4 research outputs found
Understanging Information Use in the Multidisciplinary Field: A Local Citation Analysis of Neuroscience Research
Assessing the information needs of a multidisciplinary academic community presents challenges to librarians managing journal collections. This case study analyzed the literature used by the neuroscience community at the University of Maryland to determine the following about
the publications they cited: their type, their discipline, and how recent they were relative to the citing publication. The authors searched the ISI Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index to identify the publishing, citing, and coauthoring patterns of both faculty and graduate students to inform library decisions about collecting journals and other types of literature
Has the Revolution in Scholarly Communication Lived Up to Its Promise?
In the late 1990s the need for an overhaul in the approach to scholarly publishing was
recognized. A drastic change would revise the economic model on which publishing was
based, give authors rights to their own works in open access repositories and enable
consumers across the world to access scholarly materials, building a flow of valuable information for the common good. The revolution has yet to materialize, though small but welcome achievements have been made. The open access business model has gained a foothold with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and scientists receiving grants through the National Institutes of Health must submit manuscripts to the PubMed Central digital archive. Several universities mandate that faculty members deposit their scholarly articles
in institutional repositories, and the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity promotes open publishing by supporting authors. Librarians are both part of the problem and part of the solution. Instead of worrying about paying rising subscription fees, they could use their position to influence authors to take advantage of open access channels despite publish-or-perish pressures. Recent legislative and presidential initiatives, geared to disseminating publicly funded research, may be effective in moving open access closer to transforming the traditional system of scholarly communication