Form Of Scholarly Communication Research Articles

From Pamphlets to PDFs: The Shadow Histories of Research Publishing

In this article I undertake an historical analysis exploring how civil society, government, industry, and research sectors have adopted and adapted various publishing technologies over time—including the printing press, typewriters, microfiche, photocopiers, computers, email, pdfs, websites, and databases—to communicate research and ideas. Shining a light on this shadow history reveals the way the centripetal and centrifugal forces of democratization, science, and commercialization have intersected with changing technologies to foster a diverse research publishing economy which features both centralized and decentralized trajectories. While scholarly academic publishing has moved from informal letter exchanges towards formalized standards of production, and eventually to the global business it is today, governments, civil society organisations, research institutions, and industry have continued to operate as small-scale, often ad hoc publishers, producing and distributing research and other publications for various purposes, using and adapting a range of technologies and business models, first in print and continuing in digital formats. The history of organization-based research publishing (grey literature) shows the ways in which a range of new media tools and technologies have, at any given time, been co-opted by groups for public influence and impact, and have continued in various informal and decentralized business models at the same time as other forms of scholarly communication have become increasingly aggregated.

Features of the Development of Online Scientific Periodicals on the Example of the Journal “ISTORIYA”

This review focuses on the history of the electronic scientific and educational journal “ISTORIYA”, stages of its formation and the factors influencing its development. The emergence of online journals, distinguished by the dynamic nature of filling the editorial portfolio providing a much higher level of scientific communication compared to traditional print publications, was a reflection of the rapid introduction of Internet technologies into the daily practice of the humanities. This led to a search for informational and technological solutions that would automate the ways of communicating and processing scientific periodicals against the background of the growth of publication activity and the widespread use of scientometrics. One of such solutions was the creation of publishing platforms, a striking representative of which was JES (Journal of Education and Science) developed in Russia in 2013, which subsequently provided automation of the editorial-publishing cycle for a number of socio-humanitarian journals. The Journal “ISTORIYA”, which at the time served as a guide to technological solutions that took into account the most current trends in the development of forms of scholarly communication, was a flagship publication of the platform. Due to this advantage? the Journal “ISTORIYA”, created by the efforts of the State Academic University for the Humanities and the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has managed not only to take its rightful place among the leading scientific periodicals in a relatively short period of time, but also to acquire a reputation as a media of the highest quality, becoming a “business card” of successful integration of science, education and modern information technology.

Dissertations and Theses in Top Nursing Publications: A Bibliometric Study

Objective - To investigate the overall prevalence of citations to theses and dissertations, as well as their prevalence in feature articles, editorials, and review articles in top research nursing journals. To evaluate differences between journals and to determine whether there was a change in use over time. Methods - Journals were selected from the Medical Library Association’s Nursing and Allied Health Resource Section’s 2012 Selected List of Nursing Journals. An evaluation was conducted of citations from 3,711 articles published in 2011 and 2018 in 7 top nursing journals. Thesis and dissertation citations were identified and categorized by type of scholarly communication: feature articles, reviews, and editorials. Analysis was conducted for the prevalence of citations for theses and dissertations based on percentage of overall citations and the percentage of articles with a thesis and dissertation citation. Results - Thesis and dissertation citations accounted for 0.41% of all citations. However, 9.43% of the articles contained at least one thesis and dissertation citation. Feature articles contained more thesis and dissertation citations than review articles and editorials. The Journal of Advanced Nursing, Journal of Clinical Nursing, and the Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences published a higher percentage of articles with at least one thesis and dissertation citation. Conclusion - The overall use of theses and dissertations in nursing scholarship is comparatively low compared to other forms of scholarly communication. However, this unique form of scholarship viewed from its impact on the percentage of scholarly articles in nursing demonstrates that theses and dissertations have made more of a contribution than previously reported. Our research provides libraries and the nursing academy with empirical evidence for the value of theses and dissertations. It provides librarians and the nursing academy justification for continuing efforts to preserve, enhance access through digital repositories, and to continue to explore strategies to promote the use of theses and dissertations in research.

