Elsevier responds to critics with policy change

Posted: February 27th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Newspost | Tags: , , | Comments Off on Elsevier responds to critics with policy change

Publisher withdraws support for the Research Works Act

Elsevier today published a press release, where they state their withdrawal for the Research Works Act. The publisher had initially supported this act, which proposes legislation that would prevent the US government from mandating Open Access to taxpayer-funded research.

In it’s press release Elsevier also states that

(…) while withdrawing support for the Research Works Act, we will continue to join with those many other nonprofit and commercial publishers and scholarly societies that oppose repeated efforts to extend mandates through legislation.

Even though the press release marks not a complete U-turn of Elsevier’s policy towards Open Access, it still seems as a sign, that the protest in the research community against the publishers business practices has already shown some impact.


Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers

Posted: February 14th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , , , | 3 Comments »

New study finds strong correlation between the relationship between Twitter mentions and both article downloads and article citations

A new study by Xin Shuai, Alberto Pepe and Johan Bollen analyzes the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. Based on a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011 they study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record.

They find that Twitter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are correlated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating that social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific impact of an article.

This fits very well with a study from 2011, where David McKenzie and Berk Özler analyze the Impact of Economics Blogs They found out, that “links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers.”


New Search Engine for Open Access articles in Economics

Posted: February 13th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

The Economics portal EconBiz (operated by the ZBW) has released a new tool called EconBizOpen. It’s an Open Access database for Economics and Business Studies and includes more than 800.000 full-text articles, which are accessible for free on the web.

Major input sources for EconBizOpen are RePec and BASE. BASE (maintained by Bielefeld Universiy Library) is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines dedicated to academic open access material. Its papers from Business and Economics are now also part of EconBizOpen.


EconStor documents now including cover pages

Posted: February 7th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , | Comments Off on EconStor documents now including cover pages

All documents from EconStor are now equipped with a separate cover page. This page is not part of the original paper, but is rather a service to our users, which gives them some information about the metadata, where they got the paper from and a suggestion for citation. Here’s one example

 


COAR publishes open letter to Elsevier

Posted: February 7th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , | Comments Off on COAR publishes open letter to Elsevier

In support for the researchers initiative “The Cost of Knowledge” against Elsevier’s business practices, the international repository network COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) released an open letter to the publisher yesterday. In the letter COAR

“urges Elsevier to reconsider its prohibitive approach to open access and revise its policies to allow the deposit of research articles with minimum delay. We encourage publishers to work closely with the library and repository communities to develop effective and sustainable methods for article deposit that serve the needs of researchers, their institutions”


EconStor in January 2012

Posted: February 2nd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , | Comments Off on EconStor in January 2012

We are happy to announce the following working and discussion paper series which have been added to EconStor in January 2012:

By offering more than 35,500 full texts overall, we have counted exactly 103,557 pdf downloads during this month. The Top 5 downloads in January by number of downloads were:

  1. Yadav, Pradeep K.; Megginson, William L.; Chakrabarti, Rajesh: „Corporate governance in India“  (1288 downloads)
  2. Bouza, Carlos; Juárez, Octaviano; Santiago, Agustín: „Un estudio de las potencialidades del mercado para el consumo de agua purificada de la fuente de Azinyahualco“   (1183)
  3. Bauer, Thomas K.: „High Performance Workplace Practices and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from Europe“ (806)
  4. Mueller, Gerrit; Plug, Erik: „Estimating the Effect of Personality on Male-Female Earnings“ (577)
  5. Auria, Laura; Moro, Rouslan A.: „Support Vector Machines (SVM) as a technique for solvency analysis“ (553)