The Future of Publishing > _Nature_ Special Issue

After nearly 400 years in the slow-moving world of print, the scientific publishing industry is suddenly being thrust into a fast-paced online world of cloud computing, crowd sourcing and ubiquitous sharing. Long-established practices are being challenged by new ones – most notably, the open-access, author-pays publishing model. In this special issue, Nature takes a close look at the forces now at work in scientific publishing, and how they may play out over the coming decades.

How scientists share and reuse information is driven by technology but shaped by discipline.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )

NEWS

Sham journals scam authors
Con artists are stealing the identities of real journals to cheat scientists out of publishing fees.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )

NEWS FEATURES

The true cost of science publishing
Cheap open-access journals raise questions about the value publishers add for their money.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )

The library reboot
As scientific publishing moves to embrace open data, libraries and researchers are trying to keep up.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )
The dark side of publishing

The explosion in open-access publishing has fuelled the rise of questionable operators.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )
COMMENT

Beyond the paper
The journal and article are being superseded by algorithms that filter, rate and disseminate scholarship as it happens, argues Jason Priem.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )
A fool's errand

Objections to the Creative Commons attribution licence are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible, warns John Wilbanks.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )
How to hasten open access

Three advocates for a universally free scholarly literature give their prescriptions for the movement’s next push, from findability to translations.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )
BOOKS AND ARTS

Q&A: Knowledge liberator
Robert Darnton heads the world's largest collection of academic publications, the Harvard University Library system. He is also a driver behind the new Digital Public Library of America. Ahead of its launch in April, he talks about Google, science journals and the open-access debate.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )

CAREERS

Open to possibilities
Opting for open access means considering costs, journal prestige and career implications.
Nature ( 28 March 2013 )

Source and Access to Full Text Available At 

[http://www.nature.com/news/specials/scipublishing/index.html]

A/V Now Available > FREE Webcast > Individual and Scholarly Networks > A Two-Part Seminar on Building Networks and Evaluating Network Relationships > January 22 2013

Collaborative platforms and social networking websites are becoming popular with scientists and researchers around the world: scholars can connect between institutions, countries and disciplines easily, faster and better than ever before. "The Individual and Scholarly Networks" will explore two aspects of this phenomenon; firstly, how the connections are forming, and how attitudes may change to adapt to the new environment, and, secondly, how connections can be evaluated, nuanced and measured.

The seminar will take place on Tuesday, January 22nd 2013 and will be webcast live from New York, Amsterdam and Oxford. It will be split into two segments:

Part 1: Building Networks | 8:00-10:00 EST / 13:00-15:00 GMT

This session will focus on the ways in which these relationships are formed and maintained, and how they are changing the nature of scholarly relationships.

Part 2: Evaluating Network Relationships | 10:30-12:30 EST / 15:30-17:30 GMT

Altmetrics is one of the most explosive areas of interest in bibliometric analysis and is increasing in importance. This session will explore the related areas of altmetrics, contributorship and the culture of reference.

SPEAKERS

Dr William Gunn, Head of Academic Outreach, Mendeley

http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/william-gunn/ 

Professor Jeremy Frey, Head of Physical Chemistry, Southampton University

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~jgf/Frey/Home.html

Dr Heather Piwowar, Postdoc at Duke University, ImpactStory

http://www.researchremix.org/wordpress/

Gregg Gordon, President and CEO, Social Science Research Network

http://ssrn.com/

Dr Gudmundur Thorisson, Research Associate, University of Leicester

http://gthorisson.name/

Kelli Barr, Graduate Research Assistant, Center for Study of Interdisciplinarity, University of North Texas

http://www.csid.unt.edu/about/People/barr.html

SEATS ARE LIMITED > REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Link to A/V Available At 

[http://www.researchtrends.com/virtualseminar/]

Comparison Report

How virtual science communities are transforming academic research

[http://elsevierconnect.com/how-virtual-science-communities-are-transforming-academic-research/]

Awareness, Attitudes and Participation of Teaching Staff Towards the Open Content Movement in One University / Peter Reed

Abstract

This research investigates the current awareness of, and participation in, the open content movement at one UK institution for higher education. The open content movement and the open educational resources can be seen as potential methods for reducing time and cost of technology-enhanced learning developments; however, its sustainability and, to some degree, its success are dependent on critical mass and large-scale participation. Teaching staff were invited to respond to a questionnaire. Respondents (n59) were open to the idea of sharing their own content and, similar to other studies, demonstrated existing practices of sharing resources locally amongst colleagues; however, there was little formal, large-scale sharing using suitable licenses. The data gathered concurs with other research suggesting a lack of awareness to the Creative Commons licenses as well as a lack of participation in large open educational resource repositories.
Keywords: open educational resources; staff attitudes; sustainability

(Published: 22 October 2012)

Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2012, 20: 18520

http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0.18520

Source and Links to Full Text Available At 

[http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/18520]

Visualizing Tweets Linking to a Paper

Martin Fenner / Posted: July 14, 2012

DNA Barcoding the Native Flowering Plants and Conifers of Wales has been one of the most popular new PLoS ONE papers in June. In the paper Natasha de Vere et al. describe a DNA barcode resource that covers the 1143 native Welsh flowering plants and conifers.

