36,291 research outputs found
DORAS - increasing the visibility and impact of DCU research
This paper gives an overview of DORAS â an online open access repository of research papers from Dublin City University â and explores how repositories like DORAS are increasing the visibility, and potentially the impact, of research output from educational institutions. In this
paper the main motivations for authors to deposit papers in DORAS are identified: increasing the accessibility of papers, increasing the visibility of papers on search engines and web portals, promotion of cutting-edge research, and the need to comply with research councils' policies on open access
New wine in old bottles: current developments in digital delivery and dissemination
The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess current developments in scholarly publishing in Europe. Current models for disseminating content have limitations and Open Access models of publishing have been endorsed by the
European Universities Association. The Harvard mandate for the deposit of materials in Open Access repositories is a bold new development, and the community is watching it with interest. It is possible that e-books may be the next
large form of content to be made available to the user. Users certainly express interest in using this form of material. However, current library systems need to be developed in order to cope with this mass of new content. E-theses, available in Open Access from institutional repositories, are a form of content that is made much more visible than the paper equivalents. The DART-Europe portal,
supported by LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) currently provides access to 100,000 research theses in 150 European Universities. At an
institutional and academic level, however, much remains to be done to embed Open Access into the landscape: the current situation is described in a new report for UCL (University College London), produced by RAND Europe
Effects of Genre Tag Complexity on Popular Music Perception and Enjoyment
The popular online streaming platform Spotify added over 1400 genre tags in the last two years. Despite that numerous artists and composition competitions claim to seek projects that âtranscend the traditional notion of genre,â the industry has only added more complex and mystifying genre labels. This dichotomy between artists and industry ignores the effects these labels have on consumers. Do more complex genre tags enhance the listening experience for the average consumer by providing additional information about what they are about to hear? The current research seeks to examine the effects of the granularity of genre tags on popular music perception by identifying whether more nuanced subgenre genre tags increase enjoyment and understanding of popular music excerpts.
Participants heard four 20-second excerpts of popular music from four broad genre categoriesâincluding pop, country, rap/hip-hop, rockâas defined in Gjerdingen & Perrott, 2008 and Mace et al., 2011. Excerpts were presented simultaneously with two or three corresponding broad genre category tags or nuanced subgenre category tags in a randomized order. Participants used Likert-type scales to rate how well the genre tags matched the excerpt with which they were presented, how much they enjoyed the excerpt, and were asked to self-label each excerpt with a genre tag.
Results showed that ratings were significantly higher for the broad genre categories than the subgenre categories for both enjoyment and matching, (F(1, 2109.67) = 19.07, p \u3c .001; F(1, 2109.38) = 56.47, p \u3c .001), respectively. Further, participants did not self-label any of the excerpts with genre categories that were not previously attached to the respective stimuli. These results have practical implications for how music producers market popular music since broad genre categories appear to be adequate for conveying expectations for popular music
Effectiveness of Seeking Safety for Co-Occurring Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Substance Use
The authors evaluated the Seeking Safety program\u27s effectiveness for treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use symptoms across 12 betweenâgroups studies (N = 1,997 participants). Separate metaâanalytic procedures for studies implementing wait list/no treatment (n = 1,042) or alternative treatments (n = 1,801) yielded medium effect sizes for Seeking Safety for decreasing symptoms of PTSD and modest effects for decreasing symptoms of substance use. Limitations of the findings and implications for counselors are discussed
Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: study report
The British Library (BL), JISC, UK HE institutions and CURL have funded an 18-month project to develop a national framework for the provision, preservation and open access to electronic theses produced in UK HE institutions. The project, called EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) was developed in response to a competitive tender invitation released by the JISC and proposes a service set up and run by the British Library.
The British Libraryâs current service, the British Thesis Service, offers access to around 180,000 doctoral theses, predominantly from 1970 onwards, though it is estimated that overall some half million theses dating from the 1600s are in existence in the UK. Around 80% of requests are for theses published within the last 13 years and almost all of these exist only in hardcopy. Through this service, theses are acquired âon demandâ and delivered on microfilm at a cost of just over ÂŁ60 to the user (and at this price the service runs at a loss). Whilst this service, coupled with the Index to Theses (Expert Information), enables the location of and access to relatively recent British theses by the determined seeker, no one could argue that the process is optimised. As a result, usage of theses is much lower than it might be and much research is going unnoticed and unused as a result. Conversely, it has been shown that when theses are easy to locate and access, usage is high: at Virginia Tech, a pioneer site in the provision of a formal, systematised ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) service, downloads have been shown to increase over 30-fold when a thesis is available free online and easily located.
