ANALYSIS AND NEWS News in Brief


Five UK universities sign up to new data archiving deal Five UK universities, Queens University Belfast, Gonville & Caius, UCL, and the universities of Leeds and York, have purchased the Arkivum data archiving service via the Janet Data Archive Framework Agreement. The five universities are the first to purchase


the Arkivum service via a new framework agreement that enables fast and cost-effective archiving for research and education. Under the terms, customers of Jisc’s network, Janet, benefit from pre-negotiated, preferential pricing and a fully managed, easy-to-use service, through a single supplier framework. It also allows all qualifying organisations to procure the archive service quickly without the administrative overhead and costs of an EU-compliant tender.


Atypon integrates Figshare into platform


Atypon and Figshare are working together to make authors’ supplemental data more discoverable on publishers’ Literatum-powered websites. Publishers on Literatum 14.1, the newest generation of Atypon’s platform for professional and scholarly publishers, can now embed tables, datasets, videos, and other supplemental material from Figshare on article pages in Literatum via the Figshare widget. The first Atypon customer to get this integration


is Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis’s Figshare portal currently hosts over 1,400 supplemental files. Every file is citable with a DataCite DOI allocated at the point of publication and stored under a Creative Commons Licence.


Altmetric starts tracking mentions on Sina Weibo Altmetric has begun tracking mentions of academic articles on the Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo. The company says that this data will shortly be fully integrated into existing Altmetric tools.


The mentions collated will be visible to users


via the Altmetric Explorer, a web-based application that allows users to browse the online mentions of any academic article, and, where licensed, via the article metrics data on publisher platforms. Sina Weibo, launched in 2009, has become one of the largest social media sites in China, and is often likened to Twitter. Altmetric says that integrating this data will enable is users to see a much more global view of the attention an article has received.


8 Research Information JUNE/JULY 2014


currently decreasing because of a more selective inclusion policy.


UNESCO also requires better information about open access. It promotes and supports open access to knowledge via various programmes and actions. It wanted to provide a global view of open access and also needed to gather statistics about OA resources worldwide. Meanwhile, there are many resources that provide different pieces of information that provide useful insight to guide these enquiries. The ISSN team, with UNESCO funding, saw an opportunity to help join up the dots. The result, which launched in beta in December 2013 as a subset of the ISSN Register, is ROAD – the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources. ROAD includes OA resources including journals,


conferences proceed-


ings, monographs, and institutional repositories. Content is chosen for inclusion in the directory based on the criteria that there is open access to the whole content of the resource (free


‘ROAD is currently in beta phase and the team has plenty of improvements planned before a full release at the end of 2014’


registration is accepted); no moving wall; the resource comprises mainly research papers; and the audience is mostly researchers and scholars. Currently hybrid journals are not part of the project. Pelegrin said that this decision was made to limit the scope during the pilot phase of the project. However, he said that this is something that might be considered in the future if it is valuable to users. Similarly, he said that identifying predatory journals is not part of scope of the project, although sometimes ISSNs are not assigned for such titles. ‘Beall’s list is very good at this role but based on negative criteria. ROAD is based on positive criteria,’ he explained. The way that ROAD works is that ISSN records that describe OA resources are marked with a devoted code so that they can be published in ROAD. These codes are added by the ISSN National Centres when creating the records, or retrospectively by the ISSN International Centre. The records are enriched with data such as journal indicators, indexing- abstracting services and registries.


As of April 2014, the external sources used to enhance records in ROAD are: the DOAJ;


Econlit; Catalogo (Latindex); Psych’INFO; Linguistic Abstracts; Scopus; SJR; SNIP; and The Keepers. The team also has an agreement in principle with the University of Washington’s Eigen factor. Currently, according to Pelegrin, ROAD can be searched by country, subject, indexing- abstracting service, registries, journal indicators. It also enables presentation of the external sources (method/selection criteria) and records are downloadable and reusable. ‘You can do faceted search and visualise results on a map to see how many resources in a country are covered in different databases,’ he said. The target audience of the free service, according to Pelegrin, are students and researchers, public bodies in charge of the funding


and evaluation of the research,


journalists, librarians and information scientists, and well-informed amateurs.


They can use ROAD to find out how many OA journals are indexed or ranked in their country or what OA scholarly resources are available in their discipline in, for example, Spanish. Another application might be to find out, say, which institutions have established an academic repository in South Africa or which mathematical OA journals are currently published in Brazil. Authors could also use ROAD to find out where their own papers or conference presentations are available. ROAD is currently in beta phase and the team has plenty of improvements planned before a full release at the end of 2014. These plans include: technical improvements (map, responsive design); retrospective identification of OA resources in the ISSN Register; identification of institutional repositories (semi-automatic


assignment method); and


enrichment of ROAD records (for example, whether an APC was paid, the type of licence, the type and content of the repositories, and the type of peer reviewing).


The team also plans to develop the classification (access by subject) to make it more granular and RDF outputs using the PRESSo model developped by the ISSN IC and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. In addition, ROAD is looking to form additional partnerships and considering a committee for validating the partnerships. Pelegrin said that ROAD will continue to be funded by UNESCO. ‘The idea is to continue growing and provide a valuable resource,’ he added.


FURTHER INFORMATION road.issn.org @researchinfo www.researchinformation.info


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