The digital age of publishing scholarly journals allows a wider variety of methods to evaluate usage and readership than that of traditional print articles. Online activity can be captured for each article almost immediately after publication, including number of times an article is viewed and downloaded or mentioned in online news outlets, twitter, blogs and other social media sites. (For more on altmetrics, see the earlier Unbound post.)
Thanks to support from the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) is adding a large body of legacy publications to its database this year. The source of the data is the annual reports of the United States National Museum (USNM) from the 1870s to the 1960s which often included an appendix listing staff publications. Some years there was no data listed, for example during World War II.
As noted elsewhere in this blog, the publication record of Smithsonian scholars includes a growing portion of open access (OA) articles. During 2012, nearly 14% of scientific papers authored by Smithsonian scientists were published in OA journals. This is up from 7% in 2008 and it is expected to grow.
In case you missed the news last week, a Smithsonian scientist has identified a new mammal species, one that is particularly fuzzy and cute. Meet the olinguito!
We are pleased to tell you that the paper describing the species, first published in the open access journal ZooKeys, can be found in the Libraries’ Digital Repository .
What if you could search the research output of hundreds of institutions in one place, gaining access to some of the most important research being done on any number of fields of interest?
One common problem with the Internet is that hyperlinks become outdated without web page editor awareness. Websites change URLs for a host of reasons and unfortunately when third parties link to them users end up encountering “page not found” and other dead-link errors. For this reason, many academic publishers use a system of unique identifiers for their online content to act as permanent links to articles thereby avoiding these errors.
The open access (OA) movement has a lot of moving parts. For example it has led some research funding agencies to mandate that research publications resulting from grants should be made publicly available. A recent memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy requires federal science agencies to prepare a policy for making the published results of scientific research available to the public. The Smithsonian Institution is now working to formalize its policy.