Flying over a conference: an overview of Elpub2003 technical track articles

For dealing with a large variety of issues in electronic publishing, the ICCC/IFIP International Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub) conference series has traditionally a large scope. The technical track in Elpub2003 issues, in particular, range from user interface considerations until machine learning, covering fields such as metadata, multimedia or mobile computing. This article makes an overview the main contributions of Elpub2003 technical track accepted articles

Information Workers and their Personal Information Management: a Literature Review

The research described in this paper provides insights into tools and methods which are used by professional information workers to keep and to manage their personal information. A literature study was carried out on 23 scholarly papers and articles, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA). The research questions were: How do information workers keep and manage their information sources? What aims do they have when building personal information collections? What problems do they experience with the use and management of their personal collections?The main conclusion from the literature is that professional information workers use different tools and approaches for personal information management, depending on their personal style, the types of information in their collections and the devices which they use for retrieval. The main problem that they experience is that of information fragmentation over different collections and different devices. These findings can provide input for improvement of information literacy curricula in Higher Education.It has been remarked that scholarly research and literature on Personal Information Management do not pay a lot of attention to the keeping and management of (bibliographic) data from external documentation. How people process the information from those sources and how this stimulates their personal learning, is completely overlooked

Prolegomena to any future e-publishing model

Considers why, after nearly twenty years of development, the electronic publishing model has not replaced the paper based model for academic journals. Gives three insights that attempt to explain this: the first is the ‘means-end’ confusion of commercial publishers, the second is the failure to realise it is the purpose not the form that is important about the current journal model, and third is the failure to recognise that a net-based replacement for the journal does not necessarily need a publisher. Finally some 'ground rules' to be used when thinking about, or designing, any future electronic publishing model are proposed

SCOAP3/SCOAP3-DH – Gold Open Access in High Energy Physics

SCOAP3 is a global partnership which converts high-quality subscription journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access through redirection of existing subscription funds. Since January 1, 2014 the SCOAP3 Gold Open Access Repository is providing free access to scientific articles in high quality journals in the field of High Energy Physics. This article describes this international pilot which flips the current subscription-based financing of scientific publication to an output-based financing model (fair share). This includes a description of the unique mechanisms of SCOAP3 as well as its governance structure and short view on the national German contributing partners, especially the German universities (SCOAP3-DH)

Scholarly publishing within an eScholarship framework – Sydney eScholarship as a model of integration and sustainability

This paper will discuss and describe an operational example of a business model where scholarly publication (Sydney University Press) functions within an eScholarship framework that also integrates digital collections, open access repositories and eResearch data services. The paper will argue that such services are complementary, and that such a level of integration benefits the development of a sustainable publishing operation. The paper describes the business model as a dynamic hybrid. The kinds of values considered include tangible and intangible benefits as well as commercial income. The paper illustrates the flexible operational model with four brief cases studies enabled by integrating repository, digital library, and data services with an innovative publishing service

Digital Divide and Digitization Initiatives in Pakistan: A Bird\u27s Eye View

The process of digitization in libraries of Pakistan is at a very initial stage. Pakistan is lagging behind developed countries due to many reasons such as: funding, computer illiteracy and expertise in digitization. However, some institutions like the Higher Education Commission, the Punjab University Library, the National Library of Pakistan and some private organizations are doing digitization. In social sciences, digitization is being done to preserve the cultural heritage of manuscripts and other old literature related to the history and culture of Pakistan. There are nearly 0.15 million manuscripts in Pakistan in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi and Sanskrit languages. Some are available in libraries of Pakistan while others are in Personal collections. Bibliographies of most of these manuscripts are available. Hence, there is a great need and opportunity to digitize this literature. This paper presents a status report on digitization initiatives in Pakistan

Combining structured and unstructured information in a retrieval model for accessing legislation

Legal information is often accessible via portal web sites. Legal documents typically combine structured and unstructured information, the former being tagged with markup languages such as XML (Extensible Markup Language). Current information retrieval research takes into account the structured information content of documents when computing the relevance ranking. Such an approach is very promising for the retrieval of legal documents. This is illustrated with two retrieval models specifically designed for the retrieval of legislation

From scientific communication to public knowledge : the scientific article web published as a knowledge base

Linking Electronic published scientific articles to Web ontologies is a cognitive tool of which its impacts and possibilities are far from being evaluated. The objective of this research is to investigate the potential of Web published scientific articles, conceived not only as texts, but also as a machine readable knowledge base, explicitly and formally related to Web-based public ontologies, that represent the assented knowledge of a specific domain. A prospective survey is developed to identify similar proposals and innovative experiences in electronically publishing scientific articles, authoring tools and citation analysis. Scientific methodology is also reviewed looking for structural characteristics of the scientific method presented in the written text of scientific articles. Experiences in developing Markup Language for some specific areas of knowledge, such as Chemical Markup Language, Mathematics Markup Language and Biology Markup Language, are also reviewed. An electronic publishing process is outlined which would permit the electronic publishing of not only scientific articles as full-texts, but would also enables an author to formalize the “deep structure” of a scientific article, containing assumptions, hypotheses, methodology, citations, datasets used, conclusions and contributions. All these elements are published as a knowledge base, using XML language, thus outlining a Sm-ML, a Scientific methodology Markup Language. Concepts expressed in the different parts of a Scientific article are to be linked to public Web ontologies, thus enabling the establishment of a formal relationship between the Scientific article specific knowledge base to ontologies like the UMLS – the Unified Medical Language System (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheet/umls.html). The citations of an article are also be linked to the cited Web published scientific articles as qualified citations, in which the reasons to cite and the relationship between this specific scientific article and its citations are made explicit. The proposed model can enhances the scientific communication process, permitting semantic retrieval, critical inquiring, semantic citation, comparison, coherence verification and validating of a scientific article against public Web ontologies, which express the assented knowledge of a scientific area. The model was also conceived as the base for developing enhanced authoring and retrieval tools

PlosOpenR – Exploring FP7 funded PLOS publications

Jahn N, Fenner M, Schirrwagen J. PlosOpenR – Exploring FP7 funded PLOS publications. Information Services and Use. 2013;33(2):93-101.This case study explores alternative science metrics on grant-supported research publications. The study is based on plosOpenR, a software package for the statistical computing environment R. plosOpenR facilitates access to the application programming interfaces (API) provided by Open Access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) and OpenAIRE – Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe. We report 1,166 PLOS articles that acknowledge grant support from 624 different research projects funded by the European Union's 7th Framework Programme (FP7). plosOpenR allows the exploration of PLOS Article-Level Metrics (PLOS ALM), including citations, usage and social media events as well as collaboration patterns on these articles. Findings reveal the potential of reusing data, that are made openly and automatically available by publishers, funders and the repository community

Digital preservation of scientific information in Brazil : an initial approach of existing models

The problem addressed in this study is to investigate how digital science and technical information produced and used by brazilian government research institutes has been preserved and what kind of digital preservation strategies can be proposed. It presents the results of an exploratory study from a Doctoral dissertation research being developed at the Department of Information Science at the University of Brasilia, Brazil