"Open Science and Scholarly Communication "

The main theme of the 18th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB) is the openness and use of research data as well as new and innovative publishing paradigms. Specifically, it aimed to bring together presentations and discussions that demonstrate the role of cultural heritage and service organizations in the creation, accessibility, curation and long term preservation of data. We aimed to provide a forum for discussing appraisal, citation and licensing of research data. Also, what is new with reviewing, publishing and editorial technology in a data-centric setting? ELPUB brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss data mining, digital publishing and social networks along with their implications for scholarly communication, information services, e-learning, e-businesses, the cultural heritage sector, and other areas where electronic publishing is imperative. ELPUB 2014 received 32 paper submissions. The peer review process resulted in the acceptance of 13 research papers and 9 posters. These papers were grouped into sessions based on the following topics: Open Access and Open Data; Know the Users Better: Researchers and Their Needs; Specialized Content for Researchers; Publishing and Access; Practical Aspects of Electronic Publishing. The conference held 2 pre-conference workshops and one tutorial on June 18. Andreas Rauber and Kresimir Duretec (Technical University of Vienna, Austria) led the tutorial “Digital Preservation Lifecycle: from challenges to solutions”. Pierre Mounier (EHESS/OpenEdition, France) and Victoria Tsoukala (National Documentation Centre, Greece) led the workshop “Non-profit Open Access ventures of significant scope in Europe” and Carla Basili (Sapienza University in Rome, Italy) led the workshop “Information Literacy in the context of scientific information”. The main program on June 19–20 features two keynotes. Herbert van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA) will deliver a keynote entitled “Towards Robust Linking and Referencing for Web-Based Scholarly Communication”. Mahendra Mahey (British Library Labs, UK) will deliver a keynote entitled “How the British Library’s Digital Scholarship department is putting data to use for researchers through its Digital research Team and British Library Labs project”.

2008

The growth of the Internet and digital technology has caused a dramatic and rapid change in scholarly communication practices, giving rise to new forms of digital scholarship and emerging scholarly publishing models. As libraries respond to-and help promote-these changes, they face a number of new challenges and opportunities. Libraries must develop new specialists with specific skills in digital content production and management. At the same time, they must develop a broad, general understanding, among staff across the entire organization, of how changes in scholarly communication practices affect the library enterprise as a whole. This paper discusses three new areas of activity for libraries supporting digital scholarship and scholarly communication: the development of institutional repositories, electronic publishing services, and scholarly communication outreach and advocacy. The paper will also suggest strategies for developing the capacity to support these activities. LIBRARIES & SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION The growth of the Internet and digital technology has caused a dramatic and rapid change in how scholarship is created and communicated. For academic libraries, responsible for preserving and providing access to the scholarly record, these changing scholarly communication practices are creating both new challenges and new opportunities. The challenges include the escalating costs of subscribing to scholarly journals; the explosion of new born-digital content and the corresponding need to manage, describe, and preserve it; and an intellectual property and copyright environment seemingly out of sync with the ways the scholarly community wants to use (and reuse) digital information. At the same time, there are new opportunities to address these problems and transform the scholarly communication environment altogether. The emergence of the Open Access (OA) movement, for example, offers a model of scholarly communication that embraces technology's potential to make scholarship available worldwide by eliminating or reducing economic, technical and legal barriers to access. Developments in open source software make it easier than ever to publish and distribute scholarship online, and the development of standard metadata formats and search tools ensures that, once placed online, it

This concise paper reviews the research and practice of open innovations in scholarly publishing, facilitated by the dynamics of open access, Web 2.0, and social media. Compared with traditional publisher-mediated system, open publishing not only provides a vast amount of openly accessible content, but also introduces a new communication system characterized by "publish then social filter". This paper aims to theorize the defining features of open publishing innovations and their impact on future digital scholarship. It also critically discusses the challenges for the uptake of open publishing in scholarly communication. It concludes by linking open publishing with a wider open knowledge communication system including open education and open science, from which future research suggestions are derived.

International Conference on Electronic Publishing, 2006

The manner in which scholarly research is conducted is changing rapidly. This is most evident in Science and Engineering, but similar revolutionary trends are becoming apparent across disciplines. Improvements in computing and network technologies, digital data capture techniques, and powerful data mining techniques enable research practices that are highly collaborative, network-based, and data-intensive. These dramatic changes in the nature of scholarly research require corresponding fundamental changes in scholarly communication. The established scholarly communication system has not kept pace with these revolutionary changes in research practice and has not capitalized on the immense capabilities offered by the digital, networked environment. In essence, the current electronic scholarly communication system is a scanned copy of its paper-based predecessor upon which a thin layer of cross-venue interoperability has been overlaid. The time has come to design and deploy the innately digital scholarly communication system that scholars deserve, and that is able to capture the digital scholarly record, make it accessible, and preserve it over time.

