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 Efficiency and quality of research affected by lack of access, says RIN report - 09 Dec 2009
The UK’s Research Information Network (RIN) has released a new report titled ‘Overcoming barriers: Access to research information content’. The report says that the issue of researchers’ access to research information content must be addressed if the UK research community is to operate effectively and produce high-quality research.
Researchers are encountering difficulties in getting access to the content they need and this is having a significant impact on the quality and efficiency of their research, says the report. Based on five separate studies, it looks at the nature and scale of key restrictions on access to information resources of importance to researchers; the impact of these restrictions; and the ways in which they might be alleviated or overcome.
The report’s findings show that the impact of this lack of access on the efficiency - as well as the quality - of research across the higher education sector and beyond is very real. New technological developments, including moves towards open access publishing models and the availability of e-books, may help to solve some of these problems. However, there is little evidence from the report to show that they have had a positive impact to date.
The report’s key finding is that access is still a major concern for researchers although researchers report having no problems finding content in this age of electronic information. Gaining access is another matter due to the complexity of licensing arrangements, restrictions placed on researchers accessing content outside of their own institution and the laws protecting public and private sector information.
Many librarians fear that unless licensing and technical issues are resolved, moves towards a digital environment may impose new barriers. Researchers face restrictions on access to resources which would have formerly been accessible to them in print. With impending funding cuts in higher education institutions’ budgets next year, libraries are already facing increasingly difficult decisions about which subscriptions to keep as cancellations will only add to these problems for researchers. Other barriers include intellectual property and copyright restrictions (on public and private sector information and orphan works).
The report calls on higher education institutions, librarians, publishers, funders and governments to work together to reduce the barriers to accessing research information content. It also highlights a number of recommendations for measures that need to be taken to overcome the barriers to access currently being experienced by the research community.
The report is available at www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/overcoming-barriers-access-research-information.
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 Elsevier selects BrainTrack to supply college data for Evolve online learning solutions - 09 Dec 2009
STM publisher Elsevier Inc., Netherlands, and BrainTrack, the widely referenced higher-education directory, have announced the selection of BrainTrack as supplier of US and Canadian college data for Elsevier's Evolve online learning solutions. Elsevier will use data from BrainTrack's US college directory and Canadian College Directory to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive dataset of college and university information for its Evolve website.
Elsevier’s Evolve brand of online learning solutions serves nursing and health professions faculty and students, providing textbook ancillary materials, courses, e-books, simulations, testing, remediation, and more. Each Evolve product is designed to work together as part of a Learning System, taking users from course preparation, through teaching, testing, remediation, and program completion. Entirely customisable, the Evolve solution caters to all experience levels.
Online since 1996, BrainTrack is a worldwide university and college directory that lists more than 10,000 higher-education institutions in over 190 countries. The site helps visitors make academic and career decisions through its content, and is referenced by thousands of sites, including major universities, libraries, government agencies, and publications. BrainTrack is produced and maintained by Futuremeld LLC.
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JISC unveils research data management initiative - 09 Dec 2009 The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has launched its research data management programme at the ongoing UK e-Science All Hands meeting. The Managing Research Data programme seeks to help researchers, institutions, funders and policy makers meet the challenge of keeping research data for re-use in the future. A new briefing paper is also published.
Researchers in almost all disciplines now create ‘data’ in digital form. Some data are well-managed and kept so that they can be re-used in future. But the majority that go un-catalogued, are stored in an ad hoc fashion and are thus lost to posterity, resulting in a failure to reap the full potential of investment from present day research.
JISC’s Managing Research Data programme seeks to address the research data challenge from new perspectives, plugging notable gaps in current knowledge and making links between the needs of researchers, institutions and policy makers.
The programme, which ends in 2011, will provide researchers and institutions with case studies of good research data management, better tools for managing research data and training materials. Improved tools for citing, integrating and linking data, including to publications, will also be developed. Policy makers can expect to gain a clearer understanding of researchers’ and institutions’ requirements; a better view of the value of different types of data; and a roadmap outlining the steps needed to achieve a coherent UK policy for research data.
