Genesis of Altmetrics or Article-level Metrics for Measuring Efficacy of Scholarly Communications: Current Perspectives

The article-level metrics (ALMs) or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in recent times for measuring the impact of scientific publications and their social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the world. This declaration has given preference to the ALM or altmetrics over traditional but faulty journal impact factor (JIF)-based assessment of career scientists. JIF does not consider impact or influence beyond citations count as this count reflected only through Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. Furthermore, JIF provides indicator related to the journal, but not related to a published paper. Thus, altmetrics now becomes an alternative metrics for performance assessment of individual scientists and their contributed scholarly publications. This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in measuring efficacy of scholarly communications and highlights available altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications. The paper thus argues for institutions and policy makers to pay more attention to altmetrics based indicators for evaluation purpose but cautions that proper safeguards and validations are needed before their adoption

Open Access to Scientific Knowledge: Policy Perspectives and National Initiatives

Various initiatives are taken globally to make knowledge repositories more accessible to researchers by exploiting the internet platform and developing a model that allows free access. India is also actively participating in this new initiative. Open access to scientific knowledge is an integral part of India’s S&T policy intervention. Some of the major international and Indian national initiatives are highlighted. Further efforts that would be required to make Indian participation more fruitful are also brought out

Delhi Declaration on Open Access 2018: An overview

This article provides a brief introduction, genesis and salient features of the "Delhi Declaration on Open Access", pronounced on 14th February 2018

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Research Communicators

The emergence of Web 2.0 and simultaneously Library 2.0 platforms has helped the library and information professionals to outreach to new audiences beyond their physical boundaries. In a globalized society, information becomes very useful resource for socio-economic empowerment of marginalized communities, economic prosperity of common citizens, and knowledge enrichment of liberated minds. Scholarly information becomes both developmental and functional for researchers working towards advancement of knowledge. We must recognize a relay of information flow and information ecology while pursuing scholarly research. Published scholarly literatures we consult that help us in creation of new knowledge. Similarly, our published scholarly works should be outreached to future researchers for regeneration of next dimension of knowledge. Fortunately, present day research communicators have many freely available personalized digital tools to outreach to globalized research audiences having similar research interests. These tools and techniques, already adopted by many researchers in different subject areas across the world, should be enthusiastically utilized by LIS researchers in South Asia for global dissemination of their scholarly research works. This newly found enthusiasm will soon become integral part of the positive habits and cultural practices of research communicators in LIS domain.Comment: Book Chapter. In Gautam Maity et. al. (Eds.), Charaibeti: Golden Jubilee Commemorative Volume (pp. 356-365). Kolkata, India: Department of Library and Information Science, Jadavpur University, 2014. ISBN: 978-81-929886-0-

Open Science Metrics and Scholarly Communications

This lecture titled "Open Science Metrics and Scholarly Communications" was presented in the Skill-Development Workshop on ICT-enabled Research Evaluation Metrics for Information Professionals”, DLIS, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India, during 21-27 September 2023

Open Access to Scientific Knowledge: Policy Perspectives and National Initiatives

Various initiatives are taken globally to make knowledge repositories more accessible to researchers by exploiting the internet platform and developing a model that allows free access. India is also actively participating in this new initiative. Open access to scientific knowledge is an integral part of India’s S&T policy intervention. Some of the major international and Indian national initiatives are highlighted. Further efforts that would be required to make Indian participation more fruitful are also brought out

European Union's General Data ProtectionRegulation, 2018: A brief overview

This short communication introduces the General Data ProtectionRegulation (GDPR) that came into force on 25th May 2018 across Europe. This Regulation will also have a far-reaching impact on libraries, archives and research institutions in Europe and their global collaborators. The paper also describes how IFLA and its member libraries are dealing with GDPR and data privacy issues

Corridors of Books: Memories, Ideas andReflections of a Library Worker

This a review of book titled "Corridor of Books: Memories, Ideas and Reflections of a Library Worker" written by P.R. Goswami

Book ReviewOpen Access: The Road to Freedom

Open Access: The Road to Freedom; edited by Narayan Chandra Ghosh, Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar Mukherjee, and Jiban K. Pal; Prova Prakashani, Kolkata, 2018, hardcover, 350 pages, ISBN 9789383658206

Data Stewardship for Open Science: Implementing FAIR Principles

This is a review of book titled "Data Stewardship for Open Science: Implementing FAIR Principles", written by Barend Mons, and published by CRC Press, London, 2018