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.


60% of Journals Allow Immediate Archiving of Peer-Reviewed Articles

Posted: November 25th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 60% of Journals Allow Immediate Archiving of Peer-Reviewed Articles

Good news for Repository Managers:

According to new charts published on the SHERPA/RoMEO Blog 87% of journals allow some form of immediate self-archiving of articles, although in only 60% of cases is this a post-peer-reviewed version.
http://romeo.jiscinvolve.org/wp/?p=196
This rises impressively once embargo periods have expired and any other restrictions have been complied with, showing that 94% of journals permit peer-reviewed articles to be archived. Furthermore, nearly a quarter of journals allow the publisher’s version/PDF to be archived. Only 5% of journals do not permit any form of archiving.

The statistics were compiled from a snapshot of the RoMEO Journals database taken on the 15th Nov.2011, when it contained about 19,000 titles.