This report points out a major issue for researchers: it is often easy to FIND the content they need (through Web of Science or Google or PubMed) but it is difficult to ACCESS it. "The content is not available online (either through failure to be digitised or lack of licence purchasing) and licences for
online content are seen to be too complex and sometimes restrictive of access for non-members of institutions; and institutions lack the technical and administrative capacity to overcome these issues."
"The information science field of webometrics is "the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the web drawing on bibliometric and informetric approaches" [1] or, more generally, "the study of web-based content with primarily quantitative methods for social science research goals using techniques that are not specific to one field of study"[2]."
Program announcement from the National Science Foundation. "to enhance and expand the national resource of digital data documenting existing vouchered biological and paleontological collections and to advance scientific knowledge by improving access to digitized information (including images) residing in vouchered scientific collections across the United States. " Seeking proposals from academic, governmental and non-profit orgs.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science has released Research Data Stewardship at UNC: Recommendations for Scholarly Practice and Leadership.
Recently announced NSF requirement (that all grant proposal need to include a Data Management Plan (DMP) shows the importance of digital data as a foundation for the progress of science and replicability of research in the digital age. ..
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is the first publisher to place transparent and comprehensive information about the usage and reach of published articles onto the articles themselves, so that the entire academic community can assess their value. We call these measures for evaluating articles 'Article-Level Metrics', and they are distinct from the journal-level measures of research quality that have traditionally been made available until now.
Paul Ginsparg Gets $882,610 Grant for arXiv Enhancement\nPaul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science at Cornell University, has been awarded a $882,610 grant by the NSF for the Tools for Open Access Cyberinfrastructure project, which will enhance the popular arXiv repository. The grant was funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multime
"Long-term preservation and stewardship of scientific data and research-related information are vitally important to future science and scholarship. Scientific data archives can offer capabilities for managing and preserving disciplinary and interdisciplinary data for research, education, and decision-making activities of future communities of users. Meeting the requirements for a trusted digital repository will help to ensure that today's collections of scientific data will be available in the future. A continuing self-assessment of a long-term archive for interdisciplinary scientific data is being conducted to identify the additional steps needed for it to become a trustworthy repository. Recommendations include a strategy for collaborative organizational sustainability, a model for submission and workflow to ingest interdisciplinary scientific data into a repository, and a plan for facilitating intra-organizational transfer between repositories."
"The 116-page report represents a 2-year effort with the sponsorship and support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress (LC), the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee, the Electronic Records Archives Program of the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. On April 1, the Task Force will hold a symposium in Washington, D.C., followed by another on May 6 in the U.K." _Barbara Quint, InformationToday
"A Data Curation Profile is a resource for Library and Information Science professionals, Archivists, IT professionals, Data Managers, and others who want information about the specific data generated and used in research areas and sub-disciplines that may be published, shared, and preserved for re-use."
Formerly, the impact of authors and their scientific production was measured by the average citation frequencies of journals publishing their research: the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in the United States and published annually in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)-the most frequently used quantitative indicator to measure the quality/value/impact of research works published in the core international journals. It has been suggested that, by calculating the number of webpages pointing to a given site, analogously, a Web Impact Factor can be calculated as a way of comparing the attractiveness of sites or domains on the World Wide Web.
According to Christina Pikas, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies who performed a cluster analysis on science blogs, communities generally form within scientific disciplines.