Search results

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of national libraries in developing national open access infrastructure and policy on the basis of the experiences of the National Library (NL) of Sweden.

The paper is descriptive based on the knowledge of a key player in the development of open access in Sweden. The priorities and outcome of the programme are described.

The paper reveals that the NL Sweden since around 1990 has combined the mission of a “traditional” national library with that of a national, research library authority. It has coordinated its support for development of repositories and open access in the OpenAccess.se programme that ran from 2006 to 2009. The conclusion is that a national library can successfully act as a catalyst for closer cooperation between the main bodies of research and research libraries in advancing an Open Access agenda and developing a digital research information infrastructure. This is because it is usually placed directly under the government and thus closer to national policy making. It is often perceived as unbiased in relation to the different interests of the various parties involved. It is also able to advance development projects into sustainable services.

The role of national libraries in relation to open access has not been discussed widely. The experience of the NL Sweden in this respect has a general interest.

Although ethnographic research requires researchers to become highly involved in the lives of their respondents, in research reports or articles one rarely finds how the researcher dealt with his or her involvement, how this influenced the execution of the research, the interpretations and the outcome. In this chapter, I would like to discuss the issues that I faced during my research among children and young people living in so-called child-headed households in a disadvantaged community in South Africa.

Although children are recognized as social actors in the social sciences, ethical issues in research following from this new view have received less attention. Ethical considerations are part of any research project, but it is often argued that research among children raises some particular issues. I shall reflect on my emotional involvement and ethical issues on the basis of the principles of informed consent, maximum benefit and protection from harm and the influence of my interpreters on these issues. Doing research to children and young people in such difficult situations requires emotion work. In the conclusions I will make some suggestions for dealing with the emotions of respondents and one own emotional involvement.

The paper aims to present a wide range of useful freely available internet resources (e.g. directories, e‐journals, FAQs, mailing lists, and weblogs) that allow the reader to investigate the major aspects of the important open access (OA) movement.

The internet resources included in this webliography were identified during the course of one of the authors writing the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E‐prints and Open Access Journals. The authors evaluated, selected, categorized, and annotated these resources to construct this webliography, which complements the bibliography.

The most useful resources have been annotated and organized into webliography sections. For example, the “Starting Points”, “Debates”, and “General Information” sections list resources that orient the reader to OA and the issues involved. The different “Directories (and Guides)” sections alert the reader to useful finding aids on relevant subjects.

This webliography provides easy access to the most relevant internet resources for understanding and practicing OA. It affirms the significance of OA in scholarly communication, and it identifies the key parties involved in and/or contributing to the OA movement.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the open access and open source movement in the digital library world.

A review of key developments in the open access and open source movement is provided.

Open source software and open access to research findings are of great use to scholars in developing nations.

This paper provides useful information about software for institutions introducing digital library concepts.

By analyzing journal articles with high citation counts but low Twitter mentions and vice versa, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overall picture of differences between citation counts and Twitter mentions of academic articles.

Citation counts from the Web of Science and Twitter mentions of psychological articles under the Social Science Citation Index collection were collected for data analysis. An approach combining both statistical and simple content analysis was adopted to examine important factors contributing to citation counts and Twitter mentions, as well as the patterns of tweets mentioning academic articles.

Compared to citation counts, Twitter mentions have stronger affiliations with readability and accessibility of academic papers. Readability here was defined as the content size of articles and the usage of jargon and scientific expressions. In addition, Twitter activities, such as the use of hashtags and user mentions, could better facilitate the sharing of articles. Even though discussions of articles or related social phenomena were spotted in the contents of tweets, simple counts of Twitter mentions may not be reliable enough for research evaluations due to issues such as Twitter bots and a deficient understanding of Twitter users’ motivations for mentioning academic articles on Twitter.

This study has elaborated on the differences between Twitter mentions and citation counts by comparing the characteristics of Twitter-inclined and citation-inclined articles. It provides useful information for interested parties who would like to adopt social web metrics such as Twitter mentions as traces of broader engagement with academic literature and potential suggestions to increase the reliability of Twitter metrics. In addition, it gives specific tips for researchers to increase research visibility and get attention from the general public on Twitter.

Open access repository is an essential element of an organization's strategy for enhancing the visibility and accessibility of its intellectual output to a global audience. Owing to its importance, the study aims to explore the current status of open access repositories in India and China by analyzing the different characteristic features of repositories.

The data for the study is collected from OpenDoar which is labeled as a quality assured repository directory across the globe. The country-wise contribution of Asian repositories is extracted from OpenDoar using various filtration options available in the repository. Further, the URL of every Indian and Chinese repository was manually accessed to gather the following metadata: Repository Type, Software Usage, Repository Interface Language, Year of Development, Subject Coverage, Content Coverage, and the utilization of Web 2.0 tools by repositories.

The findings of the study highlights that among the Asian countries, India is at 4th rank while China is at 5th rank in terms of repository count. The study depicts that India has shown more promising growth than China.  However, both the countries mainly focused on institutional repositories while disciplinary, aggregated, and governmental repositories are very few in number, therefore building such repositories is the need of an hour. Dspace as the preferred software and English as a dominant interface language occupy the prominent places in the repositories of both countries. Moreover, the repositories of both countries have embraced web 2.0 tools like RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom with little presence of social media tools.

The study has limitations, and results should be interpreted with caution. The comparison between the two countries is based on only one data source, i.e. OpenDoar. However, there is a possibility that future studies can take various repository directories as a data source that will give a clear picture of comparison.

The study can be beneficial to the policymakers and the administrators of these two regions as it will provide them a vivid picture of the diffrent characteristic features of their repositories so that they can formulate better policies that will be helpful to foster green open access.

The present paper is compilation of open access resources in the subject area library and information science (LIS) and their usefulness in the LIS teaching and learning process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Researcher compiled list by visiting library science department web sites, library web sites, OA forums/blogs, etc.

The library science subject area is rich in various forms of open access literature which is reported in the paper.

One of the first studies to report various forms of open access literature in the library science subject area.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the continuous evolution of scholarly publishing and knowledge communication as a result of the internet revolution.

Information was obtained from a literature review of the main contributions on “self‐archiving” – the broad term often applied to electronic publishing of author‐supplied documents on the web without commercial publisher mediation. The paper analyses the impact of the open access movement, which came to fruition after the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol was established, as it creates the potential for interoperability between e‐print repositories. It concludes by outlining the challenges for information managers in developing the full potential of open access.

With regard to the future of self‐archiving, particularly in relation to peer‐reviewed journals, information managers have a very important role to perform within their organization.

The paper highlights the benefits of publishing in e‐print repositories for authors and their institutions. It points to the roles and responsibilities of information managers, primarily within academic and research institutions, in devising clear institutional policies and assisting users to self archive their papers for the benefit of their own organizations and the global scientific community.

This paper sets out to present what the KNUST Library has done to introduce alternative scholarly communication in the form of an institutional repository to the University.

The study discusses management issues like agreement on policy to govern it, its acceptance by management and faculty as well as library personnel, and the software to be used that came into play along with challenges when the institutional repository was being planned and implemented.

The paper indicates that the introduction of the KNUSTSpace institutional repository has brought several benefits to the researchers in the University by offering them an alternative to the traditional means for scholarly communication and through that exposing their research to the world and the benefits that come with that. The University has also been show‐cased.

The paper clearly explains the key management issues encountered in the process of setting up the institutional repository and how they were tackled successfully. The paper will therefore be of assistance to libraries contemplating setting up institutional repositories.