Diss. Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2006.

At a national level, the performance at Swedish universities is evaluated using bibliometrics. A part of the research funding given to the universities from the government is distributed according to their bibliometric performance. In recent years, several Swedish universities have adopted similar systems in order to distribute funding between the different faculties at the own university according to the bibliometric performance at faculty level. The debate in media on this way of using bibliometrics indicates that scientists are negative to this quantitative method for research evaluation. The purpose of this study was to investigate the opinions among researchers about the use of bibliometrics in research evaluation. A web-based survey has been sent out to researchers at the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. In total 246 researchers from the two faculties answered the survey. The results presented here show that the opinions among the scientist are divided, but in generalare not as negative as it seems from the debate in media.

Open access (OA) is a publishing model aimed at increasingthe access to academic research results. The object of thisstudy was to contrast nine colleges and four fundingorganizations in Scandinavia with mandatory OA-policies,and to study how they put OA into practice.Inspired by the Open Access Spectrum (OAS), a tool used toappreciate the OA of academic journals, the aim was tograde the policy documents of the colleges using the OASmodel.The study also compares how the colleges implementtheir OA-policies as well as how, and if, the demands fromthe funding organizations are reflected in the policies of thecolleges.The findings show that the OAS is not a tool designed forgreen OA and that all the information needed for the scale tofunction was not found in the policy documents we studied.A selection of the colleges has some demands in theirpolicies, although most of them allow exceptions to be madefrom the mandatory policy. This is shown to be mainly aquestion of academic freedom, and copyright, or rather thanthe degree to which the scientist and the publisher can cometo an agreement on allowing the information to be accessiblethrough OA.The study proposes that the way to change this may be toincrease the demands on OA in the policies, and that the bestsolution might be in stipulations within the employmentcontracts between the individual colleges and scientist. / Program: Bibliotekarie

This Master’s thesis aims to map and analyse publishing patterns at two academic departments at the University of Gothenburg - the department of Physics and the department of History. The investigation has been guided by a set of questions: Who chooses to publish their scientific outcomes? In which forums do they publish findings? In what kind of media are the results published? What type of findings get to be published? The departments' publication lists have been examined, covering the years 2004-2007. Furthermore, ten scientists have been asked to describe factors contributing to their individual publishing pattern. The analysis leans on communication theory and in particular on three concepts developed by information scientists Rob Kling and Geoffrey McKim. Their notions of trustworthiness, publicity and accessibility were created as both analytical and instrumental devices. Here, they are used analytically to describe and interpret publishing patterns. The comparison of the two departments' publishing patterns reveals both similarities and differences. They differ in their choices of publication media and types of publications. However, both departments regarded publishing as acts of communication. Hence, they shared a will to communicate scientific findings and (among other factors) this will emerged as an important incitement for choosing to publish at all. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This thesis aims to explore how musicologists reason about publishing their articles in open-access journals. What is the challenge they face and what are the possibilities musicologists are concerned about? For the method I used open-ended and structured interviews based on four factors: trustworthiness, accessibility, reaching the readers and status of the publishing media. Musicologists are positive to the open-access concept and are willing to submit their papers to open-access journals. They think that the accessibility of the articles is going to increase when they publish them in open-access journals. Furthermore, in order to submit their articles to open-access journals, the musicologists expect that these journals have a peer-review system. Less than half of the musicologists want these journals to have high impact factor. The rest of them are not concerned about the status of the publishing media. Some of the musicologists thought they could reach more readers by means of the traditional printed journals, some thought they could do it better by open-access journals. / Uppsatsnivå: D

Since the 1990’s Open Access has developed into an alternative model for scientific publication. Today an increasing political interest in promoting Open Access is commonly channeled through the implementation of policies by research funders. However, in the scientific community the uptake and acceptance of the model has been of notably different character.This Master’s thesis examines the understanding of and attitudes towards open access among eight senior Swedish researchers and how these have been affected by the implementation of the Swedish Research Council’s Open Access-policy as implemented in 2010. It further asks the question of how researchers’ publishing practices can be understood as shaped by and performed within actor-network configurations. The study is based on interviews with researchers from three academic disciplines. The empirical material has been analyzed through the perspective of actor-network theory.The study finds that the impact of the Swedish Research Council’s policy has been low. Yet, perceived as a floating object, the policy has forced the researchers to adhere to and position themselves in relation to the immanent powers of the policy and, thus, to Open Access both as movement and publishing model. The study also finds that both the traditional model for scientific publishing and the Open Access model can be understood as actor-networks, currently competing for the researchers’ loyalty and involvement in order to secure future dominance. The study finally concludes that in order to fully understand researchers’ practices and attitudes it is necessary to perceive these as shaped in and by extra-social contexts and forces. / Program: Masterutbildning: Digitala tjänster - kultur, information & kommunikation

