Author Archives: Ang Samantha

About Ang Samantha

A member of the Digital Scholarship team who enjoys both sedentary activities and being in the outdoors.

Singapore Celebrates Open Access Week 2014

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Join us in celebrating   International Open Access Week, Oct 20-26, 2014

Did you know ….

– Individual articles can often be made Open Access (OA) by the author, even if they are published in a subscription based journal

– Many journal publishers (eg. Elsevier, Sage, Springer) allow authors to deposit a version of their articles in an institutional repository

– Once in a repository, articles can be discovered via Google / Google Scholar, and the full text can be freely accessed

– Greater access means a larger potential readership, and may lead to more citations

– Singapore research funding agencies and universities have OA policies

How much do you know about Open Access?

Test your knowledge by taking NTU’s OA Week Quiz (URL link), and have a chance to win an iPad Mini!

Other institutions in Singapore celebrating OA Week include :
A*STAR
NIE
NUS
SMU

For more information about Open Access Week and OA :

  • Open Access Week: A global annual event which aims to raise awareness on the potential benefits of OA.
  • Open Access Directory: A comprehensive and up-to-date wiki on all matters relating to OA.
  • Open Access at NTU: Find out more about open access and how to get involved!
  • ROARMAP: A registry of OA mandates adopted by funders and institutions around the world (including Singapore).
  • A*STAR OA Policy: Effective from 1 Aug 2013.
  • SPARC: An international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.
  • Richard Poynder’s blog: Poynder has been described as the “chronicler, conscience, and gadfly laureate” of the OA movement. The blog captures his writings and interviews with funding & research administrators, researchers & scientists, publishers on matters related to OA.

Open Access Journals – take note of predatory OA publishers

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As more researchers embrace the idea and attractions of publishing their papers in open access (OA) journals, they are faced with a wide selection of journals to choose from.

Among these OA journals, there are titles that are managed by reputable publishers and others that were recently established and run by unfamiliar publishing houses. Despite the pressure to publish, scholars still need to be highly selective and submit their manuscripts to OA journals of good standing.

There isn’t a prescriptive list of reputable OA journals but there is a list of OA publishers with questionable practices.

Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, has been closely watching the OA publishing scene and have identified a number of dubious or questionable OA publishers. He refers to them as predatory publishers and provided a list of publishers on his blog. In addition, he provided some criteria for determining predatory OA publishers.

We strongly recommend that scholars read the reviews, assessments and descriptions provided in his blog, and decide whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.

Learn more about Open Access & OA Theses

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What is Open Access?   It is free, immediate and online access to published scholarly research and articles.

In August 2011, NTU Provost Prof Freddy Boey announced an institution-wide Open Access mandate which requires
1) all staff to deposit their final accepted manuscripts in the institutional repository DR-NTU, and
2) PhD and other research theses, in DR-NTU, to be made open access.

Many universities, eg. MIT, HKU, Caltech, Cambridge, ETH, have also made their theses open access. You can now further your literature review and easily access these OA theses collections and leverage on research done by graduate students in NTU and from other institutions around the world.

Tips on searching for Open Access theses :

a) Search DR-NTU for NTU OA theses,
b) Search OATD.org to extend discovery to freely available theses from other repositories as well.
OATD indexes open access theses from over 800 institutional repositories around the world, including NTU’s. To date, there are close to 1.9 million records in OATD.org.

Contact scholarlycomm@ntu.edu.sg to learn more about open access theses or DR-NTU.

If you need assistance with your research, contact your personal subject librarian.

NISO to develop standards for altmetrics

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Type ‘altmetrics’ in google scholar today and it will pull out more than 4,000 records. Interest and discussion in the use of alternative metrics to measure research impact is growing but there is no agreement on what gets measured, what are the criteria used for assessing quality of the measures, etc. The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has taken the lead to address these questions and to “develop community-based standards or recommended practices in altmetrics”.

In their June 2013 press release, Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, stated that “The creation of altmetrics standards and best practices will facilitate the community trust in altmetrics, which will be a requirement for any broad-based acceptance, and will ensure that these altmetrics can be accurately compared and exchanged across publishers and platforms.”

This project is scheduled to complete within 2 years.

altmetrics : how librarians can help prepare faculty?

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In their 5 page document, Riding the crest of the altmetrics wave : how librarians can help prepare faculty for the next generation of research impact metrics, the authors Scott Lapinski, Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem suggest the following :

1. Know the literature : eg. . keep current on the discussion around altmetrics.
2. Know the tools :
3. Integrate altmetrics into library outreach and education