Dr. William Kilbride, director of the Digital Preservation Coalition, introduced the programme during a poster session at All Hands, encouraging participants - all of whom create research data - to think about how they can ensure that their work has a lasting impact.
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UC Press and California Digital Library launch collaborative publishing venture, UCPubS - 09 Dec 2009 The University of California Press (UC Press) and the California Digital Library have announced the official launch of a collaborative publishing venture, UC Publishing Services (UCPubS). UCPubS offers a suite of open access digital and print publication services to University of California centers, institutes, and departments that produce scholarly books. By co-ordinating the publishing efforts of UC Press, the California Digital Library’s eScholarship programme and publishing partners throughout the UC system, UCPubS seeks to provide a sustainable publishing model that extends the University’s capacity to disseminate its scholarship to the world.
Building on current publishing activities, UCPubS enables organisations such as the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley and the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA to focus on scholarship rather than on distribution, sales and web platform development.
With this shared resource model, campus publishing partners will be responsible for selection of content, peer review, editing, design, and composition. eScholarship provides open-access digital publishing, peer review and manuscript management tools, and preservation. University of California Press handles printing (using print-on-demand technology), sales and distribution of print publications, and online marketing for both print and digital publications.
UC Press and the CDL have embarked on this collaborative publishing venture in response to compelling research revealing the vibrant publishing activity across the UC campuses and the need for system wide services to support such activity. Several partners are already using UCPubS services. These include the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley; California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP); The Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley; Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA); and Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, among others.
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 University of Ottawa launches OA program, joins Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity - 09 Dec 2009
The University of Ottawa has become the first Canadian university to adopt a comprehensive open access programme that supports free and unrestricted access to scholarly research. The University’s new program includes a commitment to make the University’s scholarly publications available online at no charge through the University’s repository, uO Research.
In addition, the program also includes an author fund to help researchers defray open access fees charged by publishers; a fund to support the creation of digital educational materials organised as courses and available to everyone online at no charge; support for the University of Ottawa Press’s commitment to publishing a collection of open access books; and a research grant to support further research on the open access movement.
The University of Ottawa has also become the first Canadian university to join the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), adding its name to a list of prestigious institutions including Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. The signatories of this compact make a commitment to support open access journals that make articles available at no charge to everyone while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals, services such as management of the peer review process, production and distribution.
University of Ottawa researchers have already participated in many significant open access projects. These projects include developing the Canadian Creative Commons license, which ensures authors retain the right of attribution and that their work is accessible; the publication of legal texts that are made available at no charge; and the founding of Open Medicine and Aporia, two open access journals in the fields of medicine and health sciences.
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Emerald Group Publishing set to publish Management Research - 09 Dec 2009 Academic and professional literature publisher Emerald Group Publishing Limited, UK, has announced the addition of Management Research: The Journal of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management (MRJIAM) to its extensive portfolio of management journals. Previously published by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., Management Research publishes peer-reviewed articles from international authors that aim to bring empirical investigation and theoretical analysis to management practice. Management topics such as human resource management, organisational behaviour, organisational theory, and strategic management are discussed. The journal is the official journal of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management.
Founded in 1997 and affiliated with the Academy of Management, the Iberoamerican Academy of Management aims to foster the general advancement of knowledge in the theory and practice of management among Iberoamerican scholars and/or those interested in Iberoamerican issues. Also, it seeks to support educational activities that contribute to intellectual and operational leadership in the field of management within an Iberoamerican context. Iberoamerica is defined broadly to include all of Latin America, Latino populations in North America, Spain and Portugal.
MRJIAM and its archive will be available in the Emerald Management Plus collection and the International Business Subject Collection as of the first quarter of 2010.
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 Knowledgespeak Exclusive - 09 Dec 2009
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