research findings is especially salient when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions. But the ethical imperative for OA is far more general: It applies to all scientific and scholarly research findings published in peer-reviewed journals. And peer-to-peer access is far more important than direct public access. Most research is funded to be conducted and published, by researchers, in order to be taken up, used, and built upon in further research and applications, again by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funded it -- not in order to generate revenue for the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry (nor even because there is a burning public desire to read [much of] it). Hence OA needs to be mandated for all research
Open access archiving and article citations within health services and policy research
No full textPromoting uptake of research findings is an objective common to those who fund, produce and publish health services and policy research. Open access (OA) is one method being employed to maximize impact. OA articles are online, free to access and use. This paper contributes to growing body of research exploring the “OA advantage” by employing an article-level analysis comparing citation rates for articles drawn from the same, purposively selected journals. We used a two-stage analytic approach designed to test whether OA is associated with (1) likelihood that an article is cited at all and (2) total number citations that an article receives, conditional on being cited at least once. Adjusting for potential confounders: number of authors, time since publication, journal, and article subject, we found that OA archived articles were 60% more likely to be cited at least once, and, once cited, were cited 29% more than non-OA articles
Open access self-archiving: An author study
No full textThis, our second author international, cross-disciplinary study on open access had 1296 respondents. Its focus was on self-archiving. Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories. Self-archiving activity is greatest amongst those who publish the largest number of papers. There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access. Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9% for subsequent deposits. Another author worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided. Where it is not known if permission is required, however, authors are not seeking it and are self-archiving without it. Communicating their results to peers remains the primary reason for scholars publishing their work; in other words,
researchers publish to have an impact on their field. The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate
Managing open access (OA) workflows at the University of St Andrews: challenges and Pathfinder solutions
No full text© 2014. Janet Aucock. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use and distribution provided the original author and source are credited.This article arose out of a presentation given to the UKSG seminar on ‘Managing Open Access: pain points and workflows’. It presents a case study on the workflows in place at the University of St Andrews and how these are developing to meet funder compliance policies and the challenge of the new HEFCE Research Excellence Framework (REF) open access (OA) policy. The case study describes the research environment at St Andrews and in particular the challenges faced and how these may be answered. Since the seminar in May 2014, the Open Access Research Publications Support Team has engaged in a ‘Lean’ exercise to evaluate and streamline workflows within the institution. St Andrews is also now a partner in the LOCH project, one of the Jisc Pathfinder projects. The paper gives an update on recent activities and looks at strategies and practical ideas for improving workflows and removing pain points.Publisher PD
Scholarly communication and open access : research communities and their publishing patterns [New Trends in Scholarly Communication : how do Authors of different research communities consider OA?]
No full textAt the time of the Budapest Declaration, self-archiving supporters looked like a revolutionary, "anti-commercial publishers" movement. Today, after some years debate (and technological innovation in research and scientific e-publishing), antagonist positions are able to compromise and consider the tradeoffs.
What is really changing in the Authors' attitude towards institutional or disciplinary repositories, and peer reviewed open access journals?
Many recent papers have investigated these topics. From these sources we can note that Biomedical Authors behave differently from Physicists, Astronomers and Mathematicians, who have been using open archives for such a long time. Therefore we intend to analyze these different trends in the diverse communities.
Several aspects also deserve a careful attention: the role of new OA journals in evaluation processes (i.e. their impact and citations), implementation and maintenance costs of institutional repositories, the evolution of bibliometric indicators.
We intend also to discuss the role of libraries in service innovation and e-publishing promotion. The main areas where a key role may be played are: institutional repository management and users' training, the promotion of OA journals and information about evaluation methods (both qualitative and quantitative).
We think that the transition towards new communication models may be a great opportunity that libraries have to be ready to support
Conference Institutional archives for research: experiences and projects in Open Access Istituto Superiore di Sanità Rome, 30 November - 1 December 2006
No full textThe Congress was organised into four sessions: 1) Open Access (OA) and authors: support from the international community; 2) OA in Italy: knowledge and tools to write and search; 3) institutional policies for OA; 4) opportunities and services to develop OA. It was aimed at achieving the following objectives: a) make authors of biomedical publications aware of the benefits of depositing research material in digital open archives and publishing in OA peer-reviewed journals; b) outline the impact of the OA publishing model on the assessment of research output; c) enhance the adoption of policies encouraging the OA paradigm; d) promote cooperation between research institutions in Italy and abroad to share resources and experiences on institutional repositories. A useful introductory bibliography on the OA publishing model in the biomedical field is included in the Appendix
Monitoring the transition to open access
No full textThis study was commissioned in response to a recommendation of the Finch Group in its second report in 2013 that reliable indicators should be gathered on key features of the transition to open access (OA) in the UK. The findings presented here are thus a first at tempt at generating such indicators covering five sets of issues:
OA options available to authors: the numbers of fully-OA and hybrid journals, along with issues such as the level of article processing charges (APCs), the availability of CC-BY and other licences, and the length of embargo periods
Accessibility: authors’ take-up of OA options: the numbers - and the proportions of the overall population – of articles accessible on OA terms via different routes
Usage : the levels of usage of OA articles as compared to those that are not accessible on OA terms
Financial sustainability for universities: the amounts paid by UK universities in subscriptions and in APCs; and
Financial sustainability for learned societies: the overall income and expenditure – as well as the volumes of journal-related income and expenditure – of UK learned societies which have some publishing income.
There are of course other issues highly relevant to the monitoring of progress towards OA, including s uch matters as the quality of services provided by publ ishers to authors and readers; and we hope that the se will be addressed in subsequent studie
The impact of the global movement of open access (OA) on OA publishing for Canadian government science researchers
No full textOpen access (OA) has been an enabling and accelerating factor for a more open scientific discovery process. In March 2011, the Government of Canada announced its commitment to Open Government along three streams: open information, open data, and open dialogue. The tenth anniversary statement of the Budapest Open Access Initiative has also encouraged many academic institutions to adopt and implement OA policies and best practices. This case study explores the global OA movement’s impact on researchers from federal science departments and agencies. The authors will assess whether mandates in OA and Open Science (OS) initiatives have led to a growth of Open Government resources and how the availability of open publications contributes to research impact assessment and impacts researchers at all stages of their careers. The authors use the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection to locate OA publications by federal government scientists and citation trends among the OA types. WoS and InCites Benchmarking & Analytics are used to compare the growth of OA publications against key dates identified by the OA movement and Canada’s OS initiatives. Science librarians and information professionals are increasingly well versed in how OA opens up new areas of activity and accelerates innovation across disciplines. However, our knowledge of OA publishers of high impact in science disciplines, and experiences with federal S&T activities reporting and publishing through OA are limited. We hope to develop an enhanced understanding of the current OA landscape and the requirements for a government research system that supports OA and OS.Conference presentation/proceeding
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