Open Access Articles and Position Papers

In addition to an overview of the issue, this article is a reminder that we are fully open access, free of charge, double-blind peer reviewed, and offer well-above-average editorial support, especially for early-career researchers. All of the editorial team work in a voluntary capacity. We are committed to finding alternative models of publishing, to reclaim the project of Open Access and key it to a different register of shared creativity and responsibility and work towards a more accessible, ethical, transparent, and creative form of scholarly communication.

Networking Social Scholarship…Again

This paper proposes to answer several questions that arise from the actions of American scientists between 1840 and 1890. How did the broader organization of science in the late nineteenth century create a system of professional disciplines? Why did the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) form, and why did specialized societies like the American Chemical Society (ACS) later found an organization separate from the AAAS? Why did these professional societies create journals, and how did these journals help to communicate science? This paper combines both quantitative textual analysis and qualitative historical and sociological methods within the context of nineteenth-century American science. It is hoped that by broadening the methods used, and by better understanding the early deliberations of scientists before there was a formal scholarly communication system, it may be possible to contextualize current debates about the need for changes in the scholarly communication system.

Understanding formal scholarly communication in information science by exploring generational evolution of academic writing patterns

ABSTRACTProfessional academic writing skills can improve the validity of scholarly communication. Aiming to reveal the generational differences of academic writing patterns, by applying quantitative linguistic analysis to explore 53 information scientists in China and 2,328 papers of them, we found that (1) the writing pattern evolves smoothly, (2) sentences that scientists compose in a paper have become longer and longer, and syntax has become more and more complex as time goes by, and (3) scientists tend to be more and more cautious on choosing expression manners and norm words. This research will continue the matters of exact relationships between the age differences and writing patterns, and will be extended to other languages.

Journal Adult Education - Bibliographic Data and Content Analysis of Published Articles (2001-2017)

Journals represent the most prominent medium of formal scholarly communication, and therefore, evaluation of journals has become an important tool for researchers who publish novel research results as well as for those who wish to be up-todate with the current research streams. Within this context, the analysis of Journal Adult Education was conveyed aiming to identify changes that were brought in the editing process of the Journal from 2001 until 2017. This general research objective is further divided into two research tasks – bibliographic analysis and content analysis of the journal. On the basis of bibliometric method on the selected sample of contributions, presence (or omission) of the following identification bibliographic data were assessed: author name, article title, author’s institutional affiliation, author’s contact details; article’s UDC, abstract and key words in two languages; article title and reference list. Further analysis included also author’s country of origin. The second research task was aimed at content analysis of published articles, in particular, scholarly-professional communication in adult education, which reflects cognitive texture of the field. The focus of analysis was content elements such as: key words, thematic focus and the level of andragogical approach to the given phenomenon. The results indicate that the Journal has witnessed increase in the quality of data of article identification, that on the basis of larger representation of authors from the neighbouring countries it can be regarded as regional journal, but that it is still not thematically clearly defined. Andragogical approach in much regard is mixed with approaches of other disciplines, more or less congenial to it, even to a certain extent completely deviating from the logics of adult education.

Dialectic: The Aims of Institutional Repositories

ABSTRACTIn the early 2000s, Clifford Lynch and Raym Crow had two different visions for the future of institutional respositories. Using their works as a starting point, T. Scott Plutchak discussed the initial aims of institutional respositories and addressed the dialectic between the view of institutional repositories as providing a method of preserving and nurturing new forms of scholarly communication and that of the institutional repository as a mechanism to transition to Open Access models for scholarly publications. Plutchak concludes that institutional repository librarians should focus efforts on collecting and preserving material outside of the formal publishing program in order to advance the work of our institutions, and to advance what libraries can do.

Let the crowd be my peers? How researchers assess the prospects of social peer review

While Internet technologies have provided social networks for researchers as more open means to make their work available to other scholars, the traditionally closed, peer review-based publishing process has remained nearly untouched. We ask researchers about their intention to go one step further and use social peer review (SPR), which enables them to directly publish their work within a web-based social network, where, instead of the traditional pre-publication peer review, it can be evaluated and critiqued by the entire academic community. Based on a sample of 1429 international scholars from various fields and by drawing upon adoption and institutional theory, this study seeks to identify scientists’ motivational drivers for engaging in this new forms of scholarly communication. We find that the adoption of SPR is driven more by extrinsic factors than by researchers’ intrinsic motivation or normative influences to make science more open. Further challenges for SPR are low scores on the most relevant performance criteria, as well as low acceptance by established scientists. However, rather than a substitute, SPR is well perceived as a possible supplement to the traditional peer-based review system.

