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The purpose of this paper is to define the need to a center for improving and extending university and research libraries in Iran, and identifying capabilities and position of Iranian Research Institute for Science and Technology (Irandoc) for accepting possible roles.

This research was documentary with scoping review in which the scope of research defined with internal and external organizational documents, related research studies in National Information System (NATIS) and international successful organizations in this field.

Findings show that Irandoc can play roles in developing a standard, establishing experts and professional network, developing information and knowledge sharing process, facilitating access to the scholarly contents, leadership and change management, developing infrastructures for research data management, gathering information and statistics of these libraries and developing interlibrary collaborations in these libraries.

This research is one of the seldom research studies related to clarification of an organization' role and position in NATIS in universities and improving and also extending activities of university and research libraries in Iran.

Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (Irandoc) undertaken activities to improve and expand Academic and Research Libraries (ARLs). However, it is necessary to identify demands, challenges and solutions for Irandoc to improve and extend activities of these libraries.

In this study, documents of Science & Technology Information System (STIS) commission analyzed in order to investigate the most important steps taken by Irandoc. The results of this part of research used to conduct interviews with administrators and experts in four groups including thirteen ARL managers, four middle and upper level managers at Irandoc, two deputies in Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT), and four experts in this field. Therefore, the present study was qualitative with content analysis approach. The credibility of the research findings promoted by a peer debriefing and member checking methods.

The results showed that strengthening of STIS commission, reinforced Irandoc's authoritative duties in MSRT, establishing a network of ARLs, promoting Irandoc's relationship with ARLs, institutional mapping among organizations in the field of libraries and information, updating of Irandoc's policies and statutes regarding ARLs, completing library statistics and information, standardizing, monitoring and evaluating ARLs, developing Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programs, and future study of ARLs were among the most important operational and executive strategies for improving and expanding ARLs' activities.

Organizational structure of the relationship among MSRT, Irandoc, ARLs and the types of services and resources ARLs provide in six levels, as well as conceptual model of Irandoc's position in this field presented.

The purpose of this paper is to design a conceptual model for the scholarly communication system in the Iranian Research Institute for Scientific Information and Documentation (IranDoc).

Some models have been developed to describe the scholarly communication process in different contexts but few considered this process from the organizational point of view. In the model, the organizational structure of scientific communication in IranDoc was considered. This model has four levels:, e.g. person‐to‐persons (P2P) scientific communication, person‐to‐organizations (P2O) scientific communication, organization‐to‐organizations (O2O) scientific communication, and organization‐to‐persons (O2P) scientific communication.

A conceptual model for scholarly communication within IranDoc is designed. Scientific and research institutions can establish their scholarly communication system by customizing the model.

The model is fairly conceptual and does not refer to technological aspects of the system. The implementation implications of the model are also not considered, so it could not be used directly in action. As it has been developed specifically for IranDoc, it may need some revisions to be used in other contexts.

Compared to the earlier models, the main differences and innovations in the model are: its organizational structure; detailed functions of the organizational scholarly‐communication; researcher based approach of the model; and different and new levels of the model analysis. This model can be applied in research institutions and generalized to those institutions in which information plays an important role.

Strengthening and improving Scientific and Technical Information (S&Ti) flow in all nations require an effective national S&Ti policy (NS&TiP). The very first step in developing an integrated NS&TiP is clarifying its scope and dimensions. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the dimensions of NS&TiP, in the form of an analytical framework, and to show how to apply it.

The current study adopted a qualitative method, called the framework approach, and proposed HeLICAM, a comprehensive framework including different dimensions for NS&TiP. Afterward, Iran's science and technology documents were analyzed based on the proposed framework.

HeLICAM framework includes (1) human resources, (2) laws and regulations, (3) ICT infrastructure, (4) connections, (5) activities and (6) information market. The results obtained from the application of HeLICAM in the analysis of Iran's science and technology policy documents indicated that the various dimensions of NS&TiP have mostly been overlooked. Although several policies have been developed for science and technology in Iran, the efforts have not been comprehensive and effective enough.

