Category Archives: oa.google.scholar

Role of social networking services for scientists in promoting scientific output on example of Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences | Emerald Insight

Posted on by

Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aims to answer the question of how the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences communicate the most recent scientific findings in the media space, i.e. what types of publications are shared, what activities do they exemplify (sharing information about their own publications, leading discussions, formulating opinions), what is the form of the scientific communication created by them (publication of reference lists’ descriptions, full papers, preprints and post prints) and what is the audience reception (number of downloads, displays, comments).

Design/methodology/approach

The authors present the results of analysis conducted on the presence of the most recent (2017–2019) publications by the Polish representatives of the widely understood social communication and media sciences in three selected social networking services for scientists: ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Academia.edu. The analyses covered 100 selected representatives of the scientific environment (selected in interval sampling), assigned, according to the OECD classification “Field of Science”, in the “Ludzie nauki” (Men of Science) database to the “media and communication” discipline.

Findings

The conducted analyses prove a low usage level of the potential of three analysed services for scientists by the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences. Although 60% of them feature profiles in at least one of the services, the rest are not present there at all. From the total of 113 identified scientists’ profiles, as little as 65 feature publications from 2017 to 2019. Small number of alternative metrics established in them, implies, in turn, that if these metrics were to play an important role in evaluation of the value and influence of scientific publications, then this evaluation for the researched Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences would be unfavourable.

Originality/value

The small presence of the Polish representatives of the communication and media sciences in three analysed services shows that these services may be – for the time being – only support the processes of managing own scientific output. Maybe this quite a pessimistic image of scientists’ activities in the analysed services is conditioned by a simple lack of the need to be present in electronic channels of scientific communication or the lack of trust to the analysed services, which, in turn, should be linked to their shortcomings and flaws. However, unequivocal confirmation of these hypotheses might be brought by explorations covering a larger group of scientists, and complemented with survey studies. Thus, this research may constitute merely a starting point for further explorations, including elaboration of good practices with respect to usage of social media by scientists.

Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press

Posted on by

“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar.  CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.

How does it work?

When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution.  This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location.   Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”

Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press

Posted on by

“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar.  CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.

How does it work?

When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution.  This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location.   Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”

Finding Open Access Articles – Tools & Tips – LITA Blog

Posted on by

“You know you have access and you have access now. However, the discovery process for open access articles isn’t necessarily the same as subscription searching. Especially if you do not have access to specific subscription databases.

This guide is meant to help individuals, of any background, search more easily for open access articles….”

Free articles – accounting for the timing effect

Posted on by

Abstract: “Various studies have attempted to assess the amount of free full text available on the web and recent work have suggested that we are close to the 50% mark for freely available articles (Archambault et al. 2013; Björk et al. 2010; Jamali and Nabavi 2015). Our paper contributes to the literature by taking into account the timing issue by studying when the papers were made free. We sampled citations made by researchers who published in 2015 (based on records in the Singapore Management University Institution repository), checked the number of cited papers that were free at the time of the study and then attempted to “carbon date” the freely available papers to determine when they were first made available. This allows us to estimate the length of time the free cited article was made available before the citing paper was published. We find that in our sample of cited papers in Economics, the median freely available cited paper (oldest variant) was made available 7-8 years before the citing paper was published. Of these papers found free via Google Scholar, the majority 67% (n=47) was made available via University websites (not including Institutional repositories) and 32.8% (n=23) were final published versions.”

Open Access Week 2016: researcher spotlight – science and technology | Library Matters: RGU Library Blog

Posted on by

“OpenAIR was a very early open access repository at a university, putting RGU at the leading edge of what we know now as Green Open Access publishing.”

Scraping Scientific Web Repositories: Challenges and Solutions for Automated Content Extraction

Posted on by

Abstract: “Aside from improving the visibility and accessibility of scientific publications, many scientific Web repositories also assess researchers’ quantitative and qualitative publication performance, e.g., by displaying metrics such as the h-index. These metrics have become important for research institutions and other stakeholders to support impactful decision making processes such as hiring or funding decisions. However, scientific Web repositories typically offer only simple performance metrics and limited analysis options. Moreover, the data and algorithms to compute performance metrics are usually not published. Hence, it is not transparent or verifiable which publications the systems include in the computation and how the systems rank the results. Many researchers are interested in accessing the underlying scientometric raw data to increase the transparency of these systems. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and present strategies to programmatically access such data in scientific Web repositories. We demonstrate the strategies as part of an open source tool (MIT license) that allows research performance comparisons based on Google Scholar data. We would like to emphasize that the scraper included in the tool should only be used if consent was given by the operator of a repository. In our experience, consent is often given if the research goals are clearly explained and the project is of a non-commercial nature.”