Category Archives: oa.iran

IPLC Launches the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement of Iran Web Archive – Ivy Plus Libraries

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“The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement of Iran web archive, curated by librarians at the IPLC. This web archive preserves material on, about, and from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of Iran, which emerged in the wake of the 2022 police killing of Mahsa Jîna Amini. Her arrest by the morality police, on alleged grounds of non-compliance with the compulsory Hijab Law, ignited a series of protests that began in Kurdistan, spread across all levels of Iranian society, and reached other marginalized regions like Sistan-Baluchistan. This movement garnered international solidarity, with the Iranian diaspora and global activists demanding accountability from the Iranian government. Despite the government’s attempts to violently suppress dissent, the movement persists into 2023. This archive curates a collection of videos, photographs, art, music, petitions, statements, and diverse forms of expression that have emerged from this movement, showcasing both government crackdowns and the resilience and determination of the Iranian people in their pursuit of meaningful change….

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research….”

Providing a framework for the reuse of research data based on the development dynamic framework of United Nations Development Program (UNDP) | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

The present research is aimed at presenting a framework for the reuse of research data in Iran through applying the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Design/methodology/approach

The research at hand has a mixed methods design. In the qualitative section, the authors first carried out meta-synthesis and then an interview was conducted. Likewise, in the quantitative section, the reliability of the recommended framework was measured through carrying out a survey. Finally, the framework for data reuse was presented in five dimensions, namely human, organizational, policies and laws, technical, implementation and analysis.

Findings

Through structural equation modeling, the fitness of the framework was confirmed, and it was found out that the dimensions of policies, human and organizational played more prominent roles in the explanation of the framework in comparison with the other two dimensions.

Originality/value

Research studies in the area of data reuse have been conducted either quantitatively or qualitatively and in most of them interviews or questionnaires were used as tools for collecting data; however, due to the nature of this area and its relatively new literature in Iran, it is necessary to use mixed methods in order to be able to arrive at a proper understanding of this concept using both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Altmetrics analysis of selected articles in the field of social sciences | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This study aims to measure the impact of the selected papers in the field of social sciences indexed in Scopus using altmetrics tools.

Design/methodology/approach

The research community consists of the articles of the Iranian researchers in the field of social sciences indexed in the Scopus database in 2014–2018. Some of the most important altmetric service providers have been used to assess the presence of the research outputs in the social media and their impact assessment. Also, the relationship between variables such as scientific collaboration of researchers, open access journals and the quality of research journals with altmetric activity have been investigated through appropriate correlation tests.

Findings

The findings indicated that the most important social media publishing Iranian articles are Mendeley, Twitter and Facebook. The results of the correlation test showed a statistically significant positive and weak relationship between the scientific collaboration of researchers and their altmetric activity. Also, there is a significant and weak statistical relation between journal openness and the altmetric scores. In this study, the findings suggest that the published articles in the journals with higher quality indicators have higher altmetric scores and are more likely to be present in social media.

Research implications

In this study, the social network indicators have been introduced as a solution to examine the effectiveness of research activities on social media. These indicators can be used to evaluate the impact and usefulness of the articles and other scientific outputs with the aim of completing and eliminating the shortcomings of traditional scientometrics indicators. What distinguishes altmetric criteria from other criteria related to the scientometric studies is the speed, ease and transparency of these scales. This allows the publications to be evaluated regardless of their formal form and in the shortest possible time, and in addition to the scientific impact, the social impact of the works is also measured.

Originality/value

The results of these studies show that using altmetric service providers not only reflects the social impact of publications on authors in different subject areas but also helps libraries, universities, research organizations and politicians in planning, budgeting and allocating resources.

Iranian researchers’ perspective about concept and effect of open science on research publication | BMC Health Services Research | Full Text

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Abstract:  Background

Sharing research outputs with open science methods for different stakeholders causes better access to different studies to solve problems in diverse fields, which leads to equal access conditions to research resources, as well as greater scientific productivity. Therefore, the aim of this study was to perceive the concept of openness in research among Iranian health researchers.

Methods

From the beginning of August to the middle of November 2021, twenty semi-structured interviews were held with Iranian health researchers from different fields using purposeful, snowball, and convenience sampling. The interviews continued until data saturation. Data analysis was performed with thematic analysis using MAXQDA 20. Finally, seven main issues related to open science were identified.

