Publications — Open Access Scholarly Publishing Journal

Web search engines (WSE) are powerful and popular tools in the field of information service management. This study is an attempt to examine the impact and usefulness of web search engines in providing virtual reference services (VRS) within academic libraries in Pakistan. The study also attempts to investigate the relevant expertise and skills of library professionals in providing digital reference services (DRS) efficiently using web search engines. Methodology used in this study is quantitative in nature. The data was collected from fifty public and private sector universities in Pakistan using a structured questionnaire. Microsoft Excel and SPSS were used for data analysis. The study concludes that web search engines are commonly used by librarians to help users (especially research scholars) by providing digital reference services. The study also finds a positive correlation between use of web search engines and quality of digital reference services provided to library users. It is concluded that although search engines have increased the expectations of users and are really big competitors to a library’s reference desk, they are however not an alternative to reference service. Findings reveal that search engines pose numerous challenges for librarians and the study also attempts to bring together possible remedial measures. This study is useful for library professionals to understand the importance of search engines in providing VRS. The study also provides an intellectual comparison among different search engines, their capabilities, limitations, challenges and opportunities to provide VRS effectively in libraries. Full article

As the requirement for accountability and demonstration of the impact of public and privately funded research increases, the practice of attributing impact to research published in high impact journals is on the rise. To investigate the relevance of existing bibliometrics laws to current health research practices, 57 research areas in Web of Science (WoS) representing the major and minor disciplines were studied. In the majority of cases, Garfield’s Law of Concentration is followed with 20% of journals in each area contributing 80% of the total citations. The major multidisciplinary journals formed an anomalous grouping with low overall citation rates, although those documents cited were at a level well above the norm. In all research areas studied, team science is the prevailing norm, single author publications were rarely present in the data sets. For researchers looking to maximize the uptake and recognition of their work, publication in the top journals in the appropriate research area would be the most effective strategy, which does not in many cases include the major multidisciplinary journals. Full article

There are several indicators that distinguish an academic discipline, including journals, conferences, and graduate programs. One of them is the presence of academic publications in well-regarded citation indices such as Web of Science (WoS). This study explored the bibliometric characteristics of publications on “second language writing” (SLW) covered in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index of WoS. We found that, while the first appeared in 1992 with a steady increase in recent years, there were a total of 266 SLW publications, mostly in the linguistics research area (92%), in the WoS between 1900 and 2013. The publications included articles, book reviews, and bibliographies written by 1.64 authors per publication, suggesting a low level of collaborations among SLW scholars. They cited 31.44 publications and received citations from 5.90 publications on average. An average SLW title had 2.49 different words and a total of 10.85 words, with an abstract of about five sentences and about six keywords and diverse topics including second language writing, writing, academic writing, error correction, and plagiarism. Our findings will be of value to second language writing scholars, graduate students, and practitioners for examining the status of their field. Full article

High-throughput scientific instruments are generating massive amounts of data. Today, one of the main challenges faced by researchers is to make the best use of the world’s growing wealth of data. Data (re)usability is becoming a distinct characteristic of modern scientific practice. By data (re)usability, we mean the ease of using data for legitimate scientific research by one or more communities of research (consumer communities) that is produced by other communities of research (producer communities). Data (re)usability allows the reanalysis of evidence, reproduction and verification of results, minimizing duplication of effort, and building on the work of others. It has four main dimensions: policy, legal, economic and technological. The paper addresses the technological dimension of data reusability. The conceptual foundations of data reuse as well as the barriers that hamper data reuse are presented and discussed. The data publication process is proposed as a bridge between the data author and user and the relevant technologies enabling this process are presented. Full article

This White Paper reports the outcome of a Workshop on “Research Data Service Discoverability” held in the island of Santorini (GR) on 21–22 April 2016 and organized in the context of the EU funded Project “RDA-E3”. The Workshop addressed the main technical problems that hamper an efficient and effective discovery of Research Data Services (RDSs) based on appropriate semantic descriptions of their functional and non-functional aspects. In the context of this White Paper, by RDSs are meant those data services that manipulate/transform research datasets for the purpose of gaining insight into complicated issues. In this White Paper, the main concepts involved in the discovery process of RDSs are defined; the RDS discovery process is illustrated; the main technologies that enable the discovery of RDSs are described; and a number of recommendations are formulated for indicating future research directions and making an automatic RDS discovery feasible. Full article

