Jonathan Bull

Will Open Access Get Me Cited? An Analysis of the Efficacy of Open Access Publishing in Political Science

The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot afford. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the efficacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the efficacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We find that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing.

Successful Scholarly Communication at a Small University: Integration of Education, Services, and an Institutional Repository at Valparaiso University

Beginning in 2011, the Christopher Center Library Services (CCLS) unit at Valparaiso University (VU) started implementing new scholarly communication services utilizing two different components: (1) the education and training of library staff in scholarly communication trends and issues; and (2) the implementation of ValpoScholar, VUs institutional repository (IR) and its associated services. These components allowed for new skills to be developed, new services to be delivered, and the librarys digital collections to grow with minimal impact to existing services. This model may provide a framework for other small institutions interested in adding scholarly communication services to their existing library services.

Harvesting the Academic Landscape: Streamlining the Ingestion of Professional Scholarship Metadata into the Institutional Repository

INTRODUCTION Although librarians initially hoped institutional repositories (IRs) would grow through researcher self-archiving, practice shows that growth is much more likely through library-directed deposit. Libraries must then find efficient ways to ingest material into their IR to ensure growth and relevance. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Valparaiso University developed and implemented a workflow that was semiautomated to help cut down on the time needed to ingest articles into its IR, ValpoScholar. The workflow, which continues to be refined, makes use of practices and ideas used by other repositories to more efficiently collect metadata for items and upload them to the repository. NEXT STEPS The article discusses the pros and cons of this workflow and areas of ingesting that still need to be addressed, including adding full-text items, checking copyright policies, managing student staffing, and dealing with hurdles created by the repository’s software.