A national service for the UK that provides discovery and access to theses in electronic form via the Web will increase the utility of doctoral scholarship. A single interface that directs users to theses wherever they are held, and which addresses the issues of intellectual property, permissions, royalties, preservation, discovery, and other matters associated with the public provision of theses in electronic form, will be of great benefit to the scholarly community in the UK and across the world.
The EThOS project (Electronic Theses Online Service) was commissioned to develop a model for a workable, sustainable and acceptable national service for the provision of open access to electronic doctoral theses. The EThOS project team have completed the task and UCL Library Services in partnership with Key Perspectives Ltd have been asked to undertake a consultative study to assess the acceptability of the proposed model to the UK higher education community in the context of other potential models. This document reports the results of this consultative study, including a set of recommendations to JISC and other stakeholders for setting up a UK national e-theses service. The stakeholders other than JISC are:
The British Library
University administrators (registrars)
Graduate students and recent PhDs
Librarians
Institutional repository managers
Other e-theses services including:
DART-Europe
DiVA
DissOnline
Australasian Digital Theses
Theses Canada
Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations
The EThOS tea
Citation Rates for Ohio State Graduate Theses & Dissertations: Trends, Surprises, and Inaccuracies
The Ohio State Universityâs holdings of graduate theses and dissertations were examined to determine if highly-downloaded titles tended to be highly-cited. The study found that citation rates were highly variable and did not necessarily correspond to download rates. This included very highly downloaded titles with low citation rates, and lesser-downloaded titles with high citation rates. The study found that Google Scholar, which was used to identify citation rates, too often counts theses and dissertations as a version of a different work with the same title, even if it is another format and sometimes with additional authors. This article will share these findings
The Thesis: texts and machines
This opening chapter focuses on how research knowledge is represented in the dissertation as a textual format. It sets the dissertation in two contexts. Borg discusses its historical formation within the technologies of the pen and the typewriter; Boyd Davis analyses the changes produced by digital technologies, offering counter-arguments to the claim that the predominantly textual thesis is a poor representation of research knowledge. He advances evidence-based arguments, using a synthesis of recent technological developments, for the additional functionality that text has acquired as a result of being digital and being connected via international networks, contrasting this with the relatively poor forms of access available even now using pictures, moving images and other non-textual forms. The chapter argues that the dissertation is inherently contingent, changing and changeable. While supervisors may expect their students to produce a dissertation that resembles the one they wrote themselves, changes both in the available technologies and in the kinds of knowledge the dissertation is expected to represent are having a significant effect on its form as well as its content.
Boyd Davis is co-editor of the book in which this chapter is published, which has its origins in an ESRC-funded seminar series, âNew Forms of Doctorateâ (2008â10), that he co-devised and co-chaired.
The work grew out Boyd Davisâs questioning of methods and formats for research knowledge in his introduction to, and editing of, a special issue of Digital Creativity, entitled Creative Evaluation, in 2009. This followed a peer-reviewed symposium on evaluative techniques within creative work supported by the Design Research Society and British Computer Society, which he devised and chaired. Related work on forms of knowledge in interactive media appears in an article with Faiola and Edwards of Indiana UniversityâPurdue University, Indianapolis, for New Media and Society (2010)
Google Scholar Versions: Errors and Implications
Google Scholar combines versions of what should be the same item into a single record with multiple versions listed and a common citation rate for all versions. However, these versions are not always the same document. A study on the citations of theses and dissertations found unusually high citation rates for some titles. On closer examination, these titles had versions that were other formats, sometimes with additional authors. A close examination of highly cited theses and dissertations revealed that nearly half of the titles were considered versions of other different formats, often much shorter and sometimes multi-authored journal articles
Information strategy development in the UK and Ireland: a role for Aleph
This paper looks at the role of the Ex Libris Strategy Group of UK and Irish Chief Librarians. It then analyses the role of Information provision at a strategic level in Universities in the UK. The paper identifies a Top Ten Wish List for development and partnership working with Ex Libris, comprising: Back to Basics, the Corporate Context, E-Journals, E-Books, Open Access, OAI compliance, the Catalogue, Management Information, Virtual and Managed Learning Environments, and international developments in information provision. The paper concludes that libraries must: support the institutional Mission, be seen to deliver, support their customers, and be cost-effective. Ex Libris software and products have an important role to play in delivering this agenda
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