O foco deste estudo é a Biblioteca Publicadora, modelo difundido em biblioteca internacional universitária ou de pesquisa para designar a biblioteca que atua em serviços de edição de conteúdos acadêmicos. Discute a produção do livro digital pelo serviço de publicação, diferente do modelo de publicação tradicional nacional voltado normalmente à produção de revistas digitais. Ao expandir seu campo de atuação, a biblioteca reafirma sua missão de preservação e circulação da informação através da reformulação e acréscimo da atividade de publicação de conteúdos digitais acessíveis irrestritamente. O trabalho destaca também a parceria Biblioteca Publicadora/Editora Universitária na construção de um modelo de publicação para conteúdos digitais, ressaltando suas dificuldades e ações por subsistência no meio acadêmico; envolvendo a busca por novos autores, leitores. Descreve a contribuição de entidades e associações, como o Library Publishing Coalition, voltadas à divulgação de práticas da publicação em formatos acessíveis via web e difusão de cursos para contribuir na formação de pessoas envolvidas na área. Este trabalho trata também das dificuldades do acesso aberto pelas vias verde, dourada, bronze, modelos híbridos, black ou piratas, além da importância do conhecimento sobre licenças de uso pela comunidade acadêmica. Apresenta estudos de caso provenientes de biblioteca de pesquisa e por editora da iniciativa privada apresentando fluxo de criação do livro digital por aplicativo de edição de conteúdo. Aponta alguns desafios da biblioteca publicadora no mundo editorial, como a relação editor/bibliotecário e as perspectivas para implementação e continuidade destas atividades. / The focus of this study is the library publishing model disseminated into international university or research libraries in order to designate the library which acts in services of academic content editions. It discusses the production of digital book by a publishing service which is different from the traditional national publication model usually aimed at the production of digital journals. By expanding its field of activity, the library reaffirms its mission of preserving and circulating information by reformulating and adding the activity of publishing freely accessible digital content. The work also highlights the partnership of the Library Publishing-University Press in the building of a model of publication for digital contents, highlighting their difficulties and actions for subsistence in the academic environment; involving the search for new authors and readers. It further describes the contribution of entities and associations, such as the Library Publishing Coalition, in order to propagate publishing practices in web-accessible formats and distribute courses to contribute to qualification for training people involved in the area. This work also deals with the difficulties of open access through green, gold, bronze, hybrid, black or pirate models, as well as the importance of knowledge about licenses for use by the academic community. It presents cases from a research library and a publishing house report as well as the workflow of production of digital books by content publishing software. In addition, it points out some challenges facing the library publishing world, such as the publisher/librarian relationship and perspectives for the implementation and continuity of these activities.

Submitted by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-01-26T13:03:43Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_Mest_PPGCI-UFF_IaraVidal.pdf: 1139977 bytes, checksum: c060d1dc8e124903f244f016f7b0fa45 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Geisa Drumond (gmdrumond@vm.uff.br) on 2017-01-27T15:05:23Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_Mest_PPGCI-UFF_IaraVidal.pdf: 1139977 bytes, checksum: c060d1dc8e124903f244f016f7b0fa45 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-01-27T15:05:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_Mest_PPGCI-UFF_IaraVidal.pdf: 1139977 bytes, checksum: c060d1dc8e124903f244f016f7b0fa45 (MD5) / A proposta deste trabalho é traçar o estado da arte da altmetria, definida como o estudo, a criação e a utilização de indicadores relacionados à interação de usuários com produtos de pesquisa diversos no âmbito da Web Social – visualizações, downloads, citações, reutilizações, compartilhamentos, etiquetagens, comentários, entre outros. Para entender o contexto de surgimento da altmetria, exploramos as especificidades e potencialidades da Web Social e as características da comunicação científica. Além de constituir mais um passo na evolução dos estudos métricos da informação, a altmetria se apresenta também como reação à crise do atual modelo de publicação e avaliação na Ciência. A partir de pesquisa bibliográfica exploratória em fontes nacionais e internacionais, levantamos a produção científica sobre altmetria, identificando atores envolvidos na produção de conhecimento na área, seus conceitos, as propostas e tendências dos estudos sobre o tema; fundamentando a reflexão sobre o desenvolvimento da área e a aceitação das métricas alternativas como ferramentas da avaliação científica. Constatamos que a altmetria é uma área de estudos em expansão, cujos métodos complementam os estudos métricos tradicionais contribuindo para o entendimento mais completo da comunicação científica, seus atores, seus processos, seus produtos e seus impactos. / Describes the state of the art of altmetrics, defined as the study, creation and use of measures related to user interaction with diverse research products through the Social Web – views, downloads, citations, reuse, sharing, tagging, comments, among others. To understand the context where altmetrics arises, we explore the Social Web’s specificities and potentials, and the characteristics of scientific communication. Besides being another step on the evolution of metric studies of information, altmetrics also presents itself as a reaction to the crisis in the current model of scientific publication and evaluation. Through an exploratory search in national and international sources we were able to identify the scientific literature about altmetrics, analysing the authors involved, its concepts, the proposals and trends around the theme, basing our reflection about the development of altmetrics and the acceptance of alternative metrics as tools for scientific evaluation. We note that altmetrics is an expanding area, and its methods complement traditional metrics contributing to a more complete understanding of scientific communication, its actors, processes, products and impacts.

