RA21 aims to promote a modern, standards-based access management system that preserves patron privacy & control. It is important to dispel some myths about RA21 so we can move on from the outdated world of IP-authentication.
The celebration of the twentieth anniversary of SciELO in 2018 will culminate in the week of September 24-28 with meetings of the SciELO Network and the SciELO 20 Years International Conference. This Conference will discuss 12 main themes organized into four programmatic lines that will address the trends, innovations, methodologies and technologies that are shaping the future of research communication and the key functions of journals.
Learn more at www.scielo20.org/en/.
This report will zoom in on the potential of blockchain to transform scholarly communication and research in general. It will highlight how blockchain can touch many critical aspects of scholarly communication. Moreover, blockchain could change the role of publishers in the future. The report shows that this technology has the potential to solve some of the most prominent issues such as those around costs, openness, and universal accessibility to scientific information.
Digital Science debuted Dimensions, an innovating research information database that links publications, grants, policy, data and metrics with a highly curated and strongly normalized data frame. The free core version of the platform delivers access to over 9 million open access articles, as well as 860 million abstracts and citations, accompanied with top line altmetrics information. Both paid versions Dimensions Plus and Dimensions Analytics provide full access to the platform’s underlying content and additional features. Built using real-world use cases, it combines advanced concept extraction, natural language processing, categorization and complex machine learning to create a flexible and robust tool that meets the most demanding modern research needs. This blog post gets into deeper technological details.
Reggie Raju, Deputy Director of Research and Learning Services at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, is interrogating the concept of predatory publishing. He alerts on the significant damage caused by the unilateral definition and the application of extremely generalized criteria. Time has come to develop inclusive open access practises. It is proposed that the Library Publishing Coalition develops a white paper that can help wipe out the vestiges of the Beall’s list and develop an inclusive set of criteria for acceptable research publications.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) are scholarly organisations that have collaborated to identify principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications. The third version of the Principles was published in January 2018 as a work in progress.
Looking at the two most complete researcher workflow portfolios, those owned by Digital Science and Elsevier, one of the glaring differences has been Digital Science’s lack of a citation database to compete with Elsevier’s Scopus. Digital Science announced Dimensions, a new product that includes a citation database, a research analytics suite, and streamlined article discovery and access. Roger C. Schonfeld, Director of Ithaka S+R’s Library and Scholarly Communication program, highlights the major features and differences compared to digital Science’s main competitors. He concludes that innovation and competition in this market is ultimately good for scientists themselves, their universities, and science itself.
Library as Publisher: New Models of Scholarly Communication for a New Era, by Sarah Kalikman Lippincott, is available as an open access e-book through the Charleston Briefings series. This book will help the reader understand the context of library publishing. It also explores when a publishing program is a good fit for a library and provides guidance for defining, launching or growing a publishing initiative.
Since 2015, the Nordic countries have been collaborating on a common registry of authorized research publication channels. In early December 2017, the Nordic List Steering Group met to define hosting and access rights.
This joined list will be consisting of top level bibliographic data on journals, series and publishers collected from the national registries. Notably, ISSN is used for matching the national registries in joined list. The participating organizations will use the Nordic List to gather and compare data in order to reduce and share the costs of maintaining and validating the bibliographic data and to provide higher quality.
The results of the application of the new editorial quality criteria of the Latindex Catalogue to a selection of Latin American journals specialized in Library and Information Science are presented. The results show a compliance greater than 90% in 25 of the 38 characteristics, evidencing a high degree of standardization in the journals of these disciplines. Nonetheless, some criteria that underwent adjustments in the new methodology faced difficulties to be fulfilled. When analyzing by groups of characteristics, it was found that the set of features inherent to online journals had the lowest percentage of compliance.
[In Spanish]