This study proposes the normative analytical framework called HeLICAM. The purpose of HeLICAM is to provide a draft of NS&TiP dimensions to policymakers that will be useful in NS&Ti policymaking because this framework helps to answer questions like “what dimensions have been considered in writing the policy document?” and “What it lacks?”, “What are its strengths and weaknesses?”, and “How can it be improved?”

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2020-0493

The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for categorizing and evaluating stakeholders that addresses the key five constraints of The Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience (TSIS), including (1) binary attributes, (2) heterogeneous stakeholders in each category, (3) ignoring stakeholder-organization relationship, (4) ignoring stakeholders' communication frequency and (5) ignoring fringe stakeholders.

In the first step, a set of solutions for the limitations and constraints of TSIS was extracted by holding three rounds of the Delphi method with the participation of 42 senior and middle Iranian managers in various organizations and based on it, “Basic Analysis for Stakeholder Evaluation and Classification” (BASEClass) was developed as an enhanced theoretical and empirical framework for stakeholder analysis. In the second Step BASEClass is validated by conducting an empirical study in an organization with the participation of 46 managers, experts and specialists.

BASEClass is an enhanced theoretical and methodological framework for classifying stakeholders based on the three primary attributes of legitimacy, power and urgency, and also the communication quantity as a complementary attribute in a 3D cubical schema, prioritizing stakeholders in several cubes based on one of the multi-criteria group decision-making methods.

BASEClass effectively reduces the mentioned limitations and constraints of TSIS and as a result can improve the effectiveness of strategies for dealing with different stakeholders.

This study aims to elucidate institutional analysis as an effective approach to investigating and designing the multilevel policymaking system of online social networks (OSN) for achieving a participatory model.

The institutional mapping approach has been used to analyze Iran’s OSN multilevel policymaking system. A combination of two matrices, including institutions-institutions and institutions-functions, was used to perform the institutional mapping. Two main steps were taken to draw the mentioned matrices. First, a review of related studies in Iran’s OSN policymaking system was conducted and the policy functions mentioned in these studies were identified and categorized using the meta-synthesis. Second, based on analyzing two policy documents of Iran’s OSN, institutions and their interactions were identified and policy functions were allocated to institutions.

Based on the results, the most important policy functions in the current OSN policymaking system in Iran are support, regulatory, monitoring and evaluation, business environment development, culture building and promotion, organizing licenses and permissions, policymaking and legislation. Also, the results show that there are shortcomings in this system, some of the most important of which are lack of transparency in regulatory, little work in culture building and promotion, neglect of the training of specialized human resources and research and development, slow development of the business environment and neglecting the role of nongovernmental organizations in policymaking.

By examining and analyzing how different institutions operate within a multilevel policymaking system, the policymaking process and its overall effectiveness can be enhanced. This analysis helps identify any inconsistencies, overlaps or conflicts in the roles and policies of these institutions, leading to a better understanding of how a multilevel policymaking system is organized.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the web site performances of 18 Iranian Research Institutions based on the following factors: web impact factor (WIF), connectivity, visibility and traffic rank.

In this research, AltaVista search engine was used to calculate the number of total links and WIF; and data for traffic rank, number of pages viewed and percentage of foreign and Iranian visitors were extracted from the Alexa data bank. Also correspondence analysis is employed to analyze the data using John's Macintosh Project software.

The results revealed that SANJESH Organization and Iranian Scientific Information and Documentation Center web sites have performed fairly well in most factors. These two web sites have the best ranking in traffic and attracted a large number of total links compared with the other web sites. The results of the correspondence analysis of these 18 web sites can be divided into three groups consisting of one, five and 12 web sites, respectively.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, the evaluation and ranking of Iranian research institutions' web sites were not discussed in any other studies. With web technologies playing such an important role in the areas of science and research today, the functions and performances of research and academic institutions' web sites on the world wide web should be assessed to identify their weaknesses.

