Review: "Who's Selecting Now?" | Main | Scholarly Communication On The Go
December 04, 2007
What's the Use?: A New Look at the Impact of Scholarly Communication
Coleman, Anita Sundaram and Cheryl Knott Malone. "Scholarly Communication and the Matter of Use." Journal
of Education for Library and Information Science 47, no. 1 {Winter 2006}: 1-3. http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.
com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/hww/shared/shared_main.jhtml?_requestid=51495 {accessed December 3, 2007}.
The prevalent view among academics is that the citation of their scholarly writings by other scholars is the only type of use that really counts or has an impact. The primary reason for this is that citation is very important for tenure and promotion at most major universities. Anita Coleman, an assistant professor in the School of Information Resources and Library Science at The University of Arizona, argued in her presentation at the 2006 conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education that this narrow view of the impact of scholarly communication is missing out on other types of uses that really matter, such as how many times an article is read or viewed online or the impact that an article available in an open-access database has on research in developing countries.
For her research, Dr. Coleman examined the usage statistics of several articles originally published in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science and later digitized and made available through dLIST, an open-access repository. In the first year of open access, the abstracts were viewed 5,008 times and the articles were downloaded 1,035 times. One article from 1996 was viewed 527 times and downloaded 111 times in its first year on the Internet. Its abstract has been viewed at least once in every one of the thirty-one countries that dList is available in and the full text of the article has been viewed in many of these countries, including Brazil and Indonesia. An added benefit of placing the articles in an open-access database for those concerned about being cited is that after becoming openly accessible, two of the articles were cited in scholarly journals.
Several conclusions can be drawn from Dr. Coleman's presentation. The first one is that a multidimensional model for evaluating scholarly articles and the journals that publish these articles needs to be developed that focuses more on usage statistics and other important factors. Coleman notes that some progress has been made in this area. Usage statistics have recently started to play a significant role in evaluating journals for collection development purposes in libraries. The second conclusion is that academics need to become more open to publishing their scholarly writings in open-access journals so that these articles can be available to many more people, especially those in developing countries who cannot pay for access but would benefit from it. Coleman also stated in her presentation that an additional benefit of open-access journals for scholars is that many more people have access to them and having people read their work is always gratifying to any author!
Article available at the UTK Libraries via Education Full Text (Wilson Web).
--Posted by Andrea Gales
Posted by colldev at December 4, 2007 05:19 PM