Scholarly Communication

Libraries have long served crucial roles in learning. The first great library, in Alexandria 2,000 years ago, was really the first university. It consisted of a zoo and various cultural artifacts in addition to much of the ancient world's written knowledge and attracted scholars from around the Mediterranean, who lived and worked in a scholarly community for years at a time. Today, the rhetoric associated with the National/Global Information Infrastructure (N/GII) always includes examples of how the vast quantities of information that global networks provide (i.e., digital libraries) will be used in educational settings [16].

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But what does “excellence” mean? Does it in fact mean anything at all? And is the pervasive narrative of excellence and competition a good thing? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning as used in the academy. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism or boundary object. To investigate whether linguistic function is useful we examine how excellence rhetoric combines with narratives of scarcity and competition and show that hypercompetition that arises leads to a performance of “excellence” that is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, as well as diversity to the stories we tell ourselves as researchers and offer an alternative rhetoric based on soundness. “Excellence” is not excellent, it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship.

This paper presents Jean-Claude Gardin’s distinctive approach to archaeological data, representation and knowledge in the context of his early engagement with semiotics and structural semantics and his grounding in fields as diverse as documentation, classification theory, material culture studies, argumentation theory and the philosophy of the human sciences. Pointing at Gardin’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the promises of automated classification and machine reasoning in archaeology, it shows that his approach goes beyond a normative, positivist conception of archaeological research, recognizing the contextual, theory-laden nature of archaeological data constitution, the priority of focusing on actual archaeological interpretation practices and the complementarity between narrative and formal representations of archaeological reasoning. It connects his early development of archaeological descriptive and typological metalanguages with his later elaboration of a theoretically informed approach to archaeological argumentation, analysis and publication, situates his logicist programme as a relevant contribution to the development of an archaeological “theory of practice”, grounded on reflexivity and modesty vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge and the limits of scientism, and highlights aspects of Gardin’s work that point to potentially fruitful directions for contemporary research and practice in the field of archaeological informatics and digital humanities communication.

Purpose
This paper presents an overview of different kinds of lists of scholarly publication channels and of experiences related to the construction and maintenance of national lists supporting performance-based research funding systems. It also contributes with a set of recommendations for the construction and maintenance of national lists of journals and book publishers.

Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on analysis of previously published studies, policy papers, and reported experiences related to the construction and use of lists of scholarly publication channels.

Findings
Several countries have systems for research funding and/or evaluation, that involve the use of national lists of scholarly publication channels (mainly journals and publishers). Typically, such lists are selective (do not include all scholarly or non-scholarly channels) and differentiated (distinguish between channels of different levels and quality). At the same time, most lists are embedded in a system that encompasses multiple or all disciplines. This raises the question how such lists can be organized and maintained to ensure that all relevant disciplines and all types of research are adequately represented.

Research limitation
The conclusions and recommendations of the study are based on the authors’ interpretation of a complex and sometimes controversial process with many different stakeholders involved.

Practical implications
The recommendations and the related background information provided in this paper enable mutual learning that may feed into improvements in the construction and maintenance of national and other lists of scholarly publication channels in any geographical context. This may foster a development of responsible evaluation practices.

Originality/value
This paper presents the first general overview and typology of different kinds of publication channel lists, provides insights on expert-based versus metrics-based evaluation, and formulates a set of recommendations for the responsible construction and maintenance of publication channel lists.

