Extensive bibliography on Open Access journals

This bibliography presents selected English-language scholarly works that are useful in understanding open access journals.

It does not cover works about e-prints or works that include open access journals in a treatment of diverse types of research materials

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. Open Access Journals Bibliography. Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2010. http://www.digital-scholarship.org//oajb/oajb.html

Low participation of scientists in Web 2.0

TO READ:
The new publishing and scientific communication environments have led to the emergence of new Web indicators. Along with usage metrics such as downloads there are many measures that are generated from Science 2.0. Journals published by the Public Library of Science systematically collect many of these new metrics.

The objective of this paper is to present some of these new indicators and analyze them quantitatively through the case study of 8945 papers published in the journal PLoS One.

The selected indicators were; comments, ratings, number of bookmarks, links from scientific weblogs, downloads views and citations.

Basic descriptive statistics indicators and correlations have been calculated for all of them.

The results show the low participation of scientists in Web 2.0 and how most of these indicators, except for downloads and visits, are poorly consolidated metrics.

Álvaro Cabezas-Clavijo and Daniel Torres-Salinas. Indicadores de uso y participación en las revistas científicas 2.0: el caso de PLoS One
. Profesional de la Informacion, Volume 19, Issue 4, 1 July 2010, Pages 431-434

Back to the future! Libraries Vs Databases

In reaction of a 120 percent increase of its Web of Science
subscription, a Canadian Library suggested a collaborative revolution:

The librarian estimates that there are some 40,000 science journals
published every year; if 3,000 libraries pitched in, he calculates,
“then each of them would have to index 15 journal titles.

” Instead of paying money to commercial publishers for products such as Web of Science, libraries could put their resources to work indexing the scholarly literature themselves“.

To become a serious competitor of Thomson + Elsevier?!

Leggott, Mark. UPEI, Web of Science and Knowledge for all. Posted on: 14th of August 2010.
http://loomware.typepad.com/loomware/2010/08/upei-web-of-science-and-knowledge-for-all.html

Elsevier to launch soon a new science platform

According several Elsevier communications to customers:

SciVerse would be launched at the end of August 2010.

It will enable an integrated search across ScienceDirect, Scopus,
Scirus, and greater interoperability across the applications.
Additional applications will provide value-added capabilities such as
search refinements and analytics leveraging the combined content.

It would combine:

• 42 millions of abstracts (Scopus)
• 10 millions of full-text (ScienceDirect)
• 10,000 ebooks
• + Scientific web (Scirus)
• + Scientific wiki (SciTopics)
• + Specific applications from SciVal (Research Performance evaluation)

New SciVerse applications such as search within experimental methods and
analysis of prolific authors will result in faster and more precise
results. Combining the three world leading STM resources under a common
SciVerse search interface, will provide an unparalleled resource for
researchers to accelerate discovery and scientific outcome.

At the end of August 2010 the SciVerse platform will be introduced FREE
OF CHARGE as an enhancement to existing ScienceDirect and/or Scopus
subscription as well as being integrated with Scirus.

www.sciverse.com (as of end of august)

Librarians networking with users online

It is still early days, writes David Stuart, but there are plenty of potential benefits.

“Whenever a new social network site appears, librarians are often amongst the first to be found putting it through its paces (…)

However, if you delve below the surface, you quickly discover a far more complex information landscape. There are vast differences in the extent to which libraries are making use of the social network site opportunities, from the academic libraries that have been quick to embrace the potential of social network sites, to the corporate sector, which has been more circumspect. (…)

… there is the problem that other methods of communication, such as email and the phone, are already well established within many organisations. According to the principle of least effort, if the established methods of communication are ‘good enough’, most users won’t make the effort to try something new.

The challenge for libraries is to find ways to embrace social network sites and technologies without killing their potential. To do this they need to strike a balance between the risks of an open system and the lack of communication in a closed system. They must also balance strict rules that protect an organisation from potentially damaging staff behaviour with giving staff the room to innovate.