This research aims to understand the different practices and strategies early career researchers and PhD students from the social sciences have in Social Networking Sites (SNSs) for science communication in one particular country: Brazil. Following this purpose, the central research question is which are the motives and rationale of the researchers for using social networking sites for science communication. Two sub-questions arise from this general research question: How do practices and strategies relate to the academic system of this country? And How do the traditional science communication practices translate into the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS)? This research is empirically oriented building up on case studies in Brazil. This study makes use of the adaptation that Van Dijck (2013) made of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the review of affordances of social media platforms (Bucher & Helmond, 2016) to apply it to the study of social media as the theoretical approach. The methodological approach of this research is qualitative, using both interviews and netnography as research methods. The primary motivations for using different Social Networking Sites are all related to connectivity: communication with peers, to the public and research subjects, updating themselves about their research issue, dissemination of research, availability of papers, self-branding and participation in interest groups are the most mentioned. These motivations translate into cross-posting practices and integrated communication strategies -combining online and offline elements- on the different Social Networking Sites. These motivations translate into perceived affordances all related to social affordances, therefore, social capital processes: availability, scalability, visibility and multimediality. The academic system of the country has remained unchanged as it privileges traditional scholarly academic formats; therefore, early career researchers and PhD students from the social sciences only use the different Social Networking Sites (SNS) as a side aid but not as a primary means of communication. Social media is underused as a means of public science communication, even though these platforms offer a lot of advantages for pursuing such issue. Traditional science communication practices translate into the use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs). The most important issue that came out in this report was the fact that social affordances provided by Social Networking (SNSs) are still required to be endorsed by real life meeting to start further collaboration and the fact that English is the preferred language for such issues.

Open access institutional repositories (OA IRs) are electronic systems that capture, preserve, and provide access to the scholarly digital work of an institution. As a new channel of scholarly communications IRs offer faculty a new way to disseminate their work to a wider audience, which in turn can increase the visibility to their work and impact factors, and at the same time increase institutions prestige and value. However, despite the increased popularity of IRs in numbers, research shows that IRs remain thinly populated in large part due to faculty reluctance to participate. There have been studies on the topic of open access repositories with the focus on external factors (social or technological context) that affect faculty attitudes towards participation in IRs, and there is a lack of understanding of the internal factors and the psychology of the reluctance. The goal of this mix method study was to identify the overall factors that affect faculty attitudes towards participation in IRs and examine the extent to which these factors influenced faculty willingness to participate in IRs. First, from literature review and the Model of Factors Affecting Faculty Self-Archiving this study identified eleven factors that influenced faculty members' intention to participate in OA repositories. Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) postulated that faculty intention to participate in IR was determined by three categories of factors: five attitudinal, four external (social) and two individual factors. Within the framework of the TPB this study (1) confirmed the measurement scale for each factor using principal component analysis, (2) it examined the influence that each factor had on the faculty likelihood to participate in IR using logistic regression, and (3) it weighted the relative importance of each factor on faculty intent to participate, utilizing relative weight analysis. Quantitative analysis revealed that four out of 11 factors proved to be statistically significant in faculty members' intention to participate in IRs; difficulty with the submission process, discoverability access and readership, altruism, and faculty perception of IRs as low-quality publishing venues. While qualitative analysis revealed that more than half of the faculty remain unfamiliar with OA and its goals, and while they supported the principles of OA, they also had a myriad of concerns regarding participation in IRs.

Self-archiving as a way to provide open access to research publications is gaining ground in the area of scholarly publishing. An increasing number of research funders and universities are mandating open access for output associated with their research, which calls for evaluation of the effects of the phenomenon. This two years master’s thesis aims to investigate researchers’ experiences of self-archiving. A qualitative web survey was conducted and answered by 41 researchers from several different countries, and a vast majority of the respondents concur with the principle of open access. Although self-archiving shows not to be a guarantee of increased impact for the single researcher, the study shows that might be the case. The results attest that self-archiving can generate for example increased number of collaboration, comments in social media and stronger professional profile, as well as a sense of personal progress. The results illuminate an ongoing change in scholarly communications as self-archiving shows to enable a more flexible and informal communication of research material.

The thesis deals with openness in the scientific practice and discusses in detail the concept of open science. Apart from theoretical part dedicated to description of science, traditional model of scholarly communication, and initial ideas of openness, thesis summarizes the approaches of particular open science schools of thought and introduces specific tools, initiatives and methods enabling the idea of openness to become reality. Practical part of thesis focuses on description of current state of open science in the Czech Republic and by using the Future wheel prognostic method offers visualization of the future development in science and society, further specifies possible consequences of implementing the concept of open science into practice and defines opportunities and risks of the second scientific revolution.

The thesis focuses on various information services over digital archives and institutional repositories in the area of science and research. It aims to ascertain these online services and introduce, analyse and assess selected examples in detail. Their quantitative as well as qualitative features are emphasized - The work is logically divided into four chapters. The first one defines the basic terminology and outlines the contemporary status of scholarly communication on the Internet. The second chapter introduces a comprehensive list of services as well as their suggested typology. The third chapter constitutes the core of the thesis and presents the descriptions and analysys of the selected services. The fourth final part includes the comparison of their relevant parameters, final assessment and the perspectives of their future development. Keywords digital archive, institutional repository, scholarly communication, information services, OAI- PMH, metadata harvesting, open access

Thesis (M.A. ( Information Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / This study aimed to examine the extent of awareness and the adoption of Open Access (OA) publishing for the purpose of scholarly communication by academic staff at the University of Limpopo (UL). The study was guided by Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory (1) to measure the level of awareness of academics on the availability and use of OA resources; (2) to determine the adoption and usage levels of OA publishing as a platform for information sharing by academics in scholarly communication; (3) to establish academics’ attitudes towards the use of the OA publishing platforms; and (4) to identify perspectives of academic staff with regards to challenges and benefits presented by OA publishing. A dominantly quantitative research approach was adopted using a google forms questionnaire with closed ended questions to collect data from 250 academics at the University of Limpopo. Academics were selected using the systematic simple random sampling method. To ensure the survey instrument’s reliability and validity, the researcher conducted a pilot study through a web-based survey. A descriptive statistics method of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse data. The study established that the majority (82%) of academics were aware of OA publishing platforms. The internet and subject librarians were the main communication channels through which they became aware of OA publishing. The study also found that there was minimal the adoption and usage of OA publishing among academics. Their attitudes towards OA and their perceptions of the benefits and challenges of OA. The general attitudes of academics about OA were positive, signifying the acceptance of this scholarly communication mode. However, some of the challenges encountered in adopting and using OA publishing include slow internet connectivity and access, publication charges by some publishers, lack of skills to publish online, power interruptions, lack of policies on OA, fake and predatory v publishers and OA articles not being peer-reviewed. These were reported as problems that directly or indirectly hinder academics from publishing in OA platforms. The study recommends the institutionalisation of OA publishing at UL to improve research output dissemination. An area for further research will be to establish more insights regarding the feasibility of OA development and possible ways of dealing with article processing fees. Keywords: Open Access publishing, scholarly communication, Academic staff, Institutional Repositories, Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory, University of Limpopo.

This thesis presents a detailed explanation and argumentation of why modern decentralized technologies could be utilized in order to improve scholarly communication on many fronts. The current model of scholarly communication, which is dominated by scientific journals, is analysed together with the current economic models in use. The thesis also briefly investigates peer reviews. It also endeavors to explain how scholarly goods might be perceived from an economic standpoint. Blockchain technology offers functionalities that could potentially solve many problems associated with scholarly communication through decentralization. Both permissioned and permissionless blockchains, their implementations, interesting technical/economic/governance aspects and why they are such a unique match for scholarly needs are thoroughly analyzed and explained. Finally minimal viability criteria suitable for assessment of decentralized scholarly projects are proposed. Existing decentralized applications which try to migrate scholarly communication from a current centralized system to a decentralized one are described and examined through the prism of this framework.

In Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic the Public Health Agency of Sweden assumed the major responsibility for communication and information dissemination about the contagion, and made efforts on preventive work and the risk mitigation. To successfully mitigate the risks it is important for the Public Health Agency to be transparent in their risk communication, in order to gain and strenghten the public’s trust towards their institution, which is a prerequisite for them to be able to work efficiently in changing public behaviour in the population. This study examines what strategies the Public Health Agency of Sweden has used to create transparency within their risk communication, with the theoretical perspective of scholarly communication and information making. The study was conducted by analysing texts in the form of news articles published on the agency’s own website. The study identified eleven different strategies the agency has used in their risk communication, from referring to expert knowledge, to using a language that is accessible to the whole public.