Editorial

This issue of Higher Learning Research Communications (HLRC) marks the beginning of our third year of publication.We are very excited about the continued opportunity of publishing high quality academic research in the area of higher education policies and practices.During this third year, several new initiatives will be launched, including the publication of selected conference proceedings (Volume 3, No 4) and the launch of a new series (coming in 2014) highlighting the people that have dedicated their life to Higher Education.Please look for additional information in our social media pages through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.On this issue, our authors focus on the importance and relevance that online and digital means play in reformatting, attracting, retaining, and supporting students in higher education.Invited authors highlight how the digital era has transformed higher education in several areas, including academic publishing and day-to-day teaching and learning.Rogerio Meneghini discusses SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library of Science) and its relevance in supporting open access scientific journals.The role of the SciELO index is discussed within the context of Latin American countries, with a particular focus on Brazil.Melanie Winter and Frank McCluskey write about the digital university, and the relevance of designing the online classroom experience to support the instructional design and pedagogical aims of the course.Following the theme set by the invited pieces, authors address a diversity of topics on how online teaching and learning has impacted higher education in recent years.Burkholder, Lenio, Holland, Seidman, Neal, Middlebrook, and Jobe discuss the efforts of a distance education institution to support student retention by developing an institutional culture of retention and persistence.In a case-study piece, Kruse, Bonura, James, and Potler detail the online community strategies used by a distance learning institution to successfully support the accreditation reaffirmation process.Finally, Carver and Todd analyze the student perceptions of content mastery for online courses that were redesigned to support student engagement.Throughout the papers on this issue, the authors introduce thought pieces, case- studies, and research results highlighting how the internet technology and media has impacted and transformed the teaching and learning process.They also highlight how online tools can benefit and improve the higher education community, touching multiple aspects of our every day experiences, from accreditation, publishing, teaching, learning, and retention

Digital Mathematics Libraries: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The idea of a World digital mathematics library (DML) has been around since the turn of the 21th century. We feel that it is time to make it a reality, starting in a modest way from successful bricks that have already been built, but with an ambitious goal in mind. After a brief historical overview of publishing mathematics, an estimate of the size and a characterisation of the bulk of documents to be included in the DML, we turn to proposing a model for a Reference Digital Mathematics Library--a network of institutions where the digital documents would be physically archived. This pattern based rather on the bottom-up strategy seems to be more practicable and consistent with the digital nature of the DML. After describing the model we summarise what can and should be done in order to accomplish the vision. The current state of some of the local libraries that could contribute to the global views are described with more details

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

Editorial : Launch of the European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT)

We are very pleased and proud to announce the launch of the European Journal of Taxonomy. The EJT is an international, online, fast-track, peer-reviewed, open access journal in descriptive taxonomy,covering subjects in zoology, entomology, botany, and palaeontology, owned and run by a Consortium of European Natural History Institutes. EJT is a collaborative project outcome of the EDIT network

Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review

Within the context of the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) research scope, this literature review investigates the current trends, advantages, disadvantages, problems and solutions, opportunities and barriers in Open Access Publishing (OAP), and in particular Open Access (OA) academic publishing. This study is intended to scope and evaluate current theory and practice concerning models for OAP and engage with intellectual, legal and economic perspectives on OAP. It is also aimed at mapping the field of academic publishing in the UK and abroad, drawing specifically upon the experiences of CREATe industry partners as well as other initiatives such as SSRN, open source software, and Creative Commons. As a final critical goal, this scoping study will identify any meaningful gaps in the relevant literature with a view to developing further research questions. The results of this scoping exercise will then be presented to relevant industry and academic partners at a workshop intended to assist in further developing the critical research questions pertinent to OAP

Open, Online and Global: Benefits of BioMedical Journals Going Online and Open

The emergence of Internet affords the immense possibility for scientific publications to be indexed, linked, copied, archived, redistributed and searched at ease and at a lower production cost. This has paved the way for the emergence of Online-Only Journals like the Online Journal of Health and Allied Sciences. This has also spurred the rise of Open Access movements spearheaded by the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Public Library of Science. 'Open Access' means immediate, permanent, toll-free, non-gerrymandered, online access to the full-text. Open Access can be considered as borne on three major pillars of Open Access Publishing, Open Access Archiving and Open Access Support and Open Access publishing is perhaps the future of scientific communicatio