Category: Editor’s Choice

Posted on

Editor’s Choice: Impact of Social Sciences – A variety of strategies and funding approaches are required to accelerate the transition to open access. But in all, authors are key

Source: Impact of Social Sciences – A variety of strategies and funding approaches are required to accelerate the transition to open access. But in all, authors are key

Original Article appeared on LSE Impact Blog 7/23/2018

“More than two decades of work towards liberating scholarly publishing from paywalled constraints has left many within the scholarly community exploring ways to accelerate the transition to open access. Not all institutions or author communities will agree upon which strategies or funding approaches to undertake, and nor do they need to. But whichever strategy is pursued, having university faculty lead the charge represents the most effective way forward. Rachael G. Samberg, Richard A. Schneider, Ivy Anderson and Jeff MacKie-Mason share the University of California’s range of open access policy and advocacy materials, and highlight some potential next steps that may be of use to faculty and author communities…”

Read full article

 

Posted on

Editor’s Choice: Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it

Source: Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | Aeon Ideas

By Jon Tennant on Aeon, 7/18/2018

Excerpt: “The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals…”

Read full article: https://aeon.co/ideas/scholarly-publishing-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it

Jon Tennant is a palaeontologist and independent researcher and consultant, working on public access to scientific knowledge. He is based in Berlin, Germany.

Posted on

Editor’s Choice: Using Google’s Custom Search Engine Product to Discover Scholarly Open Access and Cost-Free eBooks from Latin America

Source: Using Google’s Custom Search Engine Product to Discover Scholarly Open Access and Cost-Free eBooks from Latin America

Author: Melissa Gasparotto, Assistant Director, Research Services. New York Public Library

Paper delivered at SALALM 2018 conference

Abstract:

“Many Latin American scholarly monographs are available for free to read and download in a scattered fashion across the web, hosted on educational, institutional and government websites as well as commercial websites and publishing platforms. There is as of yet no single way to identify all of this content at once, but web-based discovery leveraging existing search engine indexing would seem to be a likely option. This case study suggests and evaluates one such method for discovery of open access and other cost-free scholarly monographs produced in Latin America. One possible configuration of Google’s Custom Search Engine product is proposed and evaluated, and findings suggest its usefulness for a variety of applications, including for collection development, the preparation of thematic research guides with open content, and the enrichment of existing lists of open access eBook sources from Latin America. Unlike existing open access eBook portals, which search across known collections of such materials, search portals such as the one proposed allow users to search across the entire web to uncover scholarly free eBook sources that were previously unknown to them alongside known content sources, a key advantage to this method of discovery. The results further suggest the importance of pursuing discovery of these monograph titles outside established known collections, as an astonishing 45 % of all monographs identified through the Custom Search Engine portal were not discoverable in any edition, print or electronic, through WorldCat, and only 27 % were indexed by Google Books. Additionally, the low number of these eBook titles hosted in preservation-worthy repositories raises cause for concern about their long-term digital availability.”

Read Full Article:

Gasparotto, M. (2018). Using Google’s Custom Search Engine Product to Discover Scholarly Open Access and Cost-Free eBooks from Latin America. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 41(2), 153‑166. doi: 10.17533/udea.rib.v41n2a04

https://aprendeenlinea.udea.edu.co/revistas/index.php/RIB/article/view/328527