Valerie C.L. Spezi

Authors’ Awareness and Attitudes Toward Open Access Repositories

This article investigates the awareness of scholarly authors toward open access repositories and the factors that motivate their use of these repositories. The article reports on the findings obtained from a mixed methods approach which involved a questionnaire returned by over 3000 respondents, supplemented by four focus groups held across Europe in the summer 2009. The research found that although there was a good understanding and appreciation of the ethos of open access in general, there were clear differences between scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds in their understanding of open access repositories and their motivations for depositing articles within them. This research forms the first part of a longitudinal study that will track the changing behaviors and attitudes of authors toward open access repositories.

Open-access mega-journals: A bibliometric profile

In this paper we present the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of eleven open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs are a relatively recent phenomenon, and have been characterised as having four key characteristics: large size; broad disciplinary scope; a Gold-OA business model; and a peer-review policy that seeks to determine only the scientific soundness of the research rather than evaluate the novelty or significance of the work. Our investigation focuses on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs (the number of articles published and changes in output over time); OAMJ author characteristics (nationalities and institutional affiliations); subject areas (the disciplinary scope of OAMJs, and variations in sub-disciplinary output); and citation profiles (the citation distributions of each OAMJ, and the impact of citing journals). We found that while the total output of the eleven mega-journals grew by 14.9% between 2014 and 2015, this growth is largely attributable to the increased output of Scientific Reports and Medicine. We also found substantial variation in the geographical distribution of authors. Several journals have a relatively high proportion of Chinese authors, and we suggest this may be linked to these journals’ high Journal Impact Factors (JIFs). The mega-journals were also found to vary in subject scope, with several journals publishing disproportionately high numbers of articles in certain sub-disciplines. Our citation analsysis offers support for Björk & Catani’s suggestion that OAMJs’s citation distributions can be similar to those of traditional journals, while noting considerable variation in citation rates across the eleven titles. We conclude that while the OAMJ term is useful as a means of grouping journals which share a set of key characteristics, there is no such thing as a “typical” mega-journal, and we suggest several areas for additional research that might help us better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.

Improving perceptions of value to teaching and research staff: The next challenge for academic libraries

This article investigates the value, and perceptions of value, of academic libraries to teaching and research staff by examining working relationships between libraries and academic departments in universities. Eight case studies were undertaken in the US, the UK and Scandinavia. Primary findings were analysed and triangulated with a series of short surveys to ascertain whether they resonated with other librarians’ experiences. The article offers examples of good practice in the area of partnership building for academic libraries to improve their value to, or perceptions of value by, teaching and research staff, as well as raise their profile and better market their services to this category of users. Those examples may be of interest to fellow library practitioners and researchers interested in exploring further library-faculty interaction and collaboration.

Open-access mega-journals: The future of scholarly communication or academic dumping ground? A review

Purpose Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE, are large scale, broad scope journals that operate an open access business model (normally based on article-processing charges), and which employ a novel form of peer review, focussing on scientific “soundness” and eschewing judgement of novelty or importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses relating to OAMJs, and their place within scholarly publishing, and considers attitudes towards mega-journals within the academic community. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents a review of the literature of OAMJs structured around four defining characteristics: scale, disciplinary scope, peer review policy, and economic model. The existing scholarly literature was augmented by searches of more informal outputs, such as blogs and e-mail discussion lists, to capture the debate in its entirety. Findings While the academic literature relating specifically to OAMJs is relatively sparse, discussion in other fora is detailed and animated, with debates ranging from the sustainability and ethics of the mega-journal model, to the impact of soundness-only peer review on article quality and discoverability, and the potential for OAMJs to represent a paradigm-shifting development in scholarly publishing. Originality/value This paper represents the first comprehensive review of the mega-journal phenomenon, drawing not only on the published academic literature, but also grey, professional and informal sources. The paper advances a number of ways in which the role of OAMJs in the scholarly communication environment can be conceptualised.

Is Information-Seeking Behavior of Doctoral Students Changing?: A Review of the Literature (2010–2015)

ABSTRACT The advent of the Internet and networked communications in the last 15 years has arguably considerably changed the information behaviors of doctoral students, including the discovery process. Information seeking includes initiating a search, constructing search strategies, and locating and evaluating the identified sources. Current research on information-seeking behaviors is focusing on understanding how the Internet, social media, and other technological and communication-based changes, including mobile technologies, have changed the way students seek information in order to understand the information behaviors of the students of tomorrow. This article offers a review of the literature on information-seeking behaviors, with a particular focus on recent years (2010–2015). It aims to determine whether notable changes in the information-seeking behavior of doctoral students have emerged in recent years. The study shows that the information-seeking behaviors of doctoral students follow a steady trend, with some subtle changes, particularly in the (patchy) use of social media and networking sites. There appears to be more similarities than differences across disciplines in the information-seeking behaviors of doctoral students. Considerations to their information literacy skills are given to understand better the role supervisors and library staff can play to support the doctoral students population in the early stages of the research process.