My new job as technical lead for the PLoS Article Level Metrics (ALM) project involves thinking about how we can best display the ALM collected for this and other papers. We want these ALM to tell us something important and/or interesting, and it doesn’t hurt if the information is displayed in a visually appealing way. There are many different ways this can be done, but here I want to focus on Twitter and CiteULike, the only two data sources where PLoS is currently storing every single event (tweet or CiteULike bookmark) with a date. Usage data (HTML and XML views, PDF downloads) are aggregated on a monthly basis, and PLoS doesn’t store the publication dates of citations.

We know from the work of Gunter Eysenbach and others that most tweets linking to scholarly papers are written in the first few days after publication. It therefore makes sense to display this information on a timeline covering the first 30 days after publication, and the tweets about the de Vere paper follow the same pattern.

[more]

Source and Full Text Available At 

[http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2012/07/14/visualizing-tweets-linking-to-a-paper/]

altmetrics12 > An ACM Web Science Conference 2012 Workshop

Evanston, IL • 21 June 2012

Keynotes (9:00-10:00)

• Johann Bollen
• Gregg Gordon

Coffee break (10:00-10:30)

Paper presentations (10:30-01:00)

Position and theory papers, 10min each (10:30-11:30)

• Martin Fenner / Altmetrics will be taken personally at PLoS (presentation)
• William Gunn and Jan Reichelt / Social metrics for research: quantity and quality (presentation)
• Elizabeth Iorns / Reproducibility: an important altmetric
• Britt Holbrook / Peer review, altmetrics, and ex ante broader impacts assessment – a proposal
• Kelli Barr / The Role of altmetrics and Peer Review in the Democratization of Knowledge (chalkboard notes)

Empirical papers, 15min each (11:30-1:00)

• Judit Bar-Ilan / JASIST@mendeley
• Jasleen Kaur and Johan BollenStructural Patterns in Online Usage (presentation)
• Vincent Larivière, Benoit Macaluso, Staša Milojević, Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Mike Thelwall / Of caterpillars and butterflies: the life and afterlife of an arXiv e-print
• Jason Priem, Heather Piwowar and Bradley Hemminger / Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact (presentation)
• Jennifer Lin / A Case Study in Anti-Gaming Mechanisms for Altmetrics: PLoS ALMs and DataTrust (presentation)
• Richard Price / Altmetrics and Academia.edu

Lunches on your own (1:00-2:00p)

Demos (2:00-3:00p)

• total-impact (Heather Piwowar)
• altmetric.com (Euan Adie) (presentation)
• PLoS ALM (Martin Fenner)
• Ubiquity Press metrics (Brian Hole)
• Plum Analytics (Andrea Michalek)
• BioMed Central metrics (Ciaran O’Neill)
• Academia.edu (Richard Price)
• Knode (David Steinberg)
• CASRAI (David Baker)
• Mendeley and ReaderMeter (William Gunn)
• Academia.edu (Richard Price)

Group discussion (3:00-4:30p)

We’ll split into small groups to discuss key altmetrics issues; topics may include:

• Gaming: how might it happen, and how do we stop it?
• Standards: We’ve got COUNTER for downloads; should there be standards for other altmetrics? What should they look like?
• Visualization: There’s a lot of data. How should we display it?
• Peer review: Could altmetrics replace traditional peer review? Should it? Can we build new publishing models around altmetrics?
• CVs and “impact dashboards”: What does an altmetrics-informed CV look like? Who wants (and doesn’t want) one?
• Publishers: What do publishers want from altmetrics services? How about readers and authors?
• Normalization: How do we compare metrics from different fields or disciplines?

Group presentations and discussion (4:30-5:30p)

Summing up (5:30-6:00p)

Conclusion (Summarize key points from live and online discussion)

Open discussion: what’s the next year of altmetrics look like?

Dinners

Source and Presentation Links Available At 

[http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics12/program/]

Slideshare > NISO Webinar: Beyond Publish or Perish: Alternative Metrics for Scholarship

November 14, 2012
1:00 - 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time)

[snip]

About the Webinar

Increasingly, many aspects of scholarly communication—particularly publication, research data, and peer review—undergo scrutiny by researchers and scholars. Many of these practitioners are engaging in a variety of ways with Alternative Metrics (#altmetrics in the Twitterverse). Alternative Metrics take many forms but often focus on efforts to move beyond proprietary bibliometrics and traditional forms of peer referencing in assessing the quality and scholarly impact of published work. Join NISO for a webinar that will present several emerging aspects of Alternative Metrics.

Source and Q&A and Slideshare Only Available At

[http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/nisowebinars/alternative_metrics/]

Reusing, Revising, Remixing and Redistributing Research

An OA Week guest post by Daniel Mietchen

The initial purpose of Open Access is to enable researchers to make use of information already known to science as part of the published literature. One way to do that systematically is to publish scientific works under open licenses, in particular the Creative Commons Attribution License that is compatible with the stipulations of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and used by many Open Access journals. It allows for any form of sharing of the materials by anyone for any purpose, provided that the original source and the licensing terms are shared alongside. This opens the door for the incorporation of materials from Open Access sources into a multitude of contexts both within and outside traditional academic publishing, including blogs and wikis.

Amongst the most active reusers of Open Access content are Wikimedia projects like the over 280 Wikipedia, Wikispecies and their shared media repository, Wikimedia Commons. In the following, a few examples of reusing, revising, remixing and redistributing Open Access materials in the context of Wikimedia projects shall be highlighted.

[more]

Source and Full Text Available At 

[http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2012/10/23/reusing-revising-remixing-and-redistributing-research/]