Awareness, Attitudes and Participation of Teaching Staff Towards the Open Content Movement in One University / Peter Reed

Abstract

This research investigates the current awareness of, and participation in, the open content movement at one UK institution for higher education. The open content movement and the open educational resources can be seen as potential methods for reducing time and cost of technology-enhanced learning developments; however, its sustainability and, to some degree, its success are dependent on critical mass and large-scale participation. Teaching staff were invited to respond to a questionnaire. Respondents (n59) were open to the idea of sharing their own content and, similar to other studies, demonstrated existing practices of sharing resources locally amongst colleagues; however, there was little formal, large-scale sharing using suitable licenses. The data gathered concurs with other research suggesting a lack of awareness to the Creative Commons licenses as well as a lack of participation in large open educational resource repositories.
Keywords: open educational resources; staff attitudes; sustainability

(Published: 22 October 2012)

Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2012, 20: 18520

http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0.18520

Source and Links to Full Text Available At 

[http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/18520]

Visualizing Tweets Linking to a Paper

Martin Fenner / Posted: July 14, 2012

DNA Barcoding the Native Flowering Plants and Conifers of Wales has been one of the most popular new PLoS ONE papers in June. In the paper Natasha de Vere et al. describe a DNA barcode resource that covers the 1143 native Welsh flowering plants and conifers.

My new job as technical lead for the PLoS Article Level Metrics (ALM) project involves thinking about how we can best display the ALM collected for this and other papers. We want these ALM to tell us something important and/or interesting, and it doesn’t hurt if the information is displayed in a visually appealing way. There are many different ways this can be done, but here I want to focus on Twitter and CiteULike, the only two data sources where PLoS is currently storing every single event (tweet or CiteULike bookmark) with a date. Usage data (HTML and XML views, PDF downloads) are aggregated on a monthly basis, and PLoS doesn’t store the publication dates of citations.

We know from the work of Gunter Eysenbach and others that most tweets linking to scholarly papers are written in the first few days after publication. It therefore makes sense to display this information on a timeline covering the first 30 days after publication, and the tweets about the de Vere paper follow the same pattern.

[more]

Source and Full Text Available At 

[http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2012/07/14/visualizing-tweets-linking-to-a-paper/]

altmetrics12 > An ACM Web Science Conference 2012 Workshop

Evanston, IL • 21 June 2012

Keynotes (9:00-10:00)

• Johann Bollen
• Gregg Gordon

Coffee break (10:00-10:30)

Paper presentations (10:30-01:00)

Position and theory papers, 10min each (10:30-11:30)

• Martin Fenner / Altmetrics will be taken personally at PLoS (presentation)
• William Gunn and Jan Reichelt / Social metrics for research: quantity and quality (presentation)
• Elizabeth Iorns / Reproducibility: an important altmetric
• Britt Holbrook / Peer review, altmetrics, and ex ante broader impacts assessment – a proposal
• Kelli Barr / The Role of altmetrics and Peer Review in the Democratization of Knowledge (chalkboard notes)

Empirical papers, 15min each (11:30-1:00)

• Judit Bar-Ilan / JASIST@mendeley
• Jasleen Kaur and Johan BollenStructural Patterns in Online Usage (presentation)
• Vincent Larivière, Benoit Macaluso, Staša Milojević, Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Mike Thelwall / Of caterpillars and butterflies: the life and afterlife of an arXiv e-print
• Jason Priem, Heather Piwowar and Bradley Hemminger / Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact (presentation)
• Jennifer Lin / A Case Study in Anti-Gaming Mechanisms for Altmetrics: PLoS ALMs and DataTrust (presentation)
• Richard Price / Altmetrics and Academia.edu

Lunches on your own (1:00-2:00p)

Demos (2:00-3:00p)

• total-impact (Heather Piwowar)
• altmetric.com (Euan Adie) (presentation)
• PLoS ALM (Martin Fenner)
• Ubiquity Press metrics (Brian Hole)
• Plum Analytics (Andrea Michalek)
• BioMed Central metrics (Ciaran O’Neill)
• Academia.edu (Richard Price)
• Knode (David Steinberg)
• CASRAI (David Baker)
• Mendeley and ReaderMeter (William Gunn)
• Academia.edu (Richard Price)