The aim of this paper is to compare subject headings by the authors of the work and those administrated by professional indexers. The empirical setting for the study lies within the sociological discipline. The questions asked are: What overall similarities and differences between subject headings administrated by authors versus indexers can we find? What qualitative advantages and disadvantages can we establish between subject headings generated by natural language versus controlled vocabularies?Subject headings in the Swedish national library catalogue Libris and in five Swedish universities platforms for academic publishing are studied and compared. Today it is praxis at Swedish universities that administration of subject headings is done by authors and not by professional indexers. We consider this to be a clash between professions. The paper is based on Birger Hjørlands domain analysis. We discuss the practice of subject heading administration within these two professions. Furthermore we wish to determine advantages and disadvantages with subject headings indexed by natural language versus controlled vocabularies. / Program: Bibliotekarie

Since the beginning of the 21st century the Open Access-movement, which advocates free online distribution of scholarly information, has gained momentum. Authors can provide Open Access to their work in two main ways: by depositing a copy of their research output in an e-print archive and by publishing in Open Access journals. During the past few years, universities and other research institutions throughout the world have established institutional repositories to manage, preserve and provide access to the intellectual output of the university/research institution. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to describe the implementation of an institutional repository at the Swedish University College of Borås. The thesis also aims to describe the current situation regarding Open Access at the university college. The case study indicates that a requirement for the deposit of references into the repository is believed to have had a significant impact on the contents of the institutional repository. The full-text availability of research publications is, however, at present relatively low. The results show that there are three main barriers in the development of the institutional repository: lack of knowledge regarding Open Access and digital publishing, copyright issues and lack of time. Misconception and uncertainty regarding the guarantee of quality of the digital material are factors that most likely prevent researchers from depositing their research articles into the institutional repository. Librarians play a key role when it comes to informing about self-archiving and Open Access. Our conclusion is that to obtain more research publications in full-text, researchers need to gain more knowledge about institutional repositories and digital publishing. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The aim of this master thesis is to show how the dissemination of scientific information took place and developed during the 19th century. The main focus is Lund University. Therefore I have formulated two questions: How did the five heads of the history department at Lund University publish their research findings in the 19th century? What factors in society influenced the scientific spreading of results in the 19th century? To assess the scientific reliability of the sources I have used a method based on source criticism and hermeneutics. The thesis covers important concepts such as the exchange of publications between the universities, commercium litterarium and Akademischer Tauschverein and also the development of Lund University yearbook. By taking a closer look at how five history scholars published themselves during the 19th century an interesting picture appears of how channels for scientific publication changed and developed. This concerns mainly the periodical literature. Before the regulations of 1852 the university lecturers had the possibility to write their dissertations in their capacity of “preses” and let the respondents pay for the cost of the publication. If you look at the articles registered in “Svensk historisk bibliografi” 1875–1900 it is evident that the publications were followed by reviews in different journals. The number of scientific journals was growing during this period. The publication of articles and reviews in scientific journals had gained larger impact. Between 1870 and 1890 one may notice a higher level of international orientation of the scientific production. An interaction between books and journals appeared. The scholars published themselves through books but the opportunities to publish their papers in journals were growing. Thus the number of reviews increased as the number of journals continued to grow. The increasing public discussion and polemic were both made possible through the publication of scientific research results in different journals. The geographic dissemination increased.

The main aim in this thesis is to analyse the attitudes of fivearchaeologists at the Department of History, University ofGothenburg, on the subject of scholarly publishing injournals. The investigation has been led by a set of questionsconcerning the motives and conditions for submitting articlesto scholarly journals.The primary way of collecting emprical data is based onsemistructured qualitative interviews. To get a broaderpicture, the publishing patterns of the archaeologists at theDepartment of History were mapped using the databaseGöteborgs universitets publikationer (GUP). A documentstudy was also conducted.The analysis uses Björk & Holmström’s The net value ofsubmission model to highlight which factors are assumed toinfluence an author when submitting to a scientific journal.This model is reduced and developed to six aspects whichmore or less effect the decision making of the author whenpublishing an article in a scientific journal. These six aspectsare: culture, strategy, medium/form, readership, prestige andperformance.The results of the investigation show that a set of factorsinfluence the publishing decision. As a disciplinetraditionally rooted in the humanities, the archaeologists atthe Department of History have established a scientific wayof publishing. Motives and attitudes to journal publishingshow that all aspects, in varying degrees, are important indeciding where to submit an article. / Program: Bibliotekarie