Same Question, Different World: Replicating an Open Access Research Impact Study

To examine changes in the open access landscape over time, this study partially replicated Kristin Antelman’s 2004 study of open access citation advantage. Results indicated open access articles still have a citation advantage. For three of the four disciplines examined, the most common sites hosting freely available articles were independent sites, such as academic social networks or article sharing sites. For the same three disciplines, more than 70% of the open access copies were publishers’ PDFs. The major difference from Antelman’s is the increase in the number of freely available articles that appear to be in violation of publisher policies

The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable

The multiple online research impact metrics we are developing will allow the rich new database , the Research Web, to be navigated, analyzed, mined and evaluated in powerful new ways that were not even conceivable in the paper era – nor even in the online era, until the database and the tools became openly accessible for online use by all: by researchers, research institutions, research funders, teachers, students, and even by the general public that funds the research and for whose benefit it is being conducted: Which research is being used most? By whom? Which research is growing most quickly? In what direction? under whose influence? Which research is showing immediate short-term usefulness, which shows delayed, longer term usefulness, and which has sustained long-lasting impact? Which research and researchers are the most authoritative? Whose research is most using this authoritative research, and whose research is the authoritative research using? Which are the best pointers (“hubs”) to the authoritative research? Is there any way to predict what research will have later citation impact (based on its earlier download impact), so junior researchers can be given resources before their work has had a chance to make itself felt through citations? Can research trends and directions be predicted from the online database? Can text content be used to find and compare related research, for influence, overlap, direction? Can a layman, unfamiliar with the specialized content of a field, be guided to the most relevant and important work? These are just a sample of the new online-age questions that the Open Research Web will begin to answer

Negating the Gender Citation Advantage in Political Science

Open-access (OA) advocates have long promoted OA as an egalitarian alternative to traditional subscription-based academic publishing. The argument is simple: OA gives everyone access to high-quality research at no cost. In turn, this should benefit individual researchers by increasing the number of people reading and citing academic articles. As the OA movement gains traction in the academy, scholars are investing considerable research energy to determine whether there is an OA citation advantage—that is, does OA increase an article’s citation counts? Research indicates that it does. Scholars also explored patterns of gender bias in academic publishing and found that women are cited at lower rates in many disciplines. Indeed, in many disciplines, men enjoy a significant and positive gender citation effect (GCE) compared to their female colleagues. This article combines these research areas to determine whether the OA citation advantage varies by gender. Using Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) tests, the nonparametric analog to the independent samples T-test, I conclude that OA benefits male and female political scientists at similar rates. Thus, OA negates the gender citation advantage that typically accrues to male political scientists

Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility

OpenUCT published Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility in 2012

Prospects and Challenges of Medicinal Plants Conservation and\ud Traditional Medicine in Tanzania

A qualitative study was carried to assess prospects and challenges of medicinal plants conservation and\ud traditional medicine in Tanzania. The study shows that TRM and medicinal have great prospects in healthcare\ud delivery worldwide. These prospects have more impact in developing countries where 70%-80% of population used\ud TRM for Primary Healthcare (PHC). It is reported that 25% of prescribed drugs in conventional healthcare were\ud derived from their ethnomedicinal use in TRM. Medicinal plants still provided hope for discovery of new drugs for\ud the resistant diseases and those that were not treated by conventional prescribed drugs. Traditional medicine and\ud medicinal plants were faced with challenges notably; threats due to increasing depletion of the natural resource\ud as an impact of population increase, urbanization, modernization of agriculture and climatic change. There was\ud erosion of indigenous medical knowledge as most of the traditional health practitioners were aging and dying, while\ud the expected youths to inherit the practice shy away from practice. The youths in rural settings who were willing\ud to practice some of them die because of AIDS. The other major challenges on traditional medicine and MPs were\ud constraints and include lack of data on seriously threatened and endangered medicinal plant species. Others include\ud inadequate and conflicting guidelines on management and utilization of natural resources, especially medicinal\ud plants. Efforts for scaling up the practice of TRM and medicinal plant conservation have been suggested. These\ud were creating awareness of the importance traditional medicine and medicinal plants in healthcare; training THPs\ud on good practices for provision of healthcare; conserving medicinal plants through in-situ and ex-situ programs and\ud sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants resources and training conventional health workers on the contribution\ud of TRM and medicinal plants in PHC. Traditional health practitioners, TRM and medicinal plants should be essential\ud components in PHC in order to meet the health millennium goals by 2025

Open access scholarly publishing and the problem of networks and intermediaries in the academic commons

Der Vortrag wurde am 5th Frankfurt Scientific Symposium gehalten (22-23 Oktober 2005)

The Dawn of Open Access to Phylogenetic Data

The scientific enterprise depends critically on the preservation of and open access to published data. This basic tenet applies acutely to phylogenies (estimates of evolutionary relationships among species). Increasingly, phylogenies are estimated from increasingly large, genome-scale datasets using increasingly complex statistical methods that require increasing levels of expertise and computational investment. Moreover, the resulting phylogenetic data provide an explicit historical perspective that critically informs research in a vast and growing number of scientific disciplines. One such use is the study of changes in rates of lineage diversification (speciation - extinction) through time. As part of a meta-analysis in this area, we sought to collect phylogenetic data (comprising nucleotide sequence alignment and tree files) from 217 studies published in 46 journals over a 13-year period. We document our attempts to procure those data (from online archives and by direct request to corresponding authors), and report results of analyses (using Bayesian logistic regression) to assess the impact of various factors on the success of our efforts. Overall, complete phylogenetic data for ~60% of these studies are effectively lost to science. Our study indicates that phylogenetic data are more likely to be deposited in online archives and/or shared upon request when: (1) the publishing journal has a strong data-sharing policy; (2) the publishing journal has a higher impact factor, and; (3) the data are requested from faculty rather than students. Although the situation appears dire, our analyses suggest that it is far from hopeless: recent initiatives by the scientific community -- including policy changes by journals and funding agencies -- are improving the state of affairs