Group items tagged

Researchers and academics spend a lot of time documenting the sources of the ideas, methods and evidence they have drawn on in their own writings. But Patrick Dunleavy writes that our existing citation and referencing practices are now woefully out of date and no longer fit for purpose.

I think that LSE is doing a lot of useful work for change the way scholars work and communicate. But the structure of the whole system is solid rock (still).

Peer review citation ring exposed in major scholarly publisher SAGE.

"In this paper, we examine the evolution of the impact of non-elite journals. We attempt to answer two questions. First, what fraction of the top-cited articles are published in non-elite journals and how has this changed over time. Second, what fraction of the total citations are to non-elite journals and how has this changed over time. "

"It is an irony of the digital age that at a time when we are used to having easy access to seemingly endless information and knowledge, so much of it is disappearing into a digital black hole. For 450 years the concept of legal deposit has helped to preserve the nation's intellectual record.| There is this aspect of disappearing data as well.

See my bookmark post 'Academic citation practices ...' for some geeky stuff on the reference / citation issues.

Jacynthe, you are welcome, and Phillip, many thanks!

"At the same time, a fair amount of resistance to OA practices still exists. Publishers object to OA on economic principles, as it undermines the revenue generated by journals. Some researchers feel that it devalues their work as well, lowering it to the level of "a database to be consulted," in Eve's words. He believes the academic community is over-reliant on scholarly publishing's status quo; as he told the crowd at Columbia, "the system reinforces itself through economies of prestige." Even as interest in altmetrics grows, the quality of research continues to be gauged by the number of citations an article gathers and the status of the journal it appears in."

This is a good overview of a project that seeks to demystify and break down resistance to open educational resources.

WizFolio is an online research collaboration tool for knowledge discovery. With WizFolio you can easily manage and share all types of information in a citation ready format including research papers, patents, documents, books, YouTube videos, web snippets and a lot more.

Nature Communications has announced it will go open access only from 20 October in a bid to show the world that quality papers do not have to be paid for.

I've chosen to link to the article on Wired which discusses the move as the explanation is easier for those who (like me!) have little experience of academic journals to understand. One of the most important points I've taken from reading this article (and the PDF study explaining the reasons for the move to Open Access, which is linked from the article) is that to date, articles which have previously been published to Nature Communications using the OA model have earned more citations than those published under a subscription model. I'm interested to learn more about the mentioned Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I'm not yet familiar with. If anyone with experience using (or publishing to) academic journals would like to add any relevant points to the potential impact of the magazine's choice to go OA, I would really appreciate the insight!

The wonderful blog, Hack Library School, has recently posted a piece on open access publishing. This piece is a great overview, which covers many of the basic concepts covered in Module 6. The article discusses what open access is (and what it isn't) and some of the biggest discussion points on the issue today. It's a great overview and well worth the read if you want an overview or a refresher on the topic!

This blog covers a lot of relevant concepts related to OA, but a finer point need to be clarified. Regarding Google Scholar, not everything retrieved from GS is OA. GS is a web crowler, it crows wherever it is allowed, including references and citations to articles behind paywalls. On the other hand, many librarians are working to make their paid journals subscriptions available to their faculty and students via Google Scholar. So when faculty/students are on their universities' network, they can search GS, find articles from journals. If their library subscribes to that journal, there is a good chance a link to the full text will be available.

I agree with the point that "findability" for green OA articles is a current problem. We need a PubMed or Web of Science for green OA articles!

This weeks module 6 is about Open Science and Open Data. Within the course provided videos and readings do not provide much on Open Data. This article dives into why Open Data is relevant in Open Science. Citation: Molloy JC (2011) The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Means Better Science. PLoS Biol 9(12): e1001195. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001195 Published: December 6, 2011 Copyright: © 2011 Jennifer C. Molloy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Open data leads to better science, but a community effort is needed in order to overcoming the barriers to widespread publication and availability of open scientific data.