Discoverability is a popular buzzword—ultimately meaning the degree to which scholars can locate the content needed to advance their research and other creative activity. Improved user discovery experiences require heightened collaboration among scholarly publishers and their published authors; search engine developers, database providers, abstracting and indexing services, and academic publishers; electronic resource management and integrated library system vendors; and librarians who advance institutional discoverability. Drawing from interviews with value chain experts, results of research studies, and insights from scholarly literature, this white paper assesses the currently fragmented discovery environment and proposes cross-sector conversations to further visibility and, ultimately, usage of the scholarly corpus, not only on the open web, but within library service
News Archive
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Vast amounts of new information and data are generated everyday through economic, academic and social activities. This sea of data, predicted to increase at a rate of 40% p.a., has significant potential economic and societal value. Techniques such as text and data mining and analytics are required to exploit this potential.
Businesses use such techniques to analyse customer and competitor data to improve competitiveness; the pharmaceutical industry mines patents and research articles to improve drug discovery; within academic research, mining and analytics of large datasets are delivering efficiencies and new knowledge in areas as diverse as biological science, particle physics and media and communications.
We have explored the costs, benefits, barriers and risks associated with text mining within UKFHE research using the approach to welfare economics laid out in the UK Treasury best practice guidelines for evaluation.
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Thursday, March 29, 2012
The overall aim of the Usage Factor project is to explore how online journal usage statistics might form the basis of a new measure of journal impact and quality, the Usage Factor (UF). The specific objectives of the project are: to examine the ways in which journal quality is currently assessed; to assess whether the UF would be a statistically meaningful measure; whether it would be accepted by researchers, publishers, librarians and research institutions; whether it would be statistically credible and robust; whether there is an organizational and economic model for its implementation that would be acceptable to the major stakeholder groups.
The project is being executed in three stages, from 2007 onwards. Stage 1 focused on market research into the overall feasibility and acceptability of the Usage Factor in principle. Stage 2 focused on modeling and analysis, in which real usage data from COUNTER-compliant publishers was used to test the formula for calculation of UF, as well as the processes for doing so on a sustainable, ongoing basis. The full report on Stages 1 and 2 of the project is provided below. Stage 3 of the project, which...
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Thursday, March 29, 2012
While Open Access (OA), as a concept, has been around for over a decade and remains the subject of many a heated discussion by publishers and librarians alike, it has taken much longer for awareness of the model to filter down to the author community – who should eventually stand to gain most from the barrier-free access to their work that OA brings with it.
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Thursday, March 29, 2012
Tools for social networking and social awareness are developing rapidly and evolving continuously. They are gaining popularity in a growing number of professional as well as personal activities, including scholarly research. There are social awareness tools for science researchers that facilitate collaboration, help manage references, and offer options for presenting findings in new ways. This paper discusses those tools. Evaluating and understanding their functionalities requires effort, and scientists can be reluctant to invest the necessary time to learn to use and populate them on their own. This suggests that an important role for librarians is to evaluate the many social awareness tools available, to recommend the ones that are best suited to each researcher's needs, and to help researchers use those tools effectively.
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http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march12/mcmahon/03mcmahon.html
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Open Access brings benefits for a variety of constituencies. Researchers gain from the increased usage and impact of their work. Their institutions benefit from the aggregated usage and impact of their researchers and the increased presence that Open Access brings. Society benefits from better technology transfer, better diffusion of know-how and a better-informed populace.
Open Access helps research to be carried out more efficiently by reducing duplication and blind alley research, by enabling researchers to find what they need more quickly and without cost and by helping researchers develop and diffuse the use of open standards. It makes possible better peer review and other methods of upholding academic rigour because researchers can easily see and judge the work of their peers and can access data for re-analysis and independent confirmation of findings. It also encourages collaborative endeavours by making research visible to new communities, including the general population.
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Friday, March 23, 2012
A reminder that Early Bird registration for 2012 IATUL Conference in Singapore closes on 31 March. To register please go to the website http://conference.ntu.edu.sg/iatul2012/Pages/home.aspx.
The theme of the conference is “Library Strategies for New Generation Users”. There will be 45 paper presentations from 25 countries and a poster session. Our invited keynote speakers will provide perspectives from different angles. Prof Rakesh Kumar is a professor of pathology at University of New South Wales and he will speak on his experience in teaching the new generation of students and what it holds for libraries. Mr Joe Murphy, librarian & technology trend spotter consultant is a well-known blogger who represents the new breed of librarians. Finally to round...
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