Protocols for Scholarly Communication

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has operated an institutional preprint repository for more than 10 years. The repository contains over 850,000 records of which more than 450,000 are full-text OA preprints, mostly in the field of particle physics, and it is integrated with the library's holdings of books, conference proceedings, journals and other grey literature. In order to encourage effective propagation and open access to scholarly material, CERN is implementing a range of innovative library services into its document repository: automatic keywording, reference extraction, collaborative management tools and bibliometric tools. Some of these services, such as user reviewing and automatic metadata extraction, could make up an interesting testbed for future publishing solutions and certainly provide an exciting environment for e-science possibilities. The future protocol for scientific communication should naturally guide authors towards OA publication and CERN wants to help reach a full open access publishing environment for the particle physics community and the related sciences in the next few years.Comment: 8 pages, to appear in Library and Information Systems in Astronomy

Astrophysicists and physicists as creators of ArXiv-based commenting resources for their research communities. An initial survey

This paper conveys the outcomes of what results to be the first, though initial, overview of commenting platforms and related 2.0 resources born within and for the astrophysical community (from 2004 to 2016). Experiences were added, mainly in the physics domain, for a total of 22 major items, including four epijournals, and four supplementary resources, thus casting some light onto an unexpected richness and consonance of endeavours. These experiences rest almost entirely on the contents of the database ArXiv, which adds to its merits that of potentially setting the grounds for web 2.0 resources, and research behaviours, to be explored. Most of the experiences retrieved are UK and US based, but the resulting picture is international, as various European countries, China and Australia have been actively involved. Final remarks about creation patterns and outcome of these resources are outlined. The results integrate the previous studies according to which the web 2.0 is presently of limited use for communication in astrophysics and vouch for a role of researchers in the shaping of their own professional communication tools that is greater than expected. Collaterally, some aspects of ArXiv s recent pathway towards partial inclusion of web 2.0 features are touched upon. Further investigation is hoped for.Comment: Journal article 16 page

The Faustian Grip of Academic Publishing

The journal acquisition budget of libraries is not increasing at the same rate as subscription rates creating the serials' crisis. Many solutions have been proposed including the freely available electronic journal. However, all the solutions suffer the same Faustian Grip - namely that the actors in the academic publishing game have little or no incentive to stop publishing in the current journals. We examine those incentives concluding that even with a better more efficient technology, the actors will not change from the current academic publishing institution, and the serials' crisis will remain.serials crisis journal pricing academic publishing

Harvesting for disseminating, open archives and role of academic libraries

The Scholarly communication system is in a critical stage, due to a number of factors.The Open Access movement is perhaps the most interesting response that the scientific community has tried to give to this problem. The paper examines strengths and weaknesses of the Open Access strategy in general and, more specifically, of the Open Archives Initiative, discussing experiences, criticisms and barriers. All authors that have faced the problems of implementing an OAI compliant e-print server agree that technical and practical problems are not the most difficult to overcome and that the real problem is the change in cultural attitude required. In this scenario the university library is possibly the standard bearer for the advent and implementation of e-prints archives and Open Archives services. To ensure the successful implementation of this service the Library has a number of distinct roles to play