First and Second Drafts of History: The Case of Trump, Foucault and Pre-Modern Governance

How do we, as scholars – social scientists and historians – respond to momentous contemporary events? Our instincts urge caution, but the events demand action. While blogs and other media offer some paths, they can veer too much towards the snap judgments associated with bad journalism and simplistic representation. This paper consists of two essays, one embedded in the other, that challenge us to think differently about news, social science, and history. The impetus comes from an attempt to make sense of the first, muddled weeks of the new Trump administration in Washington. With reference to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it reflects on how the CEO-in-Chief at the White House seemed to invoke a form of pre-modern governance, reminiscent of the divine right of kings and echoing a case in the not-too-distant past of a lapse in corporate governance. The main essay then resumes to consider what this means about academic writing and publishing, and what it might mean in terms of new forms of scholarly communication and impact about current affairs, as the first, rough draft of history passes into and through a second.

FIRST AND SECOND DRAFTS OF HISTORY: THE CASE OF TRUMP, FOUCAULT AND PRE-MODERN GOVERNANCE

How do we, as scholars – social scientists and historians – respond to momentous contemporary events? Our instincts urge caution, but the events demand action. While blogs and other media offer some paths, they can veer too much towards the snap judgments associated with bad journalism and simplistic representation. This paper consists of two essays, one embedded in the other, that challenge us to think differently about news, social science, and history. The impetus comes from an attempt to make sense of the first, muddled weeks of the new Trump administration in Washington. With reference to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it reflects on how the CEO-in-Chief at the White House seemed to invoke a form of pre-modern governance, reminiscent of the divine right of kings and echoing a case in the not-too-distant past of a lapse in corporate governance. The main essay then resumes to consider what this means about academic writing and publishing, and what it might mean in terms of new forms of scholarly communication and impact about current affairs, as the first, rough draft of history passes into and through a second. [This paper is is available open access as a SHERPA/RoMEO publication by the publishers, Addleton Academic Publishers.]

Assessment of Open-Access Institutional Repositories: A Case Study of Australia

This paper highlights the assessment of open-access institutional repositories (IRs): a case study of Australia. This study attempts to focus on some basic constraints, those are analyses of total number of IRs, subjects and contents of IRs, language interface and software used. To accomplish the identified aims, the open-access IRs in Australia were identified by selecting the database of Directory of Open Access Repositories, and the data collected were analysed for the necessary information. It is observed that majority, 42 (76.36%), of the IRs belong to universities, whereas 13 (23.64%) are from research institutions. English language was most preferred (i.e. 54 (98.18%)) language interface by Australian IRs. DSpace was a widely used (i.e. 15 (27.27%)) software by repositories. 39 (70.91%) repositories were from multidisciplinary subjects, and more archived form of scholarly communication in Australian open-access IRs was 44 articles (20.85%).

Dimensions of trust in scholarly communication: Problematizing peer review in the aftermath of John Bohannon's “Sting” in science

This study investigates online material published in reaction to a Science Magazine report showing the absence of peer‐review and editorial processes in a set of fee‐charging open access journals in biology. Quantitative and qualitative textual analyses are combined to map conceptual relations in these reactions, and to explore how understandings of scholarly communication and publishing relate to specific conceptualizations of science and of the hedging of scientific knowledge. A discussion of the connection of trust and scientific knowledge and of the role of peer review for establishing and communicating this connection provides for the theoretical and topical framing. Special attention is paid to the pervasiveness of digital technologies in formal scholarly communication processes. Three dimensions of trust are traced in the material analyzed: (a) trust through personal experience and informal knowledge, (b) trust through organized, internal control, (c) trust through form. The article concludes by discussing how certain understandings of the conditions for trust in science are challenged by perceptions of possibilities for deceit in digital environments.

Open access – deus ex machina for publishing scholarly journals?

