Welcome to the May 2014 issue of ScieCom info. Nordic - Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.
Abstract
NEWS
We are very pleased to have received new financial support from the Nordic National Libraries for 2014. This enables us to continue to provide our readers with information and reports on the developments in scholarly communication in the Baltic and Nordic countries
COMING EVENTS
Helsinki, Finland: The conference "Open Repositories 2014" is arranged in Helsinki 9-13.6.2014. More information on http://or2014.helsinki.fi/
Tromsø, Norway: The 9th annual Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing will be held 26–27 November 2014 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. The Munin Conferences raise and debate questions within the theme of scholarly publishing. The list of keynote speakers for this year’s conference is as exciting as ever. See http://site.uit.no/muninconf/
ARTICLES
This issue contains two reports from Lithuania.
Žibutė Petrauskienė and Saulius Maskeliūnas from Vilnius University describe the implementing of a national OA archive of research data - MIDAS - and how it will provide virtual services for participants in researchers and education. This is expected to lead to more efficient research and higher quality. The various benefits and possibilities are discussed, as well as the tools available. The aim of this National Open Access Research Data Archive is to increase the global visibility of Lithuanian science and facilitate international cooperation.
In her study “Open Access publishing in Lithuania: Mykolas Romeris University publishing case study“ Natalija Popkova, a librarian at Mykolas Romeris University (MRU) in Vilnius , analyses the 2013 results on readability and sales since the introduction of the eBooks Portal at the university. MRU is the first Lithuanian university to give open access to scientific journals, textbooks, and monographs. The MRU eBooks Portal applies the Creative Commons 4.0 license.
An interesting feature is that they have used the DAISY format to publish MRU eBooks, thus also making it available for the disabled.
Our Icelandic editor Sólveig Thorsteinsdottir describes the “Open Access to research articles published in Iceland in 2013 “. She carefully compares the number of Icelandic publications in foreign journals, as shown by searching in the Web of Science with the open access availability, either Green, Hybrid or Gold, of the same articles according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
The author shows that there has been a slow but steady growth of OA in Iceland. The figures are convincing. The total number of all varieties of OA for all of Iceland is now approximately 30% and for Landspitali, the National University Hospital, 40%.
The figures are also split per OA variety and show some interesting differences. In general, the analysis shows a large untapped potential for OA. Had the Landspitali authors used all their options for green OA, this would have increased OA 20% to 44,3%. If all options, including paid OA had been used, OA would have increased to 84.3%. The author also demonstrates that the impact differs between articles published in Hybrid and in Gold journals.
In his article “The past, present & future of Open Access“, Mikael Laakso, researcher in Information Systems Science at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, summarizes his recent doctoral thesis “Measuring Open Access - Studies of Web-enabled Innovation in Scientific Journal Publishing”, in which Mikael Laakso examines the Open Access phenomenon from a quantitative perspective. He has looked at the development of article publishing in scientific open access journals as well as the number of articles uploaded on the Internet and made available by authors themselves.
His results show that there has been a rapid and even aggressive change in the field of scientific and scholarly publishing, but – as Sólveig Thorsteinsdottir also shows in her article – there still remains a lot to be done to promote openness in research, and especially when it comes to the important factor of individual researchers taking an active interest in the process of publishing.
Our Danish editor Adrian Price at the Faculty of Science Library, Frederiksberg, University of Copenhagen, presents a recently published report from the Knowledge Exchange (KE) project in “Knowledge Exchange working group on authority files”
The report explains the concept “authority files”- controlled lists of data elements - and how they are used in the information infrastructure. There is an increasing need for quality controlled data as the amount of global information grows. Authority files are very useful for repositories, and, as a matter of fact, the author points out that a repository “could be seen as (potentially) being “nothing but” an aggregation of several authority files, if they were available.”
Examples of authority files are ISSN for journals, ISBN for books, and the DOI, -Digital Object Identifier for articles . A level down we have the ORCID system, used for the identification of scholarly authors as well as inventors, artists, and other categories.
Future developments will, for example, include the identification of organisations.
The Knowledge Exchange report can be found here:
Finally, Mikael K Elbæk, a systems librarian at the Technical Information Center of Denmark, has written about the “Danish Open Access Barometer. “
This was a project financed by DEFF with two related goals: to investigate the OA-status of Danish research publications from 2011, and to develop a prototype for a web-based Danish “Open Access Barometer”. The main results of the OA investigation are presented here, together with a general description of the OA Barometer is described.
It was found that the technical universities had the highest OA rate, led by the IT University with more than half of all its publications Open Access. The universities that performed less well tended to be biased towards the humanities and social sciences. 57 % of all publications were found to have OA potential, and for 21% the potential had been realised.
We hope that you will have a good read.
Your comments and ideas are always most welcome.
Ingegerd Rabow Editor-in-chief ScieCom info
