Search

The paper will present OPERAS, a comprehensive infrastructure aimed at providing a pan-European infrastructure to rethink and reshape publishing, discovery and dissemination addressing the specificity and the critical issues of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The paper will try to set the scene examining the status of scholarly communication, the developments of Open Access and Open Science, and the specific demands for SSH. A second part will outline how OPERAS meets these needs, taking care of all the steps of the scholarly communication cycle. OPERAS unique approach is to unite researchers, libraries and publishers in a common effort, in order to take back control over scholarly communication. Not merging nor replacing, but nurturing existing realities, OPERAS provides innovative services to bring SSH into Open Science. OPERAS is designed to elaborate effective and scalable long-term strategies for the future development of the digital infrastructure and community building needed to innovate scholarly communication in the SSH. OPERAS pervading idea of science as communication holds an immense potential for an inspiring model of Open Science with direct societal impact, based on continuous communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wikipedia Library (TWL) is an international project supported by Wikimedia Foundation, which aims to provide library and reference services to Wikipedia editors and readers; this is making possible the direct access to bibliographic references which support "all human knowledge". The Wikipedia Library is pursuing ambitious goals through the partnership with scientific publishers and services like the Internet Archive. The success of this young project comes from partnership and collaboration with expert librarians. This paper explains technical solutions, projects and TWL partnerships, which lead great advantages for Wikipedians, readers, and librarians and which prelude an integration even more close between Wikipedia and libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is known, the creation of academic journals in a digital environment, as well as their transformation from print to online, is constantly growing. This trend is in its maturity thanks to the spread of journal management and publishing softwares. Open Journal System by the Public Knowledge Project is one of the most widespread software for this purpose, with over 7,000 new International journals using it in 2013. The aim of this paper is to analyze OJS functionalities and to verify their application on two Italian academic journals as case-study. These are two publishing projects belonging different disciplines: Annals of Geophysics has a long tradition in the geophysics; Between, started in 2009, collects contributions on theory and history of comparative literature. The research finds its basis in the analysis of applications and online platforms examined, combined with interviews to John Willinsky - PKP Director, and to the journal managers. From this observation point, moreover, the tangible relationship between software architecture and planning and academic publishing projects comes out. In the end, this investigation helps to define OJS cultural and political role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two-days conference "Open Access to research data as a driver for Open Science" (Athens, 15-16 January 2015), as the final event of the RECODE project (Policy RECommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe) has been a unique occasion to think about Open Access to research data as a way to move towards Open science. High-level speakers and an active audience have discussed on values, risks, opportunities, open issues, best practices; the aim of this paper is to deal with the complexity of these issues and to give a taste of the importance of open data in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]