2012

This presentation discussed the current landscape on scientific publication, and the route from 'analogue' to digital scholarship (Borgman, 2007; Holliman et al., 2009; Weller, 2011). The Digital Scholarship project was used to reflect on potential changes to academic practice. Traditional routes to publication are well known. Primary literature is about establishing priority, including printed text (Montgomery, 2009), and the peer review process (Wager, 2009) and tends to be searched by indexes (Gartner, 2009). 'Alternative' routes to publication have emerged including pre-print servers (e.g. arXiv), open access journals, open review (e.g. JiME), open repositories (e.g. ORO), popular science books, or 'festschriften'. Other sets of communication opportunities include press conferences, and news and current affairs media, with further possible forms of publication including 'secondary' and 'grey' literature, email and online forums, social media and networking, podcasts, audio downloads and web video. Figures in this landscape of publication include academic journals, scientific institutions, 'big science' projects, higher education institutions, industry, news media, magazines, NGOs and scientific citizens.

The concept of Digital Scolarship -DS-(Borgman, 2007; Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2012; Weller, 2011) defines new forms of academics’ professional practices linked to the changing cultural, social and working context of the digital age. However, the empirical research efforts relating this construct seem to emerge in a rather chaotic conceptual and methodological landscape, where several disciplines are contributing. In line with this problem, in this research work the authors have formulated the following operational hypothesis: as a mixed disciplinary topic of research, the DS is at its very first stages with high dispersion and fragmentation of conceptual bases for both further theoretical elaboration as well as empirical research. This report presents hence the topic under analysis, the methodological approach and choices made to tackle the research problem and hypothesis underlying the process of literature reviewing, the results and initial interpretations. In order to obtain evidence supporting the above mentioned hypothesis, the authors carried out a systematic review of literature based on 45 journal articles coming out from 4 relevant scientific information databases (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006). Moreover, several methods where combined, in a sort of methods’ triangulation (Mertens & Hesse-Biber, 2012), with the aim of ratifying some of the findings obtained with the main approach. In this case, in a second phase, the authors decided to include a method often adopted in the research area of Scientometrics, that is, the bibliometric maps (van Eck, Waltman, Dekker, & Berg, 2010). The results obtained go into the direction of the main hypothesis formulated: The main problem covered by this topic is the scholars’ technological uptake in support of their professional practices relating teaching and research. Moreover, the concept of Digital Scholarship seems to be configured in response to a inter/transdisciplinary problem, that is, from one side the forms that the technological infrastructures should adopt to endow researchers to work in more advanced and innovative ways within the context of open science and education; from the other side, the analysis of scholars’ engagement with technologies as expression of the own professional agency.

Research 2.0 and the Impact of Digital Technologies on Scholarly Inquiry

Social media are increasingly perceived as powerful drivers of change for research practices, in terms of openness, sharing and sociability. Numerous studies have reported benefits and factors affecting the progressive adoption of these sites especially for scholarly communication. However, extensive studies that are carried out with large samples at a national level are still rare. This chapter reports the results of a survey addressed to Italian academic scholars, the purpose of which was to identify frequency and way of use of a number of social media tools (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, Blogs, and Wikis). The study aims at providing evidence on how academic scholars are using social media for scholarly purposes, also by taking into account a number of factors such as gender, age, years of teaching, academic title, and field of knowledge. It also investigates the most valuable tools and the main reasons for use in academic pr...

2014

The present contribution concerns a case study of open access scholarly publishing in Greece, its history and effect in helping the local researcher community transition from a print-only mode of work to online working environments and in rendering Greek publications and scholarship more relevant to the international scholarly community. The paper elaborates on the goals of the project and the challenges that were encountered and addressed during its implementation. The project, which started in 2007 with the transition of three print journals in the humanities to an online and print format and online working environment, culminated in the development of an online platform that provides access to content and services from a single point in the web, ePublishing.ekt.gr. As part of the National Documentation Centre (EKT)'s services, we systematize and upgrade the journals' policies according to international standards, provide an online working platform and training, digitize and release in open access academic articles (more than 3,000 articles in established journals, published by small, non-profit, academic/scholarly society publishers, so far), provide DOIs, as well as concentrate on electronic books and conference proceedings – also to include purely online books in the future, starting with a born-digital monograph in a Humanities subject (onlineBook). In a nutshell, we have focused on providing publishers of scientific journals a range of comprehensive services which are constantly updated and improved in the light of the developments in scholarly communication, and which foster the internationalization, visibility, and preservation of research in these fields.

Learned Publishing, 2009

Sydney eScholarship is a framework and suite of services that enables integration of digital collections, open access repositories, and research data services with scholarly publishing. The primary platform for scholarly publishing at the

Proceedings of the …, 2005