The seemingly overnight emergence of a form of promotion known as ‘book trailers’ shortly after the turn of the millennium suggests a shift in the marketing and promotional strategies employed within the publishing industry. This article follows the historical development of the audio-visual form known as the ‘book trailer’ across its history with a view to understanding the form itself. This article uses third party mediation to identify ‘book trailers’ within the public domain, grounding this work within a broader media and literary history. As such, this article charts the use of the term ‘book trailer’ and its competing nomenclature through newspaper archives and contextualises this with antecedent practices, and integrating this with the current literature on the film trailer as part of a wider understanding of the promotional trailer as a cultural entity. Full article

This study analyzes research articles about open access (OA) indexed by the Scopus database, published from 2001 to 2015, in order to: (a) propose a categorization scheme about OA; (b) categorize the scientific production about OA; and (c) identify research trends on OA through disciplines at international level over time. The authors used descriptive statistical methods and deductive content analysis using an unconstrained matrix in 347 selected research articles. The most explored themes were found to be “overview, current state, and growth of OA” counting for 98 articles (28.2%), and “awareness, perceptions, and attitudes toward OA” for 75 articles (21.6%). As a conclusion, this study reveals a continuous and growing research interest by the OA community in studies focused on case studies regarding the development or evolution of OA in relation to certain groups, institutions, regions, periods, and how different actors perceive and address the OA movement. Full article

As scholarly communications became digital, Open Access and, more broadly, open research, emerged among the most exciting possibilities of the academic Web. However, these possibilities have been constrained by phenomena carried over from the print age. Information resources dwell in discrete silos. It is difficult to connect authors and others unambiguously to specific outputs, despite advances in algorithmic matching. Connecting funding information, datasets, and other essential research information to individuals and their work is still done manually at great expense in time and effort. Given that one of the greatest benefits of the modern web is the rich array of links between digital objects and related resources that it enables, this is a significant failure. The ability to connect, discover, and access resources is the underpinning premise of open research, so tools to enable this, themselves open, are vital. The increasing adoption of resolvable, persistent identifiers for people, digital objects, and research information offers a means of providing these missing connections. This article describes some of the ways that identifiers can help to unlock the potential of open research, focusing on the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID), a person identifier that also serves to link other identifiers. Full article

In Brazil, as in much of the academic world, there is an increasing acknowledgement among scholars that their chances of having their research noticed by a geographically diverse scientific community increase when that research is communicated in English. At the same time, much like the majority of the world, the first language of Brazil is not English, which raises one question that heretofore has not been addressed in the context of that country: How do Brazilian scholars write their research articles in English? That question drove the initial phase of the exploratory study described in the present paper, and it is one that also led the authors to discover that one key agent in the publishing process in Brazilian academia is the dissertation/thesis supervisor. Questionnaire and interview data collected from students and supervisors at a Brazilian university suggest that student and lecturer alike see the need and value of specialized writing guidance, yet neither party seems to ascribe the role of “literacy broker” (a person who contributes to the development of a text intended for publication) to the thesis supervisor in any specific way. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are discussed. Full article

The value of including a research component in medical students’ training programs has been widely recognized. Nevertheless, examples of how this may be done are rarely found in the literature. The case study reported in this short paper aimed to address this gap in the literature by investigating how a group of postgraduate students attached to the Orthopedics Department of a major hospital in China engaged in research for publication. Fourteen students were interviewed, and their “mission lists” were analyzed to reveal the students’ research profiles, the sources of their research ideas, and their data collection activities. The study showed that the students pursued more clinical than basic research topics, their research topics often fell under their immediate supervisors’ larger projects, and the students were actively engaged in the gathering of research data on the wards and at the outpatient clinic. The reported study does not claim generalizability of its findings. More of such reports from various settings in different parts of the world are needed to enhance constructive exchanges and mutual learning. Full article

