Tariq Ahmad Shah

Culture of open access in the University of Kashmir: a researcher's viewpoint

Purpose – A survey of University of Kashmir scholars was undertaken in 2008 to ascertain their experience, attitudes and perceptions about the open access (OA) movement. The purpose of this paper is to report the surveys findings.Design/methodology/approach – The study was based on data collected from scholars belonging to the Science and Social Science faculties at the University of Kashmir. A pre‐defined, closed‐ended, 14‐item questionnaire was distributed among 84 research scholars. The selection of scholars was based on stratified disproportionate sampling in which the sample size for the departments of both faculties was confined to four scholars, as only four research scholars were enrolled in the Department of Psychology.Findings – The majority of the scholars consulted both open access as well as library‐subscribed resources. Of OA resource users, four‐fifths consulted journals and two‐fifths consulted books. Colleagues (57.14 per cent) were the main referral sources of OA awareness with the leas...

Web 2.0 interactivity in open access repositories

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of open access (OA) repositories that have embraced Web 2.0 technologies. The main focus of the paper is to explore the occurrence of Web 2.0 tools used in the open repositories. Design/methodology/approach – Repositories having English as one of the interface/content languages and indexed in Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) were selected and analyzed under different parameters. Findings – A total of 1,499 open access repositories having English as one of the interface/content languages (75.82 percent of total OA repositories) are developed from 81 nations and only 61 countries have most of their repositories Web 2.0 enabled. About 57 percent (804) repositories make use of Web 2.0 tool/s, 43 percent (608) have yet to avail benefits of Web 2.0 tools while 5.8 percent remain inaccessible (87) during the study period. Though the USA leads in terms of OA repositories, the percentage of Web 2.0 enabled repositories is higher for the U...

Tweets speak louder than leaders and masses: An analysis of tweets about the Jammu and Kashmir elections 2014

Purpose Twitter as a social tool allows people to express their views, emotions or communicate information within brevity of 140 character limit. It has provided an opportunity to researchers to tab users’ expressions on social or political issues, be it natural calamity, elections and alike. The purpose of this paper is to assess how people explored Twitter to express their views regarding state assembly elections of Jammu and Kashmir (India). Design/methodology/approach The authors performed content analysis of 4,537 tweets that were posted by 1,420 different Twitter users over a period of 78 days (October 30, 2014 through January 15, 2015). Findings Users were found to be active on the days of polling while post-polling period witnessed a huge influx in particular on the day of voting and declaration of results. Nearly 94 percent users have posted around 50 percent of tweets and there were only 81 handles which posted remaining 50 percent tweets. In additions to people, news agencies, anonymous groups and social/political groups have expressed their views on this event. Nearly one-fourth tweets were retweeted and one-fourth tweets were marked favorite. Users have mostly providing news updates or personnel commentaries about the election process. Originality/value The study is first of its kind using Twitter to represent the sentiments of people during floods.

COUNTER Codes and Practices of Vendors: What They Say and What They Do Not Say

The present study was undertaken to probe the effectiveness of Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) reports with regard to usage of journals and to learn more about the practices adopted by different content providers in generating reports. Under Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice, we closely examined reports from eighteen content providers having accounts with the University of Kashmir library. The University of Kashmir has subscription access to content from nineteen different providers through the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium of India, eighteen of which are COUNTER-compliant. We were thus able to make observations on the practices of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, Annual Reviews, Cambridge University Press, Emerald, the Institute of Physics, JSTOR, Nature, Oxford University Press, Portland Press, Project Euclid, Project Muse, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Science Direct, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. We discuss a number of patterns among the provider set that yield ambiguous or incomplete indications of journal usage. We offer to the library community and standard-making bodies a set of recommendations to seek better practices: (1) Providers should archive and make available a minimum of three years of historical usage data in addition to the current/most recent year; (2) Counts for titles that have undergone a title change should appear under the previous name for the applicable year rather than be subsumed in the count for the current form of title; (3) Usage reports for retrospective years should be limited to the title set that was available in the applicable year; (4) Usage reports should be limited to titles on subscription with the client institution; (5) The PR1 (Platform Report 1) should be required to enable librarians to acquire useful platform-specific information, such as popularity and usability of the platform; (6) Required output formats should include both the Tab Separated Values (TSV) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) formats (and we acknowledge that these formats are now required under COUNTER Release 4); and (7) Content providers should exercise great care in communications regarding platform changes to ensure that librarians can discern usage from each platform and combine usage numbers from each when not duplicated.

Authors self-citation behaviour in the field of Library and Information Science

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the author self-citation behavior in the field of Library and Information Science. Various factors governing the author self-citation behavior have also been studied. Design/methodology/approach – The 2012 edition of Social Science Citation Index was consulted for the selection of LIS journals. Under the subject heading “Information Science and Library Science” there were 84 journals and out of these 12 journals were selected for the study based on systematic sampling. The study was confined to original research and review articles that were published in select journals in the year 2009. The main reason to choose 2009 was to get at least five years (2009-2013) citation data from Web of Science Core Collection (excluding Book Citation Index) and SciELO Citation Index. A citation was treated as self-citation whenever one of the authors of citing and cited paper was common, i.e., the set of co-authors of the citing paper and that of the cited one are not disj...