The article describes the evolution of scholarly communication through scholarly journals. It gives a short overview of the historical development, starting from the first journals in the 17th century to problems in the 20th century (such as increase in the number of journals, problems of accessibility, visibility, and journal access crisis). The open access (OA) movement is described. It arose from the “old tradition” facing new technologies and was supposed to be the solution to the journal crisis that culminated in 1990s. The idea, defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, was to assure free and unrestricted online availability of peer-reviewed journal literature. The beginnings of formal scholarly communication, back in 1665, had similar ideas of making research results available to the widest possible public. The idea was excellent – removing access barriers would increase visibility, impact and quality of research. Research has shown that OA articles have better impact and visibility (Lawrence, Brody, Harnad, Haajem, etc.). However, publishing scientific information has its costs. New models have been developed, some of them causing new restrictions and barriers. The most popular model is the author-pays model (article processing charges, APC) – if authors can afford to pay the processing charges, their work is published and thus more visible and more citable. However, if they cannot, a new problem arises – some research results, although valuable, are not published in open access and therefore they have lower visibility and impact. Another problem is the phenomenon of the so-called predatory publishers. Those publishers use the APC model but neglect quality control mechanisms in order to make profit. Their criteria for publishing are not positive peer-reviews but payments made by authors or their institutions. Predatory publishers’ practices are not only unethical, but also illegal, and they are a great threat to the development of science. New questions have arisen lately - has OA movement achieved its goal, has it evolved in the way it was supposed to, was it really dues ex machina for publishing scholarly journals, i.e. did it solve the access crisis. In conclusion, it is proposed that the solution to the problem of predatory publishers could be the development of a new set of information literacy skills that are based on finding, evaluating and properly using OA information. Universities and academic libraries should play an important role in developing those skills and competencies.

The role of arXiv, RePEc, SSRN and PMC in formal scholarly communication

Purpose– The four major Subject Repositories (SRs), arXiv, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and PubMed Central (PMC), are all important within their disciplines but no previous study has systematically compared how often they are cited in academic publications. In response, the purpose of this paper is to report an analysis of citations to SRs from Scopus publications, 2000-2013.Design/methodology/approach– Scopus searches were used to count the number of documents citing the four SRs in each year. A random sample of 384 documents citing the four SRs was then visited to investigate the nature of the citations.Findings– Each SR was most cited within its own subject area but attracted substantial citations from other subject areas, suggesting that they are open to interdisciplinary uses. The proportion of documents citing each SR is continuing to increase rapidly, and the SRs all seem to attract substantial numbers of citations from more than one discipline.Research limitations/implications– Scopus does not cover all publications, and most citations to documents found in the four SRs presumably cite the published version, when one exists, rather than the repository version.Practical implications– SRs are continuing to grow and do not seem to be threatened by institutional repositories and so research managers should encourage their continued use within their core disciplines, including for research that aims at an audience in other disciplines.Originality/value– This is the first simultaneous analysis of Scopus citations to the four most popular SRs.

Changes in the digital scholarly environment and issues of trust: An exploratory, qualitative analysis

The paper reports on some of the results of a research project into how changes in digital behaviour and services impacts on concepts of trust and authority held by researchers in the sciences and social sciences in the UK and the USA. Interviews were used in conjunction with a group of focus groups to establish the form and topic of questions put to a larger international sample in an online questionnaire. The results of these 87 interviews were analysed to determine whether or not attitudes have indeed changed in terms of sources of information used, citation behaviour in choosing references, and in dissemination practices. It was found that there was marked continuity in attitudes though an increased emphasis on personal judgement over established and new metrics. Journals (or books in some disciplines) were more highly respected than other sources and still the vehicle for formal scholarly communication. The interviews confirmed that though an open access model did not in most cases lead to mistrust of a journal, a substantial number of researchers were worried about the approaches from what are called predatory OA journals. Established researchers did not on the whole use social media in their professional lives but a question about outreach revealed that it was recognised as effective in reaching a wider audience. There was a remarkable similarity in practice across research attitudes in all the disciplines covered and in both the countries where interviews were held.