Group discussion (3:00-4:30p)

We’ll split into small groups to discuss key altmetrics issues; topics may include:

• Gaming: how might it happen, and how do we stop it?
• Standards: We’ve got COUNTER for downloads; should there be standards for other altmetrics? What should they look like?
• Visualization: There’s a lot of data. How should we display it?
• Peer review: Could altmetrics replace traditional peer review? Should it? Can we build new publishing models around altmetrics?
• CVs and “impact dashboards”: What does an altmetrics-informed CV look like? Who wants (and doesn’t want) one?
• Publishers: What do publishers want from altmetrics services? How about readers and authors?
• Normalization: How do we compare metrics from different fields or disciplines?

Group presentations and discussion (4:30-5:30p)

Summing up (5:30-6:00p)

Conclusion (Summarize key points from live and online discussion)

Open discussion: what’s the next year of altmetrics look like?

Dinners

Source and Presentation Links Available At 

[http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics12/program/]

Slideshare > NISO Webinar: Beyond Publish or Perish: Alternative Metrics for Scholarship

November 14, 2012
1:00 - 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time)

[snip]

About the Webinar

Increasingly, many aspects of scholarly communication—particularly publication, research data, and peer review—undergo scrutiny by researchers and scholars. Many of these practitioners are engaging in a variety of ways with Alternative Metrics (#altmetrics in the Twitterverse). Alternative Metrics take many forms but often focus on efforts to move beyond proprietary bibliometrics and traditional forms of peer referencing in assessing the quality and scholarly impact of published work. Join NISO for a webinar that will present several emerging aspects of Alternative Metrics.

Source and Q&A and Slideshare Only Available At

[http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/nisowebinars/alternative_metrics/]

Reusing, Revising, Remixing and Redistributing Research

An OA Week guest post by Daniel Mietchen

The initial purpose of Open Access is to enable researchers to make use of information already known to science as part of the published literature. One way to do that systematically is to publish scientific works under open licenses, in particular the Creative Commons Attribution License that is compatible with the stipulations of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and used by many Open Access journals. It allows for any form of sharing of the materials by anyone for any purpose, provided that the original source and the licensing terms are shared alongside. This opens the door for the incorporation of materials from Open Access sources into a multitude of contexts both within and outside traditional academic publishing, including blogs and wikis.

Amongst the most active reusers of Open Access content are Wikimedia projects like the over 280 Wikipedia, Wikispecies and their shared media repository, Wikimedia Commons. In the following, a few examples of reusing, revising, remixing and redistributing Open Access materials in the context of Wikimedia projects shall be highlighted.

[more]

Source and Full Text Available At 

[http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2012/10/23/reusing-revising-remixing-and-redistributing-research/]

Slideshare > Current and Future Effects of Social Media-Based Metrics on Open Access and IRs

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/100668456/Current-and-Future-Effects-of-Social-Media-Based-Metrics-on-Open-Access-and-IRs]

The Power of Post Publication Review: A Case Study

There are many discussions and examples of post-publication review as an alternative to the currently more common peer-review model. While this comes up fairly regularly in my Twitter stream, I don’t think I’ve done more than hint at it within the blogposts here. I’ve also been watching (but neglecting to mention here) the emergence of data journalists and data journalism as a field, or perhaps perhaps I should say co-emergence, since it seems to be tightly coupled with shifts in the field of science communication and communicating risk to the public. Obviously, these all tie in tightly with the ethical constructs of informed consent and shared decisionmaking in healthcare (the phrase from the 1980s) which is now more often called participatory medicine.

That is quite a lot of jargon stuffed into one small paragraph. I could stuff it equally densely with citations to sources on these topics, definitions, and debates. Instead, for today, I’d like to give a brief overview of a case I’ve been privileged to observe unfolding over the weekend. If you want to see it directly, you’ll have to join the email list where this took place.

[more]

Source and Full Text Available At 

[http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/the-power-of-post-publication-review-a-case-study/]