Emerging Web 2.0 applications in open access scholarly journals in the field of agriculture and food sciences

Purpose – The study aims to focus on the application of Web 2.0 tools in Agriculture and Food Sciences open access journals. The changing trends in scholarly publishing processes have revolutionised the academic world. The shifting of academic journals to open access mode has been on the rise because of the numerous benefits associated with it. The high level of profitability reaped from open access titles has forced them to experiment with new and innovative technologies, including Web 2.0. The new shift in the form of Web 2.0 has sifted in to the open access journal world. Open access journals in the field of Agriculture and Food Sciences are growing and so are the features and functionalities within them. Because of these new innovative tools there is an urgent need to focus on their adoption. Design/methodology/approach – Directory of Open Access Journals, being one of the growing open access journal directories, was selected for the purpose of data gathering. The journals selected for the study inclu...

Twitter sentiments related to natural calamities: Analysing tweets related to the Jammu and Kashmir floods of 2014

Purpose The study aims to showcase public sentiments via social media, Twitter, during 2014 floods of Jammu and Kashmir, India. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on content analysis of tweets related to Kashmir floods. Search was performed with “#kashmirfloods” and was confined to tweets posted from 4 September 2014 through 3 November 2014. A naturalistic approach was applied to examine the content and classify tweets into 5 major and 25 sub categories. Data as such collected were tabulated in SPSS 21 for analysis. Findings During the study period, individuals, news channels, and organisations posted a total of 36,697 tweets related to Kashmir floods. It all started with an outburst of tweets which goes on declining (exponentially) with every passing day. People express themselves in a number of ways with informational tweets used more during the time of disaster. Individuals expressing their sentiments outscore other types of sentiments with text-based tweets ranking high. About 44 per cent of tweets were retweeted, and nearly 31 per cent tweets were marked favourite. Comparatively, more number of informational and help tweets were retweeted or marked favourite. Contextual richness of tweet (i.e. number of embedded expressions) enhances its visibility by means of getting liked and/or retweeted. A statistically significant positive association is observed between the number of expressions in a tweet and the number of times it is liked (favourite) or retweeted. Research limitations/implications Twitter plays a pivotal role during natural calamities like Kashmir floods to connect people in the hour of need and help. It provides a platform where the plight of people is heard across the globe and which encourages people to unite and overcome hurdles together. Originality/value This study examines the sentiments of people expressed during Jammu and Kashmir (India) Floods 2014 on social media – Twitter.

Philosophy of escapism in the open access world: studying author pay model

– The purpose of this paper is to consider the economic perspective in open access publishing. The status of the article processing charges in open access journals is explored and highlighted., – The study is based on the analysis of journals indexed by Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the fee structure levied by them as article processing charges (APCs)., – Open access journal publishers have to evolve a mechanism that will share the burden of the authors interested in publishing in OA journals that levy article processing charges., – The study can act as an eye‐opener for the publishers and associations affiliated with authors to support them and their works in making them publishable in open access journals which charge fees for article publishing. Also, the study can be extended on the basis of economic models that open access journals share in different disciplines and additional work can be carried out to highlight the perception of the authors who are benefitted from article processing charges., – An economic divide between the authors who belong to the developed nations and the authors who reside from third world nations can be bridged., – The study is first of its kind, as it highlights the economic burden that the authors share in a fee‐based open access publishing world.

Effects of gender in library and information science research: A case study of The Electronic Library

This study aims to showcase the effect of gender in the field of library and information science.,Research and review articles published from 2005 through 2014 in The Electronic Library, a prominent journal in the field of Library and Information Science, were examined from the perspective of authors’ gender. Influence of gender was assessed with respect to at individual and collaborative levels, quality in terms of citedness and citation count, and receipt of research grants.,There has been an increase in the proportion of male authors over the years with a resulting decline in female authors. Male authors are more productive as teachers, while females contribute more as working professionals or while they peruse their academic/research programmes. Though the productivity in collaborative works has increased in all gender combinations, it is more prominent when authors of opposite gender team up. No significant difference is observed in the number of national or international works produced in different collaborative authorship patterns. There is no difference in the number of male and female authors in male–female collaborative works. Works sponsored by grants are produced more frequently in groups comprising male–female or male–male members. No significant difference is observed in the number of cited or uncited works produced in different authorship patterns. The number of citations to works is independent of the nature of gender-wise authorship patterns.,The study examines the status of women in research, specifically in the field of library and information science. The findings of the study are based on the contribution of the authors involved with the journal, “The Electronic Library”. Readers are encouraged to expand the study by including authors that contribute to other library and information science journals.,The study is first of its kind to highlight the involvement and observe the influence of female authors in the field of library and information science research.

Research endeavour of SAARC nations: A reflection from InCites

This study is an attempt to comparatively assess the research productivity, performance and impact of SAARC nations with the aid of InCites, an innovative research analytical tool developed by Thomson Reuter. For the period of 32 years (1981 through 2013), India has outnumbered other SAARC nations in terms of research productivity and count of citations received. However, Nepal has the highest no. of average citations per document and has best score of aggregate performance. Sri Lank leads in the proportion of cited documents while Maldives scores high at global relative impact.