Trustworthiness and authority of scholarly information in a digital age: Results of an international questionnaire

An international survey of over 3,600 researchers examined how trustworthiness and quality are determined for making decisions on scholarly reading, citing, and publishing and how scholars perceive changes in trust with new forms of scholarly communication. Although differences in determining trustworthiness and authority of scholarly resources exist among age groups and fields of study, traditional methods and criteria remain important across the board. Peer review is considered the most important factor for determining the quality and trustworthiness of research. Researchers continue to read abstracts, check content for sound arguments and credible data, and rely on journal rankings when deciding whether to trust scholarly resources in reading, citing, or publishing. Social media outlets and open access publications are still often not trusted, although many researchers believe that open access has positive implications for research, especially if the open access journals are peer reviewed.

The Merits and Drawbacks of Electronic Journals: A Research Survey of Aerospace Scientists and Engineers of Bangalore

Today, scientific journals undoubtedly represent the most vital means for disseminating research findings. Often, the research challenges common assumptions and/or the research data presented in the published scientific literature in order to gain a clearer understanding of the facts and findings. Depending upon the policies of a given journal, articles may include reports of original research, re-analyses of others’ research, reviews of the literature in a specific area, proposals of new but untested theories, or opinion pieces. One can also say that, journals are fundamental to formal scholarly communication. It is also observed that for more than three centuries, scholarly journals have played a pivotal role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge by serving as the primary medium of scholarly communication. This has however remained unchanged in form and function over its lifetime. It is now very clear that science as we know it is scarcely imaginable without the scholarly journal [1, 2]. A research study was undertaken to study the ‘Advantages and Disadvantages of Electronic Journals’ The geographic boundary of this research study consisted of 16 prominent aerospace organizations of Bangalore. The age-group of this study was between 21-60 years. The broad areas of specialization of the Aerospace Scientists and Engineers have been classified into (a) Thermal and Fluid Sciences, (b) Avionics, Guidance and Control, (c) Aerospace Structures and Allied Mechanical Sciences, (d) Materials and Metallurgy, (e) Flight Operations and other Allied Disciplines, and (f) General Engineering and Support Sciences. The major conclusions of this study are: (a) Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was applied for testing the significant difference among the 16 mean scores attained from the scientists and engineers of the aerospace organizations for ‘Advantages of Use of e-Journals’. It is observed that all the 16 aerospace organizations show a significant difference (P < 0.05) in their mean scores viz., ‘Current / Up to Date Information’, Ease of Search’, Ease of Browsing’, Multi-User Access, Fast Access, ‘Ability to Download’, ’24 Hour Access’, ‘Available Before Print’, ‘Search-ability of Databases among Journals’, ‘e-Back Volumes are Available’, ‘Non-Availability of Print Volumes’, ‘Easy Backup Availability’ and ‘Multiple e-Choice of Formats (PDF, RTF, DOC and HTML)’. (b) Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was applied for testing the significant difference among the 16 mean scores attained from the scientists and engineers of the aerospace organizations for ‘Disadvantages of e-Journals’. It is observed that all the 16 aerospace organizations show a significant difference (P < 0.05) in their mean scores viz., ‘Slow Downloads’, ‘Additional Payment’, ‘Problems with Print Facilities in Databases’, ‘Dependence on Connectivity’, ‘Quality of Print Images is Low’ and ‘It is Difficult to Read on Screen,

The Imperative for Open Altmetrics

The Imperative for Open Altmetrics

Library publishing directory, 2014

The first edition of the Library Publishing Directory provides a snapshot of the activities of 115 academic and research libraries, including information about the number and types of publications they produce, the services they offer authors, how they are staffed and funded, and the future plans of institutions that are engaged in this emerging In documenting the breadth and depth of activities in this field, this resource aims to articulate the unique value of library publishing; establish it as a significant and growing community of practice; and to raise its visibility within a number of stakeholder communities, including administrators, funding agencies, other scholarly publishers, librarians, and content creators. Specifically it is hoped that this Directory will: • Introduce all readers to the emerging field of library and help articulate its unique characteristics as a distinctive publishing field. • Facilitate collaboration among library publishers and other entities, especially the university presses and learned societies that share their values. • Alert authors of scholarly content to a range of potential partners dedicated to supporting their experimentation with new forms of scholarly communication and open access business models. The Directory is also available Open Access in several electronic formats through www.librarypublishing.org.