Query Expansion for Survey Question Retrieval in the Social Sciences

In recent years, the importance of research data and the need to archive and to share it in the scientific community have increased enormously. This introduces a whole new set of challenges for digital libraries. In the social sciences typical research data sets consist of surveys and questionnaires. In this paper we focus on the use case of social science survey question reuse and on mechanisms to support users in the query formulation for data sets. We describe and evaluate thesaurus- and co-occurrence-based approaches for query expansion to improve retrieval quality in digital libraries and research data archives. The challenge here is to translate the information need and the underlying sociological phenomena into proper queries. As we can show retrieval quality can be improved by adding related terms to the queries. In a direct comparison automatically expanded queries using extracted co-occurring terms can provide better results than queries manually reformulated by a domain expert and better results than a keyword-based BM25 baseline.Comment: to appear in Proceedings of 19th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2015 (TPDL 2015

First results of the FP7 SOAP Project

* About the project * Highlights: Gold OA journals today * Results from the large-scale survey of researcher

Open Access Publishing - Models and Attributes

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has compiled data on the present offer for open access publishing in online peer-reviewed journals. Starting from the Directory of Open Access Journals, several sources of data are considered, including inspection of journal web site and direct inquiries within the publishing industry. Several results are derived and discussed, together with their correlations: the number of open access journals and articles; their subject area; the starting date of open access journals; the size and business models of open access publishers; the licensing models; the presence of an impact factor; the uptake of hybrid open access. In addition, a number of qualitative features of open access publishing, relevant to understand the present landscape, are described

A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s

Particle physics has an ambitious and broad experimental programme for the coming decades. This programme requires large investments in detector hardware, either to build new facilities and experiments, or to upgrade existing ones. Similarly, it requires commensurate investment in the R&D of software to acquire, manage, process, and analyse the shear amounts of data to be recorded. In planning for the HL-LHC in particular, it is critical that all of the collaborating stakeholders agree on the software goals and priorities, and that the efforts complement each other. In this spirit, this white paper describes the R&D activities required to prepare for this software upgrade.Peer reviewe

Open Access in German research - Results of the FP7 funded project "Study of Open Access Publishing" (SOAP)

Within the "Study of Open Access Publishing" (SOAP, a FP7 funded European project, http://soap-fp7.eu, project duration March 2009 until February 2011) a comprehensive study has been conducted on the golden road to Open Access. The project partners (publishers and scientific organizations) jointly designed a large-scale survey to which more than 40,000 researchers responded. This paper presents and discusses the responses of 3,000 researchers based in Germany. Results of 12 selected questions from the original 23-piece set of questions provide an insight into researchers' publishing behavior and their attitudes towards Open Access publishing. Survey respondents in Germany exhibited a very positive opinion on Open Access, which coincides with the worldwide data. A significant proportion of the researchers working in Germany have had experience with Open Access publications. Funding publication fees has been specified as one of the main barriers to publish in Open Access. Different funding sources are used to pay for Open Access fees: Researchers in Germany, in particular the employees of research institutions, often use institutional funds.Das im 7. Forschungsrahmenprogramm geförderte EU-Projekt "Study of Open Access Publishing" (SOAP; http://soap-fp7.eu, Laufzeit März 2009 bis Februar 2011), hat eine umfassende Studie zum goldenen Weg zu Open Access durchgeführt. Die von den Projektpartnern (Verlage und Wissenschaftsorganisationen) konzipierte Umfrage haben weltweit mehr als 40.000 Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler beantwortet. In diesem Beitrag werden die Antworten von 3.000 in Deutschland arbeitenden Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern vorgestellt und analysiert. Die Ergebnisse von 12 ausgewählten Fragen aus dem ursprünglich 23-teiligen Fragenkomplex geben einen Einblick in das Publikationsverhalten und die Einstellung zum Open Access-Publizieren. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich eine sehr positive Meinung zu Open Access, die sich mit den weltweiten Daten deckt. Ein erheblicher Anteil der in Deutschland arbeitenden Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler hat bereits Erfahrung mit Open Access Publikationen. Die Finanzierung der Publikationsgebühren wird als eines der Haupthindernisse bei der Open Access Publikation angegeben. Verschiedene Finanzierungsquellen werden hierfür genutzt: In Deutschland sind dies, insbesondere bei Angehörigen der außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen, überdurchschnittlich häufig institutionelle Fonds