Singapore Celebrates Open Access Week 2014

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.

2014 Highly Cited Researchers by Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters has revealed the people behind the most influential research, the Highly Cied Researchers in different research fields of science. Data deriving from InCites Essential Science Indicators.

The 2014 highly cited researchers could be searched by their names, institutions, and subjects via site: http://highlycited.com/.  It originally known as ISIHighlyCited, first launched in 2001. ISIHighlyCited identified researchers according to the total citations to their work. The new compilation of highly cited rsearchers adopted a different approach by analyzing at citation data over the last 11 years to identify those who published the highest-impact work (2002 – 2012 and 2012 – 2013).

In addition to the site, the highly cited researchers are compiled in a report,The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014. The 1st part of the report spotlighting on 17 hottest-of-the-hot researchers who have published the greatest number of hot papers (ranked in top 1% by citation for their field) during 2012-2013. Prof Zhang Hua from the School of Materials Science & Engineering, NTU made it to 17 list of scientists with 16 hot papers. The 2nd part of the report lists 3200 researchers who published the hightest number of highily cited papers (ranked in the top 1% by citations for their field and year of publication) in one of the 21 broad field from 2002 to 2012.

Interested in this topic? Visit  ScienceWatch.com for more information.

ORCID – What, Why and How

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID and is a unique and persistent digital identifier to let you distinguish yourself from other researchers, specifically those who have the same names or initials as you.

By using ORCID, your scholarly works can be correctly attributed to you right at the point of publishing and you will have an easier way to consolidate your publications and citation counts in indexing databases such as Scopus and Web of Science.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Register for ORCID at https://orcid.org/register

  • Complete the form and click “Register”
  • You will receive an email. Click on the link in the email to verify your email address
  • Your registration is complete

201403_ORCID_Register

  Step 2: Add information about yourself

  • We recommend that you complete at least the “Employment” portion so that you can be easily distinguished from other authors of the same name.

Under Employment please add “Nanyang Technological University”.

201403_ORCID_Employment

Integration between ORCID and Citation Databases

You can also integrate your ORCID with citation indexes such as Scopus & Web of Science (via ResearcherID). This way, ORCID will have a consolidated list of your publications that are indexed in these 2 databases. Also, Scopus & Web of Science (via ResearcherID) will be able to recognize your ORCID and reduce author ambiguity thus allowing  author attribution to take place faster and more accurately.

We strongly recommend that you choose only ONE database (Scopus or Web of Science) to integrate with ORCID. This is because, at this point, ORCID platform cannot distinguish duplicate articles.

For example, if you integrate ORCID with both Scopus and Web of Science and you have an article that is indexed in both databases, this article will appear twice in your ORCID. You will have to manually remove duplicate articles from your ORCID profile. Therefore, we recommend that you choose the database that best showcases your publication & research to be integrated with ORCID.

More information on integrating ORCID to Scopus & Web of Science:

1.  Web Of Science (Via ResearcherID)

Information:  http://wokinfo.com/researcherid/integration

2.  Sciverse Scopus

Information: http://blog.scopus.com/posts/scopus-author-identifiers-further-linking-with-orcid

Scopus2ORCID Feedback Wizard:  http://orcid.scopusfeedback.com/

 

Should you need assistance with regards to ORCID, ResearcherID or Scopus Author ID,  please contact scholarlycomm@ntu.edu.sg.

 

Open Access Journals – take note of predatory OA publishers

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

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.