The Convergence of Digital-Libraries and the Peer-Review Process

Pre-print repositories have seen a significant increase in use over the past fifteen years across multiple research domains. Researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. The contribution set forth by this paper emphasizes a deconstructed publication model in which the peer-review process is mediated by an OAI-PMH peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighting the relative influence of each participating reviewer's evaluations. This paper also suggests a set of peer-review specific metadata tags that can accompany a pre-print's existing metadata record. The combinations of these contributions provide a unique repository-centric peer-review model that fits within the widely deployed OAI-PMH framework.Comment: Journal of Information Science [in press

Content in Institutional Repositories: A Collection Management Issue

Many libraries are facing the challenges to develop and manage an institutional repository. This article addresses the issue of content in repositories, and suggests that librarians need to approach the task of content development by applying some of the procedures and skills associated with collection management within more traditional environments. It also considers the types of content that might be suitable for institutional repositories, and notes that several recent Australian reports have recommended the need for a more standardised and regulated approach to the content of institutional repositories. It is argued that this is inappropriate

arXiv e-prints and the journal of record: An analysis of roles and relationships

Since its creation in 1991, arXiv has become central to the diffusion of research in a number of fields. Combining data from the entirety of arXiv and the Web of Science (WoS), this paper investigates (a) the proportion of papers across all disciplines that are on arXiv and the proportion of arXiv papers that are in the WoS, (b) elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication, and (c) the aging characteristics and scientific impact of arXiv e-prints and their published version. It shows that the proportion of WoS papers found on arXiv varies across the specialties of physics and mathematics, and that only a few specialties make extensive use of the repository. Elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication has shortened but remains longer in mathematics than in physics. In physics, mathematics, as well as in astronomy and astrophysics, arXiv versions are cited more promptly and decay faster than WoS papers. The arXiv versions of papers - both published and unpublished - have lower citation rates than published papers, although there is almost no difference in the impact of the arXiv versions of both published and unpublished papers.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figure

Mapping Scholarly Communication Infrastructure: A Bibliographic Scan of Digital Scholarly Communication Infrastructure

This bibliography scan covers a lot of ground. In it, I have attempted to capture relevant recent literature across the whole of the digital scholarly communications infrastructure. I have used that literature to identify significant projects and then document them with descriptions and basic information. Structurally, this review has three parts. In the first, I begin with a diagram showing the way the projects reviewed fit into the research workflow; then I cover a number of topics and functional areas related to digital scholarly communication. I make no attempt to be comprehensive, especially regarding the technical literature; rather, I have tried to identify major articles and reports, particularly those addressing the library community. The second part of this review is a list of projects or programs arranged by broad functional categories. The third part lists individual projects and the organizations—both commercial and nonprofit—that support them. I have identified 206 projects. Of these, 139 are nonprofit and 67 are commercial. There are 17 organizations that support multiple projects, and six of these—Artefactual Systems, Atypon/Wiley, Clarivate Analytics, Digital Science, Elsevier, and MDPI—are commercial. The remaining 11—Center for Open Science, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko), LYRASIS/DuraSpace, Educopia Institute, Internet Archive, JISC, OCLC, OpenAIRE, Open Access Button, Our Research (formerly Impactstory), and the Public Knowledge Project—are nonprofit.Andrew W. Mellon Foundatio

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2007 Annunal Edition

This bibliography lists citations of English-language articles, books and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published from 1990 through 2007; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included

The place of eprints in scholarly information delivery

Publisher’s version is restricted access in accordance with Ingenta’s policy. The original publication is available at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mcb/264The continuing high costs of scholarly information provision have encouraged the proliferation of eprint servers. We have seen the establishment of the Chemistry Preprint Server, PhilSci Archive and ClinMed, to mention just three examples. Both the well‐established and the evolving eprint repositories offer hope that academic libraries can continue to provide access to required scholarly information at reasonable cost. The paper describes the advantages of eprint servers and possible obstacles to their acceptance