Open access megajournals: The publisher perspective (Part 2: Operational realities)

This paper is the second of two Learned Publishing articles in which we report the results of a series of interviews, with senior publishers and editors exploring open access megajournals (OAMJs). Megajournals (of which PLoS One is the best known example) represent a relatively new approach to scholarly communication and can be characterized as large, broad‐scope, open access journals, which take an innovative approach to peer review, basing acceptance decisions solely on the technical or scientific soundness of the article. Based on interviews with 31 publishers and editors, this paper reports the perceived cultural, operational, and technical challenges associated with launching, growing, and maintaining a megajournal. We find that overcoming these challenges while delivering the societal benefits associated with OAMJs is seen to require significant investment in people and systems, as well as an ongoing commitment to the model.

Towards an understanding of the relationship between disciplinary research cultures and open access repository behaviors

This article explores the cultural characteristics of three open access (OA)‐friendly disciplines (physics, economics, and clinical medicine) and the ways in which those characteristics influence perceptions, motivations, and behaviors toward green OA. The empirical data are taken from two online surveys of European authors. Taking a domain analytic approach, the analysis draws on Becher and Trowlers (2001) and Whitleys (2000) theories to gain a deeper understanding of why OA repositories (OAR) play a particularly important role in the chosen disciplines. The surveys provided a unique opportunity to compare perceptions, motivations, and behaviors of researchers at the discipline level with the parent metadiscipline. It should be noted that participants were not drawn from a stratified sample of all the different subdisciplines that constitute each discipline, and therefore the generalizability of the findings to the discipline may be limited. The differential role of informal and formal communication in each of the three disciplines has shaped green OA practices. For physicists and economists, preprints are an essential feature of their respective OAR landscapes, whereas for clinical medics final published articles have a central role. In comparing the disciplines with their parent metadisciplines there were some notable similarities/differences, which have methodological implications for studying research cultures.

The Impact of RDS on Usage of Electronic Content in UK Academic Libraries: Selected Results from a UKSG-Funded Project

Resource discovery services (RDS), also called web-scale discovery services (WDS), have attracted considerable attention in recent years. This article aims to provide an environmental scan of the adoption of RDS in UK higher education libraries and provide an analysis of RDS resource usage data to gauge whether RDS have an impact on the overall usage of ejournals and ebooks. Findings show that there appears to be a positive impact in most cases, although the extent of this impact varies across libraries and publishers. There is undeniably a degree of complexity in the usage analysis owing to the multidimensional nature of the environment.

Open access megajournals: The publisher perspective (Part 1: Motivations)

This paper is the first of two Learned Publishing articles in which we report the results of a series of interviews with senior publishers and editors exploring open access megajournals (OAMJs). Megajournals (of which PLoS One is the best known example) represent a relatively new approach to scholarly communication and can be characterized as large, broad‐scope, open access journals that take an innovative approach to peer review, basing acceptance decisions solely on the technical or scientific soundness of the article. This model is often said to support the broader goals of the open science movement. Based on in‐depth interviews with 31 publishers and editors representing 16 different organizations (10 of which publish a megajournal), this paper reports how the term ‘megajournal’ is understood and publishers’ rationale and motivations for launching (or not launching) an OAMJ. We find that while there is general agreement on the common characteristics of megajournals, there is not yet a consensus on their relative importance. We also find seven motivating factors that were said to drive the launch of an OAMJ and link each of these factors to potential societal and business benefits. These results suggest that the often polarized debate surrounding OAMJs is a consequence of the extent to which observers perceive publishers to be motivated by these societal or business benefits.

Working together: library value at the University of Nottingham

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to bring together the findings of two studies investigating the value of academic libraries to teaching and research staff in higher education institutions. The Working Together (WT) project was an international study, funded by SAGE Publishing, investigating the value of academic libraries for teaching and research staff in the USA, UK and Scandinavia. The Raising Academic Impact (RAI) project was an initiative of the University of Nottingham (UoN) aimed at increasing the impact of academic librarians in departments across the university by assessing perception and awareness of current library services and future needs of academic staff. Design/methodology/approach – The WT project was conducted during Spring 2012, comprising a series of eight case studies and an online survey exploring the case study experiences and findings within their wider regional and academic context. One was conducted at the UoN, and included the RAI project. The RAI project was originally a...