Institutional Repository saber.ula.ve: A testimonial perspective

In this paper, we describe our decade-long experience of building and operating one of the most active Institutional Repository in the world: www.saber.ula.ve (University of the Andes, Merida-Venezuela). In order to share our experience with other institutions, we firstly explain the steps we followed to preserve and disseminate the scientific production of the University of Los Andes' researchers. We then present some recent quantitative results about our repository activities and we outline some methodological guidelines that could be applied in order to replicate similar experiences. These guidelines list the ingredients or building blocks as well as the processes followed for developing and maintaining the services of an Institutional Repository. These include technological infrastructure; institutional policies on preservation, publication and dissemination of knowledge; recommendations on incentives for open access publication; the process of selection, testing and adaptation of technological tools; the planning and organization of services, and the dissemination and support within the scientific community that will eventually lead to the adoption of the ideas that lie behind the open access movement. We summarize the results obtained regarding the acceptance, adoption and use of the technological tools used for the publication of our institution's intellectual production, and we present the main obstacles encountered on the way.Comment: 7th International Conference on Open Access in Accra Ghana from 2nd to 3rd November 200

Academic writing for publication: Putting the ‘international’ into context

There is a growing body of research on the impact of English-medium publication and associated higher education regimes on knowledge construction. However, not much is known about how academics outside the Global North make decisions about how and where to publish. Through a comparative case study, this article sets out to explore how academics in Ethiopia and Oman engage in writing for publication. Taking an academic literacies lens, the analysis reveals that their decisions were shaped by institutional values at the local level, as well as global hierarchies around knowledge construction. However, issues around identity, languages and disciplinary cultures also influenced how academics chose to position themselves in relation to local and international journals. The findings point to the need for new partnerships between journals in the Global North and South to prevent ‘publication drain’, and for universities to explore ways to address inequalities perpetuated through journal ranking and language hierarchies

Systematic Grant and Funding Body Acknowledgment Data for Publications: An Examination of New Dimensions and New Controversies for Bibliometrics

Bibliographic databases are beginning to provide systematic grant and funding body acknowledgement data for the publications they index. This paper considers how this new data might be used for policy purposes and the key issues that are likely to arise in its use. While the attempt to provide this kind of systematic data is in its relative infancy, there is already sufficient information within the WOS database to examine a number of controversies in science studies. This paper considers one such issue, namely the relationship between the number of funding sources acknowledged and the citation impact of publications where a positive relationship has been assumed to exist. Analyses of sets of publications from 2009 from the journals Cell and Physical Review Letters give contrasting results, suggesting that our understanding of the issue of the relationship between the impact of a publication and the number of funding sources which it acknowledges is not fully understood and may be more complicated that previously considered. It is proposed that scientific research findings are packaged by researchers into papers in a variety of ways for a wide variety of purposes. Individual funding quanta from whatever source are not therefore inputs to papers directly; rather, such funding supports a process that has amongst its outcomes, the production of papers

Are decision trees a feasible knowledge representation to guide extraction of critical information from randomized controlled trial reports?

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This paper proposes the use of decision trees as the basis for automatically extracting information from published randomized controlled trial (RCT) reports. An exploratory analysis of RCT abstracts is undertaken to investigate the feasibility of using decision trees as a semantic structure. Quality-of-paper measures are also examined.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A subset of 455 abstracts (randomly selected from a set of 7620 retrieved from Medline from 1998 – 2006) are examined for the quality of RCT reporting, the identifiability of RCTs from abstracts, and the completeness and complexity of RCT abstracts with respect to key decision tree elements. Abstracts were manually assigned to 6 sub-groups distinguishing whether they were primary RCTs versus other design types. For primary RCT studies, we analyzed and annotated the reporting of intervention comparison, population assignment and outcome values. To measure completeness, the frequencies by which complete intervention, population and outcome information are reported in abstracts were measured. A qualitative examination of the reporting language was conducted.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Decision tree elements are manually identifiable in the majority of primary RCT abstracts. 73.8% of a random subset was primary studies with a single population assigned to two or more interventions. 68% of these primary RCT abstracts were structured. 63% contained pharmaceutical interventions. 84% reported the total number of study subjects. In a subset of 21 abstracts examined, 71% reported numerical outcome values.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The manual identifiability of decision tree elements in the abstract suggests that decision trees could be a suitable construct to guide machine summarisation of RCTs. The presence of decision tree elements could also act as an indicator for RCT report quality in terms of completeness and uniformity.</p

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review [version 2; referees: 2 approved]

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments