Magister Bibliothecologiae - MBibl / In the academic world, open access institutional repositories (IRs) are beginning to play a vital role in storing and disseminating scholarly communication. Through this method, higher education institutions are able to showcase their intellectual outputs and to contribute to sharing and building knowledge. This evolutionary process of scholarly communication is an important feature of knowledge societies.Furthermore, IRs allow scholars to make known the research they are involved in,which can result in their academic reputation improving, as well as the reputations of the institutions they represent.The purpose of this study is to examine the processes of establishing IRs in the four tertiary education institutions in the Western Cape, which form part of the Cape Higher Education Consortium (CHEC). Within this consortium is the collaborative library project, the Cape Library Consortium (CALICO), which represents the four academic library services. The researcher investigated whether the four Western Cape Higher Education Institutions have established IRs and their experiences in doing so. They are examined in the light of the guidelines for successful IRs already established in the international professional literature on IRs. Throughout the study,the partnerships that are needed for the success of IRs, with a specific emphasis on the crucial role that the librarian might play in this regard, are a central focus.The study is a qualitative case study, relying on interviews with key informants from the four HEIs and analysing policy and other supporting documents. The study confirms comment in the literature that IRs evolve in “messy” and “spotty” ways. The key findings might be summarised in the form of four assertions:• “It is all about people”• Philosophical differences are significant • Context and history cannot be ignored • The role of the university library is ambiguous.It is hoped that the study of fledgling IR projects might provide insights useful to the broader IR research and professional literature.

This information studies dissertation deals with the problem that results from research outside academia risk to receive little or no attention if communicated through reports, instead of in mainstream academic genres like research journal articles. The case in focus is Swedish development-led (DL) archaeology, i.e. state regulated archaeology preceding land development. Swedish DL archaeology is organized as a semi-regulated market. The organizations competing on the market are professional service organizations selling research services to land developers. Regional government departments, county administrative boards, function as intermediaries setting up procurement-like processes. In previous research on archaeological documentation, the problem with non-use of reports has been described as depending on cultural issues of access, possible to solve if individuals make efforts to communicate and use extra-academic results. This dissertation offers an alternative definition of the problem, highlighting a different set of solutions. The aim is to further the understanding of how the distribution of research duties to professional service organizations affects the scholarly documentation in Swedish archaeology. The aim is met through identification, operationalization and analysis of resources available to report writing DL archaeology practitioners, and an analysis of how practitioners draw on these resources. The results further the understanding of how reports are shaped within the DL archaeology institution. In view of these results, efforts to solve issues of access should target the organization of research in the archaeology discipline, and specifically how scholarly documentation is governed on the archaeology market. The dissertation draws on science and technology studies, practice theory, and document theory for the design of the study of documentation resources and contexts in extra-academic research. A mixed methods approach is applied to capture regulative, institutional, and infrastructural resources, and practitioners’ use thereof. Dissertation papers I-III contain analyses of concrete instantiations of the resources: information policy, documentation ideals, and information source use. The fourth paper presents an analysis of how practitioners draw on these resources in their everyday report writing. The dissertation concerns archaeology specifically, but serves as grounds to inquire into the premises for scholarly documentation in other areas of extra-academic research and knowledge-making as well. / Archaeological Information in the Digital Society (ARKDIS)

The purpose of the study was to explore faculty attitudes towards institutional repositories in order to better understand their research habits and preferences. A better understanding of faculty needs and attitudes will enable academic libraries to improve institutional repository services and policies. A phenomenological approach was used to interview fourteen participants and conduct eight observations to determine how tenure-track faculty want to disseminate their research as well as their attitudes towards sharing research data. Interviews were transcribed and coded into emerging themes. Participants reported that they want their research to be read, used, and to have an impact. While almost all faculty see institutional repositories as something that would be useful for increasing the impact and accessibility of their research, they would consider publishers’ rights before depositing work in a repository. Researchers with quantitative data, and researchers in the humanities are more likely to share data than with qualitative or mixed data, which is more open to interpretation and inference. Senior faculty members are more likely than junior faculty members to be concerned about the context of their research data. Junior faculty members’ perception’ of requirements for tenure will inhibit their inclination to publish in open access journals, or share data. The study used a novel approach to provide an understanding of faculty attitudes and the structural functionalism of scholarly communication.

Co-authorship networks are a particular sort of social networks representing authors collaborating on joint publications. Such networks are studied within the fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics. While it is possible to analyze co-authorship networks in their entirety, certain analytical tasks would benefit from representing such networks as dynamic graphs, which incorporate a temporal dimension and capture structural transformations unfolding over time. The importance of dynamic graphs has emerged in recent years, in graph theory at large as well as within application domains such as social sciences, for instance.Research regarding dynamic graphs has been identified as one of the major challenges within network theory since they are particularly useful for describing real-world systems.This thesis project revolves around dynamic co-authorship network analysis algorithms, which aim to extract various temporal aspects regarding author collaborations.It is the result of a proposal by the ISOVIS group at Linnaeus University, which is active within the fields of exploratory data analysis and information visualization, including the problem of visual analysis of scientific publication data. The algorithms developed in this project extract analytical data such as (1) joint publications among pairs of authors, (2) temporal trends on connected components (groups of authors) along with network centrality measurements, and (3) major events regarding emergence, mergers, and splits of connected components over time. Together with domain experts, the analysis regarding usability, performance, and scalability of the algorithms took place as part of the evaluation process to assure that the result met the needs which instigated this thesis project. The application of the algorithms on real data sets provided by the ISOVIS group was useful concerning the evaluation of the usability domain. In contrast, customized synthetic data sets was an excellent tool for evaluating performance and scalability.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine brought the intensifying interest in open science to national attention when it joined enthusiastic scientists to introduce and host an Amazon-like rating forum on PubMed—the world's largest database of indexed biomedical and life sciences literature. The result was PubMed Commons. In June 2013, the commenting forum was introduced for open discussion about published scientific literature as part of a three-pronged approach to improve research rigor, reproducibility, and transparency. In Feb. 2018, the forum was unexpectedly discontinued. This retrospective explanatory case study research asked the question, "What happened on the way to the forum?" Answers came from a variety of resources using multiple methodologies for data collection and analysis. Historical data from PubMed Commons' 7,629 comments and 1,551 commenters; key informant interviews with PubMed Commons editors; and a systematized search for published articles, gray literature; and social media content about PubMed Commons were analyzed using computer-mediated discourse analysis and a social network analysis. Results from the quantitative content analysis described a forum with little participation, and the qualitative content analysis demonstrated that active forum members were focused primarily on providing links to other information resources and discussing aspects of post-publication peer review. The social network analysis revealed a disconnected network, which was supported by a sociogram showing a community of independents with only seven small clusters. Findings pointed to 11 factors that affected the forum's adoption and use. Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory scaffolds a forum innovation agility model developed from this work to offer a better understanding of organizational processes and to aid organizations interested in introducing and managing a similar forum. PubMed Commons was a missed opportunity. No comparable alternative is available to promote open science and serve as a tool for the expected paradigm shift in the way we do scholarly communication in science.

Awards or grant programs are a common way for higher education institutions to incentivize the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and other affordable course materials. This study evaluates the results of a two-year pilot OER awards program at East Tennessee State University. To assess the awards program, we used data from student savings and program costs, grades, drop-fail-withdrawal (DFW) rates, and survey results compiled within the COUP framework (Cost, Outcomes, Usage, and Perception). The initial monetary return on investment was moderately positive, while the grades and DFW rates remained steady. The faculty and students rated the open and affordable materials as well as the OER awards program favorably but expressed some issues with using and implementing open and affordable resources. Based on these results, we determined that the awards program was worth the costs and efforts but needed improvements specifically to address the faculty’s feedback around the lack of time to implement OER and the absence of OER for their courses.

This exploratory and descriptive study examines research articles published in ten of the top journals in the broad area of educational technology during the last 20 years: 1) Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D); 2) Instructional Science; 3) Journal of the Learning Sciences; 4) TechTrends; 5) Educational Technology: The Magazine for Managers of Change in Education; 6) Journal of Educational Technology & Society; 7) Computers and Education; 8) British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET); 9) Journal of Educational Computing Research; and 10) Journal of Research on Technology in Education. To discover research trends in the articles published from 1995-2014, abstracts from all contributing articles published in those ten prominent journals were analyzed to extract a latent semantic space of broad research areas, top authors, and top-cited publications. Concepts that have emerged, grown, or diminished in the field were noted in order to identify the most dominant in the last two decades; and the most frequent contributors to each journal as well as those who contributed to more than one of the journals studied were identified.

This paper examines the potential impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the press and in the production of books and academic journals. LLMs, such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, are trained on massive text corpora and can predict the next word in a given context through probabilistic methods. They have demonstrated autonomy and versatility in a variety of tasks, including question answering, translation, summarization, text classification, and code generation from natural language instructions. The paper discusses the trends, opportunities, and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) and LLMs in the publishing industries, as well as the existing research on these topics. It also conducts experiments and operations with GPT-3 to explore its potential benefits and limitations, and offers reflections on the medium- and long-term impact of LLMs in those sectors.

This book reviewed deals with the investigation of conceptions of the medieval world called "Medievalisms". In addition, the book's contributors examine how early modern men and women perceived the medieval world and how these interpretations differed from our own in the twenty-first century.

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