Blogs

Have you ever wondered how many scholarly documents can be located via the public web?  Two computer science researchers from the University of Pennsylvania set out to tackle this daunting task.

In a study recently published in PLOS ONE, Khasba and Giles (2014) report that “at least 114 million English-language scholarly documents” can be found via the open web and approximately 27 million (or 24%) of these items are open access.

Their study provides an analysis, by discipline, of the “percentage of publicly available scholarly documents” included in Google Scholar.  According to their research, the field of Computer Science is at the high end with approximately 50% of documents freely available via Google Scholar.  While Engineering, Materials Science, and Agricultural Science were tied at the low end with each of these fields having 12% of documents freely available from Google Scholar.

Here at the Center for Digital Scholarship we have been lucky to work with some very dedicated, creative, and knowledgeable IUPUI students. These students have played a huge part in the building of our collections through scanning, metadata creation, and even digital photography. Let's find out what some past student workers are doing now!

---------------------

Sami Norling

Sami Norling joined the Digital Scholarship Team during the second year in her dual MA Public History/MLS program at IUPUI. As a member of the team she worked on many of our digital collections with a special focus on the Indiana School for the Deaf and the Kinzer Papers from the Hamilton County Historical Society. Since graduating from IUPUI in August 2013, she has continued her career as the Archivist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and currently serves as a Community Representative for the Digital Public Library of America.

In November 2014 IUPUI University Library will mark 21 years in its current location.  In celebration we share 21 stories that highlight successes of the Library's past while speaking to its future.  Story 17 focuses on the IUPUI University Library Center for Digital Scholarship and its collaboration with Indianapolis community groups.

21 years. 21 stories.

Click below for story 17.

I recently attended the Federal Depository Library Conference in Washington D.C. Among the many interesting topics discussed, one in particular caught my attention and got me thinking about the way my duty as a documents librarian and as a member of our Digital Scholarship Team overlaps: promoting access to and preserving born-digital government information.

Over the past decade the amount of government information online far outpaced the number of documents printed by the Government Printing Office (GPO) for distribution through the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) (Jacobs, 2014). The sheer volume of this information makes both providing access (at least through bibliographic control) and ensuring preservation extremely difficult. What’s worse, much of this information is transitory and is lost when administrations change or Congressional committees disband.

Here at the Center for Digital Scholarship we have been lucky to work with some very dedicated, creative, and knowledgeable IUPUI students. These students have played a huge part in the building of our collections through scanning, metadata creation, and even digital photography. Let's find out what some past student workers are doing now!

--------------------

Justin Davis

Last Fall, September 2013, IUPUI launched an Open Access Publishing Fund. Faculty members that wish to publish an article in a trusted, fully open access journal, may apply to the Fund to support article processing fees. With the average article processing fee hovering at about $1,000, this is a great opportunity for IUPUI authors.

As of today, the Fund has encumbered or spent 30% of the available funds ($47,000) in supporting fees for ten articles.

Published:

The American Chemical Society (ACS), “the world’s largest scientific society” (ACS, 2014) is launching an open access journal, ACS Central Science. 

According to ACS this journal will be the society’s “first completely open access journal and the first highly selective, society-published, pure open access journal to cover the breadth of chemistry and its interfaces with research in the natural and physical sciences” (ACS, 2104). ACS Central Science will have no author fees and all articles will be openly available to the public. 

Read more about ACS and open access here.

American Chemical Society. (2014).  About ACS. Retrieved from http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/aboutacs.html

American Chemical Society. (2014).  Q&A about ACS Central Science. Retrieved from http://acsopenaccess.org/faqs/#central

You already know that the libraries on campus, including University Library, provide you with access to a wealth of information: journals, databases, books, and tools to help you manage information. We also provide instructional support and one-on-one consultations. What you may not know is that we can also help you find data for your senior research project, master's thesis, dissertation project, or your latest funding award. Some of the best and least known resources are below, but contact your subject librarian if you need help navigating them. This list is not comprehensive, so ask us for help if you can't find what you need!

Open Data

If you are a scholar who is on the fence about whether or not to get on the Open Access bandwagon, then consider this: It's your ethical duty as a researcher to share your research. As authors John Willinsky and Juan Pablo Alperin explain in their article, "The Academic Ethics of Open Access to Research and Scholarship,"

The ethics of access have to do with recognizing people's right to know what is known, as well as the value to humanity of having one of its best forms of arriving at knowledge as widely shared as possible. The level of access is often reduced by the financial interests of publishers in a market in which there is little sense of rational order, given huge discrepancies in prices for similar products.