Stuart, David. Librarians and researchers network online. Research Information, August/September 2010, pp. 12-13
http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=279

My latest article: SharePoint for Librarians

Sum-up:

Ten years after its first beta version, Microsoft’s SharePoint is now gathering momentum in organisations around the world. The article reviews what this means for information professionals.

• 2010 is the SharePoint year

• The crème of Web 2.0

• Applications for libraries

• To SharePoint or not?

Yes, SharePoint might be the next ‘Big Thing’ for information professionals. Shall we watch the train leaving without us as happened with the internet in the 1990s? Of course not! It is time to expand our horizons and promote our skills.

I encourage librarians who read this article to jump on the train, to be educated in SharePoint and to move forward in a new career as ‘knowledge engineer’. This way you might become the future SharePoint document librarians.

Basset, Hervé. The Swiss Army knife for Information professionnals. Research Information, August/September 2010. pp. 22-23
Online: http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=283

Social Media and Libraries: the EBSCO survey

EBSCO has just published first results of their european survey about social medias usage by libraries.

Some findings I noticed:

• 62% of librarians have a positive perception of social media
• Main goals of creating social media:
  • to maximise library exposure
  • to modernise the library image
• Main social media targetted by libraries:
  • Social networks (FaceBook, etc.)
  • Blogging
  • Widgets
  • Twitter
• Only 14% of libraries implemented with preliminary survey of end users
• Main difficulties when implementing:
  • Takes too much time to maintain
• Main success factors:
  • Good understanding of end users needs
• French libraries are the less enthusiastic in Europe

Harnesk, Jakob. Social Media in libraries: European survey findings. Presentation available on line:
http://www.slideshare.net/jhoussiere/social-media-usage-in-libraries-in-europe-survey-teaser

SharePoint and your Intranet’s usability

The web usability’s guru Jakob Nielsen gives a few recommendations while using SharePoint for a corporate intranet.

Lesons are based on awarded intranets, all are designed with SharePoint.

His conclusion:
“the easier it gets to build the intranet’s basic infrastructure, the more important it becomes to populate it with the most useful features possible and to create efficient user interfaces for those features. Intranets of the future might require less programming work, but they’ll surely need even more user experience work“

Nielsen, Jakob. Does SharePoint destroy Intranet Design? AlertBox, June 7, 2010
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/sharepoint.html

Your Library catalog with SharePoint

According this consultant it is possible to manage (more or less) easily a Library catalog with SharePoint.

2 ways:

• To contact a vendor who provides specific add-ons for SharePoint. For the US market, she mentions SydneyPlus and InMagic.
• To develop by yourself your portal including a Library database

In this case, Lirarians who are not IT specialists would use the technology of “programming without coding” to maximize web parts offered by SharePoint.

The consultant encourages a close collaboration between Librarians and IT people: 
“‘One size would not fit all’ libraries so setting up SharePoint directly ’out of the box’ would not work.
Without librarian input, the IT department that was not composed of librarians generated hundreds of information silos without any relationships to each other“

Weldon, Lorette S.J. How is SharePoint used in Libraries? FUMSI, August 2010, online:
http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/use/4714

Citation data confronted to Experts judgments

When compared to human judgments by Experts, automated citation data by Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar are bot so bad, after all.

This paper studies the correlations between peer review and citation indicators when evaluating research quality in library and information science (LIS). 42 LIS experts (Bar-Ilman, Jasco, Tenopir…) , provided judgments of the quality of research published by 101scholars.

“citation data from Scopus was more strongly correlated with the expert judgments than was data from GS,which in turn was more strongly correlated than data from WoS“

Li,J., et al. Ranking of library and information science researchers : Comparison of data sources for correlating citation data, and expert judgments. Journal of Informetrics (2010), doi:10.1016/j.joi.2010.06.005