Purpose – The focus of this paper is to study the influence of social media on scholarly communication. The aim is to provide an overview of researchers’ use of Web 2.0 techniques, and
discuss a possible change of information behaviors in the context of scholarly communication.
Design/methodology/approach – A web survey was distributed to a targeted sample of university
staff (professors, teachers, researchers, and doctoral students). SPSS was utilized as a main tool to
synthesize and analyze data, and present the results.
Findings – Web 2.0 tools are well-known to researchers. Most researchers are familiar with blogs,
wikis, social networks, multimedia sharing, and online document. Social media provide a convenient
environment for scholarly communication. Depending on different aims within the scholarly communication process, researchers choose appropriate modes of communication in their research
work.
Research limitations/implications – A combination of content analysis with survey and/or interviews may highlight other aspects of Web 2.0, which is not possible using a single method of content analysis.
Originality/value – There are few studies on the changes of scholarly communication in the context
of Web 2.0. This study provides new insights for exploring the effects of Web 2.0 tools on scholarly
communication and the development of new information behavior to match the scholarly environment of social media.
of social media. This understanding can aid the researchers to keep abreast of new characteristics of
scholarly communication and help the librarians to develop the correlative services in the scholarly
environment of social media.

Geography means earth writing, and so it is perhaps fitting that writing itself has become a primary intellectual battleground in contemporary geographical thought. This paper advocates for metaphorical earth writing, arguing that it unchains our geographical imaginations from the shackles of our disciplinary past by boldly embracing geopoetics. I hope to spark debate by promoting the un-disciplining of geography as a means to open up a theoretical space for voice, where a material space of emancipation might follow. The notion that our epistemological, ontological, and methodological choices are not apolitical decisions without consequence guides my inquiry. Accordingly I critique the accusation of esotericism as a narrative that reifies the false dichotomy between academia and society. Aversion to metaphor fails to recognize the epistemological challenge it raises and underestimates how jargon combats commonsense notions that reinforce hierarchical power relations. How we write the earth constitutes a political choice, where disciplining others into a singular way of knowing, being, and doing geography is an affront to the possibilities of space. When we make space for earth writing as a beautiful flourishing of geopoetics, we place the earth at the center of experience, releasing the light and energy of a more powerful geography.

Open access (OA) has mostly been studied by relying on publication data from selective international databases, notably Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. The aim of our study is to show that it is possible to achieve a national estimate of the number and share of OA based on institutional publication data providing a comprehensive coverage of the peer-reviewed outputs across fields, publication types and languages. Our data consists of 48,177 journal, conference and book publications from 14 Finnish universities in 2016-2017, including information about OA status, as self-reported by researchers and validated by data-collection personnel through their Current Research Information System (CRIS). We investigate the WoS, Scopus and DOI coverage, as well as the share of OA outputs between different fields, publication types, languages, OA mechanisms (gold, hybrid and green), and OA information sources (DOAJ, Bielefeld list and Sherpa/Romeo). We also estimate the role of the largest international commercial publishers compared to the not-for-profit Finnish national publishers of journals and books. We conclude that institutional data, integrated at national and international level, provides one of the building-blocks of a large-scale data infrastructure needed for comprehensive assessment and monitoring of OA across countries, for example at the European level. 2

This chapter presents findings from a survey study regarding academics' use of YouTube videos for research and leisure. The results are based on a large-scale survey which reflects responses from over 1,800 researchers based at 12 Russell Group universities in the UK. The results suggest that YouTube has been a very popular entertainment tool. The majority of academics have watched YouTube videos for leisure purposes whilst almost half of them watched YouTube videos for academic purposes. However, active uses of YouTube for posting videos were still limited. There were some differences in the extent of active/passive use of YouTube between groups in terms of academic discipline, age and seniority. Academics who had received social media training, recommendations from colleagues, had teaching duties and positive attitudes towards YouTube as a means of dissemination, were more likely to post videos on YouTube for research purposes. Additionally, academics who owned a smartphone were more likely to post videos on YouTube for leisure purposes.

Develops a theoretical model to enable explanation and prediction of patterns of e-journal article reading across scientific fields. Studies have typically focused either on single disciplines or attempted to reach an overview by using broad disciplinary groupings. Attempts to reach a fuller understanding of distinct characteristics of scientific specialisms by extending Whitley's theory to information and communication practices, hence taking into account both epistemic and social aspects, which shape reading practices.

