La qualité de l’édition scientifique en Europe. Academic Publishing in Europe 2008 : Quality and Publishing
(déposé sur ArchiveSIC, 17/11/08 - compte-rendu de conférence)

"Du 22 au 23 janvier 2008, l'Académie des Sciences de Berlin-Brandebourg a accueilli la 3e conférence « Academic Publishing in Europe » (APE 2008). Sous les auspices de la Commission Européenne, les organisateurs de ce forum développent depuis 2006 l'échange d'expériences, d'informations et d'analyses entre les professionnels de l'édition scientifique européenne. Cette année, environ 230 éditeurs, intermédiaires et chercheurs de 15 pays ont suivi l'invitation et débattu pendant deux jours les questions liées à la qualité de l'édition."

Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication
(source: Association of Research Libraries)

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released the final report from a study that ARL commissioned Ithaka to conduct, Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication, by Nancy L. Maron and K. Kirby Smith, along with the database of exemplars that the study produced.
In the spring of 2008, ARL engaged Ithaka’s Strategic Services Group 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. The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work, but the decentralized distribution of these new-model works has made it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number.
Ithaka’s findings are based on a collection of resources identified by a volunteer field team of over 300 librarians at 46 academic institutions in the US and Canada. Field librarians talked with faculty members on their campuses about the digital scholarly resources they find most useful and reported the works they identified. The authors evaluated each resource gathered by the field team and conducted interviews of project leaders of 11 representative resources. Ultimately, 206 unique digital resources spanning eight formats were identified that met the study’s criteria.

Boice, Kristin (2008) Open Access, Libraries, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing
(déposé sur dLIST, 05/11/08)

"Running scholarly presses as profit centers is becoming increasingly unsustainable as many are barely able to stay solvent in today’s market economy. Under increasing financial pressures university presses are creating a bottleneck for the publishing of scholarly articles, making less of it available more slowly. By restricting access and limiting outlets for publication, today’s commercially structured scholarly publishing system runs counter to the aims of scholarly publishing—to circulate discourse and research findings through academic institutions and into the world. The open access movement is one response to a general failure of the for-profit scholarly publishing system. This paper looks at what it would mean to reconfigure scholarly publishing away from commerce and toward an open access model, and the potential role of libraries within an open access publishing system."

Universality of citation distributions: towards an objective measure of scientific impact
(source: déposé sur arXiv / à paraître dans Proceedings of the National Academy of Science s / via The Scholarly Kitchen, 03/11/08)

"We study the distributions of citations received by a single publication within several disciplines, spanning broad areas of science. We show that the probability that an article is cited $c$ times has large variations between different disciplines, but all distributions are rescaled on a universal curve when the relative indicator $c_f=c/c_0$ is considered, where $c_0$ is the average number of citations per article for the discipline. In addition we show that the same universal behavior occurs when citation distributions of articles published in the same field, but in different years, are compared. These findings provide a strong validation of $c_f$ as an unbiased indicator for citation performance across disciplines and years. Based on this indicator, we introduce a generalization of the h-index suitable for comparing scientists working in different fields."

Heterodox Economics and Dissemination of Research through the Internet: the Experience of RePEc and NEP
(source: University of Connecticut, Department of Economics / via OAN)

"We study how the democratization of the diffusion of research through the Internet could have helped non traditional fields of research. The specific case we approach is Heterodox Economics as its pre-prints are disseminated through NEP, the email alert service of RePEc. Comparing heterodox and mainstream papers, we find that heterodox ones are quite systematically more downloaded, and particularly so when considering downloads per subscriber. We conclude that the Internet definitely helps heterodox research, also because other researcher get exposed to it. But there is still room for more participation by heterodox researchers."

PARSE.Insight - INSIGHT into issues of Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe

"The EU-project "PARSE.Insight - INSIGHT into issues of Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe" started its work in March 2008. Its areas of activity include long-term digital preservation, the provision of raw scientific data and its links to publications.
Raw scientific data is often scattered over a number of research institutes and in many cases is managed locally by the researchers themselves. The rapid aging of data carriers, formats and software and hardware environments means that their long-term accessibility is under threat. In many cases no preservation strategies exist for this data. There is therefore a risk of losing data which is of great significance for research.
The aim of PARSE.Insight is to draw up a roadmap and recommendations to support the e-Infrastructure for the digital preservation and long-term accessibility of this raw academic data. The project partners first analyze the digital preservation methods and the communities involved in the provision of raw academic data. They then carry out a Europe-wide survey to determine how raw academic data is currently being archived. Three case studies are providing specific and complementary information. The results will be used as the basis for plugging the gaps in the European e-Infrastructure with regard to the long-term usability of raw scientific data and then to devise a tool to support EU investment and infrastructure decisions aimed at ensuring long-term access to raw scientific data.
Nine partners from the fields of libraries, research, journalism and politics are working together in PARSE-Insight. The project is scheduled to run for two years.
Further information: http://www.parse-insight.eu/"

Intute signale l'article suivant (paru dans le Times Higher Education): By the blog: academics tread carefully

A voir aussi, sur Intute:
- The State of the Academic Blogosphere
- Why blog - part 1
- Why blog - part 2

Livret de Revues.org (2008-2009)

Sommaire:
* Des outils mis à la disposition de la communauté scientifique
* Suivre l’actualité du CLEO
* Des revues de sciences humaines et sociales souhaitant participer à la diffusion des savoirs
* Les revues adhérentes
* Adhérer à Revues.org

Peer-review in the Internet age
(source: Pawel Sobkowicz, déposé sur arXiv, 02/10/08)

"The importance of peer-review in the scientific process can not be overestimated. Yet, due to increasing pressures of research and exponentially growing number of publications the task faced by the referees becomes ever more difficult. We discuss here a few possible improvements that would enable more efficient review of the scientific literature, using the growing Internet connectivity. In particular, a practical automated model for providing the referees with references to papers that might have strong relationship with the work under review, based on general network properties of citations is proposed."

Copyright Law, Intellectual Property Policy, and Academic Culture
(source: Clifford Lynch, chapitre en libre accès tiré de l'ouvrage The Center for Intellectual Property Handbook, 2006)

"This chapter discusses the following topics:
- Creation of the scholarly record
- The central role of fair use in academic production
- Public domain and orphan works
- University missions as determining policy choices
- The role of university presses and scholarly societies"