For doctoral students, publishing in peer-reviewed journals is a task many face with anxiety and trepidation. The world of publishing, from choosing a journal, negotiating with editors and navigating reviewers’ responses is a bewildering place. Looking in from the outside, it seems that successful and productive academic writers have knowledge that is inaccessible to novice scholars. While there is a growing literature on writing for scholarly publication, many of these publications promote writing and publishing as a straightforward activity that anyone can achieve if they follow the rules. We argue that the specific and situated contexts in which academic writers negotiate publishing practices is more complicated and messy. In this paper, we attempt to make explicit our publishing processes to highlight the complex nature of publishing. We use autoethnographic narratives to provide discussion points and insights into the challenges of publishing peer reviewed articles. One narrative is by a doctoral student at the beginning of her publishing career, who expresses her desires, concerns and anxieties about writing for publication. The other narrative focuses on the publishing practices of a more experienced academic writer. Both are international scholars working in the Canadian context. The purpose of this paper is to explore academic publishing through the juxtaposition of these two narratives to make explicit some of the more implicit processes. Four themes emerge from these narratives. To publish successfully, academic writers need: (1) to be discourse analysts; (2) to have a critical competence; (3) to have writing fluency; and (4) to be emotionally intelligent. Full article

In this article we examine what motivations influence academic authors in selecting a journal in which to publish. A survey was sent to approximately 15,000 faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers at four large North American research universities with a response rate of 14.4% (n = 2021). Respondents were asked to rate how eight different journal attributes and five different audiences influence their choice of publication output. Within the sample, the most highly rated attributes are quality and reputation of journal and fit with the scope of the journal; open access is the least important attribute. Researchers at other research-intensive institutions are considered the most important audience, while the general public is the least important. There are significant differences across subject disciplines and position types. Our findings have implications for understanding the adoption of open access publishing models. Full article

An abstract summarizes the accompanying article in order to promote it. While many move-analysis studies of abstracts in applied linguistics (AL) have used similar coding frameworks and demonstrated similar rhetorical organizations, their findings have not yet been aggregated to show the overall picture. The present study aimed to both examine move structures in AL abstracts and compare the results with previous studies both synchronically and diachronically. Fifty abstracts were collected from articles published in the journal English for Specific Purposes (ESP) between 2011 and 2013. Sentences were coded using a five-move scheme adapted from previous studies. Combining the results from previous research and the present study showed that most AL abstracts give information on the purpose, methodology, and findings of the associated article, while about half of the articles omit introduction of the topic and discussion of the findings. It was also found that authors frequently violate the move sequence expected by current schemes. These findings consistent with previous research suggest that future researchers informed by move analyses should explore the connection between the findings of move analyses and teaching materials for academic writing. Full article

How similar are the publishing patterns of among Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC countries) in comparison with other countries? This is a question that we addressed by using networks as a tool to analyze the structure of similarities and disparities between countries. We analyzed the number of publications from 2006 to 2015 that are reported by SCImago Journal and Country Rank. With this information, we created a network in order to find the closest countries to BRIC ones, and also to find communities of similar countries favoring data analysis. We found that Brazil, China and Russia are not that close to the core cluster of countries that are more diversified. In opposition, India is closer to a community of countries that are more diverse in terms of publishing patterns. Furthermore, we found that, for different network topologies, Brazil acts as a bridge to connect developing countries and that Russia practices patterns that tend to isolate it from most of the countries. Full article

In this paper we report on a study of 1541 articles from three different journals (Journal of Informetrics, Information Processing and Management, and Computers and Electrical Engineering) from the period 2007–2014. We analyzed their dates of submission and of final decision to accept and investigated whether the difference between these two dates (the so-called “time to accept”) is smaller for the articles authored by the corresponding journal’s editorial board members and whether longer times to accept yield higher citation counts. The main results are that we found significantly shorter times to accept editorial board member’s articles only in Journal of Informetrics and not in the other two journals, and that articles in any of these journals that took longer to be accepted did not receive markedly more citations. Full article