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Scholarly communication: Not just for scholars anymore
1. Scholarly Communication: Not
Just for Scholars Anymore
Joseph R. Kraus
University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
Penrose Library
Joseph.kraus@du.edu
@jokrausdu
October 30, 2012
Presented at Internet Librarian International
3. Table of Contents
• Push by various organizations and individuals
for Open Access (OA) to research
• Misunderstandings of Open Access
– Scientists, researchers, publishers, librarians, etc.
• Behavior of scientists and researchers
• The role of trust in information dissemination
has implications on the Green vs Gold debate.
4. Push from various organizations and
individuals
• Who
– Finch Report
– Wellcome Trust
– World Bank
– Academic mathematicians, Dr. Gowers
– Higher Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE)
5. Culture is slow to change
• From Collaborative Yet Independent:
Information Practices in the Physical Sciences
• Scientists can “be enthusiastic supporters of
open access. But it is important not to
underestimate the value of gatekeepers [ie.
publishers] in science; these roles have been
built up over the centuries to ensure that
good science is propagated while bad science
is not.” (Page 93.)
7. Two misunderstandings
1. Some scientists, researchers and publishers
argue that Open Access is not needed
because the researchers who need to read
the articles already work at institutions that
subscribe to the journals they need.
2. The general public would not be able to
understand or benefit from Open Access
research.
8. Could counter this argument with
• Peter Suber wrote in his book, Open Access
– “OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay
readers.”
– “The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the
primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps
to avoid acknowledging how many professional
researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the
patronizing counter‐argument that lay people don’t
care to read research literature and wouldn’t
understand it if they tried.” (Page 25.)
9. Misunderstanding the audience 1
• In this Scholarly Kitchen blog post,
Kent Anderson (an editor for an
Elsevier medical journal) wrote
that “despite accessibility, the
information remains inaccessible in
any functional sense—they can’t
apply it, understand it
competently, or put it into
context.”
10. Misunderstanding the audience 2
• Lord Robert Winston noted in this
panel discussion that “Open Access
isn’t going to solve the world’s
problems at all. I don’t believe it really
contributes greatly to public engage‐
ment.” (at 47 minutes.)
• “One of the key problems in science… is that we are
increasingly involved with more and more detail,
and less of a broad picture, and it is ridiculous to
expect people to understand the detail.” (at 51
minutes.)
11. Misunderstanding the audience 3
• Phillip Broadwith wrote in Chemistry World
“The vast majority of people who need regular
access to journals ‐ primarily researchers ‐
belong to institutions or companies with
subscriptions to the journals they want to
read. How much would the general public
actually gain from access to complex,
technically written and jargon‐heavy
articles?”
13. Misunderstandings about peer‐review
• From JISC Report, Researchers of Tomorrow
– The “lack of understanding and uncertainty about
the nature of open access remains a constraint on
disseminating their research findings; typically
their reservations include lack of impact factor or
credibility of open access journals and strong
preference for peer‐reviewed journals, with a
general assumption that open access journals are
not peer reviewed.” (Page 7.)
15. Misunderstanding the advantages of
social networking tools
• JISC Report, Researchers of Tomorrow
– Generation Y doctoral students feel that “social
media and online forums in research” do not
have legitimacy. (Page 69.)
– These tools “challenge their traditional and
conservative research working practices.” (Page
6.)
16. Could be countered with
• Melissa Terras at UCL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMXkmClYKbw
• “Using social media to disseminate research
outputs”
• “Twitter is not a waste of time.”
• Altmetrics can help researchers determine
article specific use.
18. Behavior of scientists and researchers
• From Research Support Services for Scholars:
Chemistry Project (Ithaka S+R report & JISC.)
• “On the one hand, some chemists are pushing
issues like open access, data management…”
• “some chemists continue to work in
traditional ways. … Some felt that the
departmental culture tended towards the
‘traditional’ when it comes to new modes of
scholarship.” (Page 19‐20)
20. Evidence of Green OA deposit
• Data from article submitted to Library Philosophy and
Practice by Mandy Taha and I. (Preprint)
• For Elsevier articles, “only 9 of the 266 references were
freely available outside of the Elsevier ScienceDirect
server. Only 6 of those 9 references were posted by
the authors on a locally controlled server, and none of
those were to author submitted manuscripts.”
• Even though Elsevier is Green OA compliant “it did not
appear that the researchers were taking advantage of
the opportunity to post manuscripts of their articles.”
22. Trust
• Preprints and post‐prints can be different from
the final published version
• Here is an example from the arXiv
– The Grand Cosmic Web of the First Stars (version 1 &
2)
– The signature of the first stars in atomic hydrogen at
redshift 20 (version 3)
• Nature article
• Title, abstract and much of the text of the article
was significantly different for about a week.
• Version 3 does not say where it was published.
24. Advantages of Gold OA
• Greater trust of the information, since it is
from the publishing source
• From the Library Philosophy and Practice
preprint
– We found that of 641 citations, there were 58 OA
citations from researchers in corrosion chemistry,
59% were to Gold OA, and 41% were to Green OA
– African researchers cited twice as much OA
material (over 12%) as those who were not from
Africa (5.5%)
26. How should information professionals
proceed?
• Continue to observe the actions and behaviors
of scientists in the wild.
• Provide carrots to researchers so that they
have an incentive to change their behavior for
the greater good.
• Demonstrate the citation advantage of Open
Access.
27. For the new scholar
1. Open Access can increase citations, since
many other researchers can read your
articles.
2. Open Access journals are peer‐reviewed.
3. New measurements of article impact are
coming, such as Altmetrics.
4. Let the researchers know about their rights
as authors to post green versions of OA
articles if gold OA publications are not used.
28. Further Reading
• http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications
/research/briefing‐papers/POST‐PN‐397
– Good short overview of “Open Access to Scientific
Information”
• “Field Guide to Misunderstandings about Open
Access” by Peter Suber
• Two Open Access Books
– Open Access by Peter Suber
– Open Access: What You Need to Know Now By Walt
Crawford
29. Further Reading
• Collaborative Yet Independent: Information
Practices in the Physical Sciences (IOP, RIN,
and the RAS)
• Researchers of Tomorrow: The Research
Behaviour of Generation Y Doctoral Students
(JISC)
• Research Support Services for Scholars:
Chemistry Project (Ithaka S+R & JISC)
