This article by Prof Ng Kwan Hoong, Editor, Singapore Medical Journal, presents a brief discussion on the evolution and status of electronic publishing. A glimpse of the future publishing landscape has revealed that scientific communication and research will not remain the same. The internet and advances in information technology will have an impact on the research landscape, scholarly publishing, research policy and funding, dissemination of knowledge, and the progress of science as a whole.
This article by Mark Ware, Director, Mark Ware Consulting Ltd, examines the ways in which Web 2.0 tools and services - including blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and tagging, social networking and data interoperability and re-use - are affecting scholarly communication, with examples and usage data where available. The article finds that many of the tools have yet to live up to their early promise and the expectations that rode on them, and discuss the possible reasons for this.
This article examines the current roles libraries take in promoting Creative Commons and Open Access, and possible future roles, as well as how libraries organize and share open access works and develop relationships with others producing or developing content.It focuses on the reasoning behind supporting new models and methods of distribution, especially with regards to open licenses like Creative Commons, and the resources and systems libraries have developed to provide access to open licensed work.
This article by Jeff Erwin describes the legal and technical issues which bedevil the creation of online libraries, particularly in relation to copyright. It discusses the Google Books settlement of October 2008 and a number of divergent views on its value or problems for libraries.
In Pre-Internet times, peer-reviewed journals were the best way to disseminate research to a broad audience. Even today, editors and reviewers cherry-pick papers deemed the most revelatory and dispatch them to interested subscribers worldwide. While the process is cumbersome and expensive, it has allowed experts to keep track of the most prominent developments in their respective fields. This article, recently published in The Economist, is about blogging science without peer review. It looks at how Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, may prove to be a path to speedier scientific advancement.
This whitepaper seeks to help B2B media companies leverage Web 2.0 and social media tactics and technologies. Created by American Business Media's Media Marketing Committee, it focuses on education for those B2B media executives who are not familiar with many of the latest Web 2.0 applications or whose companies have been slow to implement them.
Article tools and the copyright notice can work in concert to greatly improve the usability of content and increase publisher revenue, while reducing piracy of copyrighted content. Most publishers are missing the boat. Article tools give readers the green light to do something with content besides read it. So does the copyright notice if it is implemented as an interactive link and not as static text. This paper presents some of the findings of a recent user survey and independent usability testing of article tools.
The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works that are accessible to end users directly, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work. In the spring of 2008, ARL engaged Ithaka to conduct an investigation into the range of online resources valued by scholars, paying special attention to those projects that are pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional formats and are considered innovative by the faculty who use them. This report profiles each of these types of resources, including discussion of how and why the faculty members reported using the resources for their work, how content is selected for the site, and what sustainability strategies the resources are employing.
The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new impact measures has been proposed on the basis of social network analysis and usage log data. In this paper, authors Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel, Aric Hagberg and Ryan Chute, investigate how these new measures relate to each other, and how accurately and completely they express scientific impact.
Scholarly research and the dissemination of research output are increasing at a rapid pace. This offers STM information providers the opportunity to expand their publishing, database development, and knowledge dissemination services. This white paper identifies the key trends that triggered the information explosion and how this resulted in a paradigm shift in the way information is disseminated and used, especially in the STM domain. It also highlights the key problem areas for researchers in discovering knowledge from an avalanche of research output. Further, this white paper elaborates - with a few apt examples - on how STM publishers can use semantic enrichment in different ways to enhance their offerings to researchers.
How are scientific papers and journals ranked and evaluated? This presentation by Patricia Brennan, MSIS, Manager of Evaluative Products and Services, Thomson Reuters, gives an in-depth overview of quantitative evaluation systems for scientific papers, looking at the long-established and the newer methods to rank and correlate scientific research.
This presentation by Richard W. Clement of Utah State University addresses how to improve the chances of a successful Institutional Repository. The presentation was given at the Association for College and Research Libraries 2009 conference.
This presentation was presented by Andrew Stammer, Journals Publishing Director, CSIRO Publishing, during a two-day Public Knowledge Project Workshop in Sydney. In his presentation, Stammer gives an overview of the scholarly publishing scene and offers his thoughts on Open access. According to him, access to scholarly literature is better now than it has ever been due to the Internet and investment by publishers in electronic delivery. He further opines that access could be further improved if subscription barriers were removed leading to greater ability to exploit information.
Digital collections of full-text e-books are proliferating on the Web and provide a wealth of open content for students. To examine whether academic libraries are providing a digital gateway to these resources, ten e-book titles from open digital collections were searched in the online catalogs and Web pages of ten academic libraries serving distance learners. Only three of the digital collection e-books were available from any of the library catalogs, and none were found on library Web pages. Availability of the ten e-book titles through Google and other digital discovery tools also had mixed results. Continued projects for improved delivery of open online content are necessary. In order to fulfill their role as digital gateways for their academic communities, libraries must pursue metadata standards to support cross-searching, collaborative projects, and development of e-resource search software, which integrates with the library catalog.
This is a 30 minute slidecast by Andy Powell (using 130 slides) covers a broad sweep of history from library cataloguing, thru the Dublin Core, Web search engines, IEEE LOM, the Semantic Web, arXiv, institutional repositories and more. The focus is ultimately on why Eduserv should be interested in 'metadata' (and surrounding areas), to a certain extent trying to justify why the Foundation continues to have a significant interest in this area.
