NEWS AND ANALYSIS News in Brief
Students lack basic information skills, says survey
Many college students falsely perceive their level of information literacy, according to a new survey developed by librarians and sponsored by Credo. The survey data suggests that, while students display an understanding of information skills, they are not successful at applying these skills. In one example from the survey findings, a majority of the 1,500+ respondents grasped the concept of information literacy as it relates to finding, evaluating and using information, but 46 per cent of students admitted to looking for a copyright symbol to determine accuracy of a source – and over half admitted they were unfamiliar with the purpose and basic characteristics of scholarly journals.
White House issues OA directive President Obama has issued what has been described as a landmark directive in the USA to ensure that the results of taxpayer-funded research – both articles and data – are made available to the general public to freely access and fully use.
INFORMATION ACCESS IS CRUCIAL FOR CREATING AND SUPPORTING ENGINEERS
Access to engineering information is crucial for creating the engineers of tomorrow and supporting the ones of today, write Stephanie Fernandes and Tim Hamer
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The Directive calls on all federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to provide free and timely online access to the results of that research. Articles reporting on the results of publicly funded scientific research must be made available after a 12-month embargo period. In addition, the bipartisan Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), is making is way through the US House of Representatives and Senate.
First Vatican Library documents go online The Vatican Library has made its first digitised manuscripts available online. According to Cesare Pasini, prefect of the Vatican Library, writing in the library’s January newsletter, ‘they are the first 256 of a great multitude, and they are available directly from the Digitised Materials link on our homepage.’
8 Research Information APR/MAY 2013
he chief executive of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), Nigel Fine, recently gave evidence to the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology
Committee’s inquiry into engineering skills. He noted that the challenge the industry faces is multi-faceted. First there is the challenge of attracting young people to the industry; second is the issue of finding engineering graduates jobs once they are qualified; and third is the problem of ensuring there is the opportunity for career progression. Engineers must feel there is support over their entire career, not just at the start of it.
This third issue is one of the main areas we are concentrating on addressing. The IET and other membership bodies are constantly striving to provide essential intelligence to engineers around the world. It is this knowledge that helps drive the industry forward, allowing them to innovate and develop technologies.
Part of this is ensuring that as many people
as possible are able to access such intelligence. Open
access is one way of providing unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. This more open approach to academic content will help fuel innovation and ensure that those training and making their way in an engineering career are able to access and use the most forward-thinking, industry-changing intelligence. Academics can reach
a bigger audience for their research and it can have a more immediate impact, while readers can gain quick access to knowledge and expertise they previously may not have been able to afford. Benefits to engineers are considerable, expanding their knowledge and boosting their careers. To gauge the appetite for open access, we conducted some market research, culminating in a global survey of 35,000 engineering researchers from academia and industry. We believe open access has great potential as a way of expanding the reach of the world’s leading engineering intelligence. The aim here was to test whether researchers agreed.
TRACKING RESEARCH ACROSS THE FIELDS
Balviar Notay and Neil Jacobs unveil a way to help repositories improve metadata and how they track research outputs
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veryone seems to be on the scent of good research, researchers looking for collaborators, research managers developing industrial partnerships, and funders wanting to demonstrate the value of the investments made. The key to finding research is good metadata: information about the books, articles and so on that researchers produce. Developed
by UKOLN at the UK’s University of Bath, with input from Chygrove and funding from Jisc, a new Metadata Application Profile and Guidance for repositories called RIOXX will be launching in April 2013 and will make this process easier and more reliable. Various metadata schemes and models have emerged, but clarity on the best metadata strategy to adopt, or how to achieve
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