Nature and Science are two major multidisciplinary journals, well-known among the general public and highly-cited by scholarly communities. This article presents Google Trends, a web service providing detailed information on the Google search behavior of Internet users from all countries during the period 2004-2019 and illustrates the preference between Nature and Science. The research shows a general decrease of the demand for both journals and reveals a substantial growth in demand for Nature in some geographic regions and a decline of the interest to Science in many regions. We also found a better affinity to Nature by the general audience and a better affinity to Science in former USSR scholarly allies. This situation is explained on one hand by the editorial policy of the two journals and on the other hand by the influence of the cold war and its aftermath on worldwide scientific societies and the ongoing interest in research areas in different geographic regions.

... View all references; Lebow 200332. Lebow, Richard Ned. 2003. The tragic vision of politics , Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. [CrossRef] View all references) or even postpositivists (see Peterson 199951. Petersen, Ulrik Enemark. 1999. ...

YouTube is a particularly popular online video sharing site. It is not only used for entertainment and commercial purposes but also to disseminate and obtain information and knowledge concerning science and medicine. So far rather little is known about science and health communication via online video sharing websites such as YouTube. In this chapter the limited but growing research literature on scholarly communication, science and medicine on YouTube is reviewed and summarized. It shows the major research developments and points out omissions and gaps of knowledge. The chapter closes with an outlook and reflects on how recent internet research ideas could be used to better understand and analyze science and medicine on YouTube.
See also:
https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-94-024-1202-4#siteedition-academic-link

Objective: The current study seeks to provide estimates of the adequacy of journal coverage in the Social Work Abstracts (SWA) database. Method: A total of 23 journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports social work category during the 1997 to 2005 period were selected for study. Issue-level coverage estimates were obtained for SWA and PsycINFO, the comparison database. Results: Both databases provided less than optimal coverage of
social work journals, and SWA performed significantly worse than did PsycINFO. Both databases provided better coverage of National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Press journals than non–NASW Press journals. Conclusion: The results provide evidence of substantial deficits in SWA that merit serious concern.

This paper presents the findings from a survey study of UK academics and their publishing behaviour. The aim of this study is to investigate academics' attitudes towards and practice of open access (OA) publishing. The results are based on a survey study of academics at 12 Russell Group universities, and reflect responses from over 1800 researchers. This study found that whilst most academics support the principle of making knowledge freely available to everyone, the use of OA publishing among UK academics was still limited despite relevant established OA policies. The results suggest that there were differences in the extent of OA practice between different universities, academic disciplines, age and seniorities. Academics' use in OA publishing was also related to their awareness of OA policy and OA repositories, their attitudes towards the importance of OA publishing and their belief in OA citation advantage. The implications of these findings are relevant to the development of strategies for the implementation of OA policies.

The increasing popularity of academic social networking sites (ASNSs) requires studies on the usage of ASNSs among scholars, and evaluations of the effectiveness of these ASNSs. However, it is unclear whether current ASNSs have fulfilled their design goal, as scholars' actual online interactions on these platforms remain unexplored. To fill the gap, this paper presents a study based on data collected from ResearchGate. Adopting a mixed-method design by conducting qualitative content analysis and statistical analysis on 1128 posts collected from ResearchGate Q&A, we examine how scholars exchange information and resources, and how their practices vary across three distinct disciplines: Library and Information Services, History of Art, and Astrophysics.

Discourses on epistemology in a variety of disciplines have established the need for diverse and case-specific approaches to writing. This need is as actual in practice-based research and the relevant fields would benefit from better support of creative experimentation with academic expression. In order to demonstrate that advances in this area are necessary, this article examines advice and criteria for writing offered by a typical writing guide. The discussed examples demonstrate that while the recommendations of such guides are useful, their emphasis on standardisation is also limiting. The article contrasts the advice common to writing guides and other prescriptive documents with the current state-of-the-art practice in qualitative research, pointing out productive alternative approaches.