Results

Through analysis of the interviews, 235 primary codes and 173 main codes were extracted in 22 subclasses. After careful evaluation and integration of subclasses and classes, they were finally classified into nine categories and three main themes. Analysis showed that openness in research was related to three main themes: researchers’ understanding of open science, the impact of open science on publication and sharing of research, concerns and reluctance to open research.

Conclusion

The conditions of access to research output should be specified given the diversity of studies conducted in the field of health; issues like privacy as an important topic of access to data and information in the health system should also be specified. Our analysis indicated that the conditions of publication and sharing of research processes should be stated according to different scopes of health fields. The concept of open science was related to access to findings and other research items regardless of cost, political, social, or racial barriers, which could create collective wisdom in the development of knowledge. The process of publication and sharing of research related to open access applies to all types of outputs, conditions of access, increasing trust in research, creation of diverse publication paths, and broader participation of citizens in research. Open science practices should be promoted to increase the circulation and exploitation rates of knowledge while adjusting and respecting the limits of privacy, intellectual property and national security rights of countries.

Open Access Journals in the Middle East and Iran

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“Almost 650 journals are currently published in the Middle East (http://applications.emro.who.int/library/imjournals/). Almost two-thirds of these journals are published in Iran (http://journals.research.ac.ir/). Many research institutions publish their own journals. For some incentives, even a single university publishes several journals. For example, currently Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences publishes 62 journals (http://journals.sbmu.ac.ir/site/); Tehran University of Medical Sciences, 57 (http://journals.tums.ac.ir/). This large number of journals published by a scientific institution such as a university in a developing country, is because the raison d’être for scientific publishing in developing countries is quite different from that in developed nations….

All, but a few, of these journals are OA. In fact, almost all biomedical journals published in the Middle East (and many other developing countries) have been published and distributed internationally gratis long before the era of the Internet, online publishing, and the OA movement. They have merely published for enjoying the prestige and bringing promotion credit for the institution and the faculty members. After the introduction of OA movement, nonetheless, another incentive has come into play—making money….”

700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online | Open Culture

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“For Nowruz, the Persian New Year, the Library of Congress has released a digital collection of its rare Persian-language manuscripts, an archive spanning 700 years. This free resource opens windows on diverse religious, national, linguistic, and cultural traditions, most, but not all, Islamic, yet all different from each other in complex and striking ways….”

The Dark side of Sci-Hub | Medico musings…

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“The problem is that , as cyber security experts say, they have never met a cyber criminal who gets into a database, takes only what is necessary and gets out. Chances are he looks around. Pilfers something else that might be of value. Or worse still leaves behind something nasty.( as of this writing, there is no evidence that Scihub or its partners have actually compromised the security of the universities with any malware).

Moreover when a password is hacked, the hacker has access to the bare minimum information in the database – for example a library database. The details such as username, age, gender, timing of visiting the library, date of joining, last visit taken, last book etc can be easily gotten. From then it is only a matter of social engineering to gain access to other portals – email, social media etc. It is also a matter of concern that some people have the same password for all their sites ! …

[P]ublishers [might] tighten access – perhaps a DRM (digital rights management) or two factor authentication might be introduced – so even if the passwords are stolen by phishing attacks/attacks on university, it will become harder to access the articles….

To make things worse, nothing in Russia can be done without the tacit approval of the government. It is  a well known fact that , as a price for such approval, the government/non governmental actors might want to be a ‘part’ of the project, presumably not to download science articles. She being a marked woman, with no other refuge, would have to yield to their pressure or face the music. People have disappeared for daring to disobey the non-governmental actors in Russia.

This is where the possibility of compromised passwords providing access to the university systems causes worry. However all of this remains conjecture – or the feverish imagination of jobless bloggers at the moment. (But who doesn’t love the bragging rights to ‘I told you so’ when a disaster strikes in the future).

There is also evidence that China has been downloading a lot more than the usual academic download – although for what purpose isn’t known. Also Iran is the third largest access site – that too, a small city in Iran, raising eyebrows about what is going on….”

Bioline International Official Site (site up-dated regularly)

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“Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI’s goal of reducing the South to North knowledge gap is crucial to a global understanding of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development. By providing a platform for the distribution of peer-reviewed journals (currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela), BI helps to reduce the global knowledge divide by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide….”