EconStor in February 2012

Posted: March 6th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Comments Off on EconStor in February 2012

In February 2012 we have added about 1,000 papers to EconStor, including these new working paper and book series:

The 36,500 full texts from EconStor have been downloaded 96,621 times in the last month.  The Top 5 most downloaded papers in February were:

  1. Yadav, Pradeep K.; Megginson, William L.; Chakrabarti, Rajesh: „Corporate governance in India“ (1322 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“ (1185)
  3. Bauer, Thomas K.: „High Performance Workplace Practices and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from Europe“ (850)
  4. Pon, Bryan; Kenney, Martin: „Structuring the smartphone industry: Is the mobile internet OS platform the key?“ (620)
  5. Gottschalk, Jan: „An Introduction into the SVAR Methodology: Identification, Interpretation and Limitations of SVAR models“ (464)

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)

Researcher Initiative for Publishing reform

Posted: January 30th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on Researcher Initiative for Publishing reform

Under the headline “The Cost of Knowledge” more than 7000 researchers protest against Elsevier’s business practices.

Their main request is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work (e.g. via Open Access business models). As long as Elsevier does not comply with that, the signing researchers refrain to do any publishing, refereeing or editorial work for Elsevier journals. The initiative started in the mathematical science, but also several Economists have signed the petition.


Final Report of PEER analyses current publication process

Posted: January 23rd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , | Comments Off on Final Report of PEER analyses current publication process

The EU-funded project PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) analyses the scholarly publication process with a focus the impact of repositories on journal publishing.

The final report, which is now available (http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/) states the importance of  the  right publication strategy:

“Today, the distinctions between the three [scholarly research publication] models (subscription based, OA or repositories) are blurred, although it is becoming clear that the success of OA journals and repositories – as is the case for subscription based journals – depends on the strategies of individual players, and not merely OA status. The success of BioMed Central and PLoS  proves that OA status does not equate in principle to lower quality of research as was suggested initially by some concerned authors. At the same time, OA status does not in itself automatically lead to higher citation and visibility for the authors. In the case of repositories, while some (such as REPEC and ArXiv) succeeded in becoming a starting point and not just a destination in scholarly search (i.e. a site actively searched for and not referred to via a keyword based search), many other repositories are less visible.”

 


Working Papers on RePEc are much more used than Journal Articles

Posted: November 28th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off on Working Papers on RePEc are much more used than Journal Articles

RePEc, one of EconStor’s strong partners in disseminating and showcasing research output in Economics has released new figures on the usage of it’s papers. In their latest blog entry they say:

While a majority [of the papers] are from journals (61%), online working papers are much more popular. While an article is download on average once every two months, working papers are downloaded close to once a month.

http://blog.repec.org/2011/11/26/1-million-works-available-online-through-repec/


EconStor is now among the TOP20 RePEc archives

Posted: November 25th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on EconStor is now among the TOP20 RePEc archives

Increased visibility for German research publications in Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is the most important database for publications in economics, currently holding more than one million bibliographic records. Many of the documents are in Open Access and therefore freely accessible on the internet. The RePEc database has a worldwide scope and offers researchers and institutions relevant functions such as citation analysis, alerting services and rankings to measure their research output and its impact. Renowned academic publishers such as Elsevier, Blackwell-Wiley and Springer also use the database as a multiplier for their journals. Moreover, RePEc is the largest scholars’ network in its field with more than 30,000 registered economic researchers.

As a national service institution for RePEc, the Open Access publication server EconStor organises the publication records for nearly one hundred German institutions and advises them and their researchers on the optimal use of RePEc. This service is free of charge and includes not only the uploads of publications but also the provision and processing of the title data such as abstracts, author keywords and classifications. Based on publication agreements with the institutions, publications are permanently archived on EconStor and made available in Open Access. Documents are searchable not only in RePEc, but also in Google and other economic portals such as EconBiz and Economists Online.

Publications from economics faculties at universities, but also from research institutes of the Leibniz Association, the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the Helmholtz Association and the German research association Verein für Socialpolitik add up to more than 32,000 titles in EconStor. Among these publications are working and discussion papers, journal articles and conference contributions. The RePEc service of EconStor was initially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is now sustainably maintained by a team of ZBW experts.