The public sector (PS) has extensively utilized information technology (IT); however, research reveals that the failure rate remains high, particularly for national and sectoral IT (NaSIT) applications. To this end, numerous studies have been conducted to gauge the success of IT applications, where a significant number have demonstrated the importance of planning in this regard. Consequently, the current study aims to investigate the factors that influence the success of NaSIT planning and implementation within this sector.

A qualitative methodology and a systematic literature review encompassing papers indexed in seven databases until November 2022 were utilized.

The review of 92 selected papers revealed that the success of NaSIT planning and implementation is influenced by a number of factors divided into nine main categories. These include vision, goals and objectives; alignment; interoperability; infrastructure; involvement; equity and digital divide; privacy, security and trust; administration; and culture. Human, social, economic and organizational factors comprise the vast majority of these factors. By addressing these factors, the failure rate of IT plans can be reduced. Governments will be able to effectively employ this technology to accomplish their missions if these factors are considered in order to decrease the failure rate of IT plans.

By examining the factors that influence the success of NaSIT planning and implementation in the PS, this study attempts to provide a comprehensive view of various types of research. Furthermore, policymakers can employ this perspective to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the PS.

Many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) allow students or their advisors to restrict access to theses/dissertations (TDs) by applying embargoes. This study aims to identify why Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) allow embargoes.

One hundred HEIs were randomly selected, representing seven geographic regions. The authors imported policies/guidelines for embargoing TDs into MAXQDA software and coded the qualitative data.

Among the 100 studied HEIs, 43 HEIs (43%) have policies/guidelines on the web for embargoing TDs, most of which are from North America. For the majority of HEIs, embargoes are a voluntary option for students/advisors. Content analysis of the 32 embargo policies showed that embargo reasons (18 key reasons) can be categorized into six broad themes (commercialization, publication, ethical issues, funding contracts/agreements, security and safety, and miscellaneous).

In this study, only those policies are reviewed that are available, discoverable and accessible on HEIs' websites.

Highlighting the detrimental effect of not managing stipulations towards embargoes clearly, the findings could be useful for national/institutional policymakers and administrators of research departments, academic libraries, institutional repositories and graduate offices.

This is the first study to investigate rationales for TDs embargo practices. It creates awareness of how embargoes are managed and reflected in policy. Ultimately, it recommends further interrogation on how embargoes influence the principle of openness to scholarship.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-09-2022-0497.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an approach for retrieving a set of scientific articles in the field of Information Technology (IT) from a scientific database such as Web of Science (WoS), to apply scientometrics indices and compare them with other fields.

The authors propose to apply a statistical classification-based approach for extracting IT-related articles. In this approach, first, a probabilistic model is introduced to model the subject IT, using keyphrase extraction techniques. Then, they retrieve IT-related articles from all Iranian papers in WoS, based on a Bayesian classification scheme. Based on the probabilistic IT model, they assign an IT membership probability for each article in the database, and then they retrieve the articles with highest probabilities.

The authors have extracted a set of IT keyphrases, with 1,497 terms through the keyphrase extraction process, for the probabilistic model. They have evaluated the proposed retrieval approach with two approaches: the query-based approach in which the articles are retrieved from WoS using a set of queries composed of limited IT keywords, and the research area-based approach which is based on retrieving the articles using WoS categorizations and research areas. The evaluation and comparison results show that the proposed approach is able to generate more accurate results while retrieving more articles related to IT.

Although this research is limited to the IT subject, it can be generalized for any subject as well. However, for multidisciplinary topics such as IT, special attention should be given to the keyphrase extraction phase. In this research, bigram model is used; however, one can extend it to tri-gram as well.

This paper introduces an integrated approach for retrieving IT-related documents from a collection of scientific documents. The approach has two main phases: building a model for representing topic IT, and retrieving documents based on the model. The model, based on a set of keyphrases, extracted from a collection of IT articles. However, the extraction technique does not rely on Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, since almost all of the articles in the collection share a set of same keyphrases. In addition, a probabilistic membership score is defined to retrieve the IT articles from a collection of scientific articles.