ANALYSIS AND NEWS News in Brief
Pilot brings ScienceDirect content to MyScienceWork users Elsevier is collaborating with scientific social network MyScienceWork on a pilot initiative to enable researchers to share and discover over 11 million articles through MyScienceWork. The pilot promises to allow MyScienceWork users to read, annotate and share ScienceDirect articles amongst each other within the MyScienceWork interface. It includes access to all of the content on ScienceDirect.
Danish library collections discoverable in WorldCat Dansk Bibliotekscenter (DBC) is partnering with OCLC to synchronise DANBIB, the Danish national union catalogue, with WorldCat. This will make real-time updates that promise to result in faster visibility of the collections around the world through leading websites and search engines. The DANBIB catalogue includes all books, periodicals and newspapers published in Denmark since 1970 as well as many published earlier, significant newspaper and journal articles published since 1945, and reviews published since 1990.
Deal brings access to 33,000 video resources to UK educators Alexander Street Press has forged an agreement with Jisc to provide access to video resources for colleges and universities in the UK using its evidence-based acquisition (EBA) model. The EBA agreement gives colleges and universities in the UK the opportunity to have unlimited access to Alexander Street Press’ complete suite of academic video titles – more than 33,000 titles – for up to one year at a time.
Ireland launches project to bring together its digital collections A new project aims to bring the digital collections of Ireland’s national cultural institutions to a global audience. Inspiring Ireland will provide free access at one address to the treasures held by Ireland’s cultural institutions, including the country’s national museums, libraries, galleries, archives and theatre. For launch, Inspiring Ireland features a core exhibition – A Sense of Place – accompanied by two further exhibitions: A Sense of Freedom, and A Sense of Identity. These three exhibitions are said to be populated with more than 100 fully- searchable objects.
6 Research Information JUNE/JULY 2014
NEW RESOURCE AIMS TO PROVIDE QUALITY INSIGHT INTO OA RESOURCES
The team behind the ISSN identifiers is developing a new resource to help people make more informed choices about which open- access resources to publish with. Siân Harris reports
E
ver since the concept of open-access journals began gathering steam, the question of journal quality has been an issue for sceptics and advocates alike. It has become a normal part of our daily lives to delete emails inviting submissions to a new open-access journal with obscure origins and questionable relevance to the email recipient.
US librarian Jeffrey Beall does a thorough job of investigating and questioning such so- called predatory open-access journals and their publishers in his Scholarly Open Access blog. But what if you are not just looking for which journals to avoid but actively seeking insight into which open-access titles to publish in or read?
This is a question that the international ISSN network has increasingly found itself posed with. The network is made up of one international centre, created by UNESCO and the French government, and 88 national centres. Its role is to allocate unique ISO
‘What if you are actively seeking insight into which open-access titles to publish in, or read?’
identifiers to serials to help people ensure that they are talking about the same publication. However, beyond rejecting some applications for ISSNs on very obvious factual grounds, it is not within the agency’s remit to assess journal quality.
As François-Xavier Pelegrin, head of the Bibliographic
Data Section at the ISSN
International Centre, told a meeting at the UKSG conference, ‘like the other ISO identifiers, the purpose of the ISSN is to identify resources in an unambiguous way, not to evaluate their quality or their validity. We get
questions from students saying “A journal has an ISSN so can one assume it’s high quality?” but that’s not our role.’ And it’s not just ISSN that people are confused about; people often wrongly see inclusion in national library catalogues or abstracting and indexing services as an indicator of quality. The confusion is increased by the emergence of questionable scholarly metrics, which is another issue that Jeffery Beall is tracking in his blog.
On the other hand, as the University of
Tennessee’s Carol Tenopir’s presentation to the UKSG conference on trust in scholarly communication
revealed, some people
mistakenly assume that OA means that something has not been peer reviewed. Getting a clear picture of open-access resources and their quality is important as many national and international policies and initiatives increasingly favour open access. In addition, many tools are being developed that help journals and repositories to be produced more easily. Today there are more than 3,600 institutional repositories registered in ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) and 9,700 listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), although this number is
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