Making open access work: The ‘state-of-the-art’ in providing open access to scholarly literature

Purpose: This paper is designed to provide an overview of one of the most important and controversial areas of scholarly communication: open-access publishing and dissemination of research outputs. It identifies and discusses recent trends and future challenges for various stakeholders in delivering open access (OA) to the scholarly literature. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on a number of inter-related strands of evidence which make up the current discourse on open access, comprising the peer-reviewed literature, grey literature and other forms of communication (including blogs and email discussion lists). It uses a large-scale textual analysis of the peer-reviewed literature since 2010 (carried out using the VOSviewer tool) as a basis for discussion of issues raised in the OA discourse. Findings: A number of key themes are identified, including the relationship between ‘Green’ OA (deposit in repositories) and ‘Gold’ OA (OA journal publication), the developing evidence base associated with OA, researcher attitudes and behaviours, policy directions, management of repositories, development of journals, institutional responses, and issues around impact and scholarly communication futures. It suggests that current challenges now focus on how OA can be made to work in practice, having moved on from the discussion of whether it should happen at all. Originality/value: The paper provides a structured evidence-based review of major issues in the OA field, and suggests key areas for future research and policy development

Opening Access to collections:The making and using of open digitised cultural content

Structured Abstract Purpose . This paper situates the activity of digitisation to increase access to cultural and heritage content alongside the objectives of the Open Access movement. It demonstrates that increasingly open licensing of digital cultural heritage content is creating opportunities for researchers in the arts and humanities for both access to and analysis of cultural heritage materials. Design/methodology/approach. The paper is primarily a literature and scoping review of the current digitisation licensing climate, using and embedding examples from ongoing research projects and recent writings on open access and digitisation to highlight both opportunities and barriers to the creation and use of digital heritage content from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Findings. The digital information environment in which digitised content is created and delivered has changed phenomenally, allowing the sharing and reuse of digital data and encouraging new advances in research across the sector, although issues of licensing persist. There remain further opportunities for understanding how to: study use and users of openly available cultural and heritage content; disseminate and encourage the uptake of open cultural content; persuade other institutions to publish their content in an open and accessible manner; build aggregation and search facilities to link across information sources to allow resource discovery; and how best to use high performance computing facilities to analyse and process the large amounts of content we are now seeing being made available throughout the sector. Research limitations/implications (if applicable). It is hoped that by pulling together this discussion, the benefits to making material openly available have been made clear, encouraging others in the GLAM sector to consider making their collections openly available for reuse and repurposing via publishing with open licesnses. Practical implications (if applicable). This paper will encourage others in the GLAM sector to consider licensing their collections in an open and reusable fashion. By spelling out the range of opportunities for researchers in using open cultural and heritage materials it makes a contribution to the discussion in this area. Social implications (if applicable). Increasing the quantity of high quality open access resources in the cultural heritage sector will lead to a richer research environment which will increase our understanding of history, culture, and society. Originality/value. This paper has pulled together, for the first time, an overview of the current state of affairs of digitisation in the cultural and heritage sector seen through the context of the Open Access movement. It has highlighted opportunities for researchers in the arts, humanities and social and historical sciences in the embedding of open cultural data into both their research and teaching, whilst scoping the wave of cultural heritage content which is being created from institutional repositories which are now available for research and use. As such, it is a position paper that encourages the open data agenda within the cultural and heritage sector, showing the potentials that exists for the study of culture and society when data is made open

Political brand image: an investigation into the operationalisation of the external orientation of David Cameron’s Conservative brand

This paper seeks to address the limited understanding of how to operationalise the external brand image of a political brand. More specifically, this research critically assesses the transfer potential of the six variables of brand image by Bosch, Venter, Han and Boshoff to deconstruct the UK Conservative Party brand from the perspective of young people aged 18–24 years during the 2010 UK General Election campaign. This research demonstrates the applicability of the six variables otherwise known as the ‘brand image framework’ to the political environment. However, the application of the brand image framework in its original conceptualisation proved problematic. Many of the brand image variables were clarified, rearticulated and simplified to address the political context. This refined conceptualisation provided an in-depth understanding of how to investigate the political brand image of David Cameron’s Conservative Party. This study addresses the paucity of research that operationalises external brand image and provides practitioners and academics within and beyond the context of political branding a mechanism to understand the external orientation of brands. This research may also be used by political and non-political brands as a basis to explore external brand image and compare its consistency with internal brand identity

Discovering Usability: Comparing Two Discovery Systems at One Academic Library

In the spring of 2013, the University Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago was in the unique position of having access to two discovery systems, Summon and WorldCat Local, at the same time. When tasked with choosing between the two systems, librarians undertook a usability study of Summon and WorldCat Local. The goal of this study was two-fold: to test the ease-of-use of each discovery system with an eye toward identifying one tool to retain for the longer term, and to learn about the search behaviors of different types of user groups. Eighteen subjects, consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty, participated in the study. Participants performed usability tasks using each tool and answered pre-task and post-task questions. While there was no clear preference among study participants for either discovery layer, individual groups did express preferences. Faculty, for example, preferred Summon to WorldCat Local at a rate of five to one. The study findings are explored in detail through an examination of the three major data sets produced by the usability test instrument: results derived from tasks performed by participants as part of the study; themes and trends identified by the investigators within the recorded participant tests; and discovery tool preferences as determined from pre-task and post-task questionnaires administered to study participants. This study has implications for librarians engaged in information literacy instruction; those considering implementing discovery tools, as well as for librarians currently using Summon or WorldCat Local at their libraries

Identification of nine new susceptibility loci for endometrial cancer

Endometrial cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer of the female reproductive tract in developed countries. Through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), we have previously identified eight risk loci for endometrial cancer. Here, we present an expanded meta-analysis of 12,906 endometrial cancer cases and 108,979 controls (including new genotype data for 5624 cases) and identify nine novel genome-wide significant loci, including a locus on 12q24.12 previously identified by meta-GWAS of endometrial and colorectal cancer. At five loci, expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analyses identify candidate causal genes; risk alleles at two of these loci associate with decreased expression of genes, which encode negative regulators of oncogenic signal transduction proteins (SH2B3 (12q24.12) and NF1 (17q11.2)). In summary, this study has doubled the number of known endometrial cancer risk loci and revealed candidate causal genes for future study