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Teaching students how to employ their personal voice has always presented a unique challenge to composition instructors. Although teaching students how to engage in scholarly dialogue lies at the heart of every composition program, many students remain unsure, intimidated, and even skeptical of this mode of communication. As a result, research papers often take the form of unsupported monologues in which citations are merely ornamental, lengthy summaries, or numerous information resources are cited without one voice serving as an arbitrator. Library instructors face the same dilemma as composition instructors do when teaching students how to apply information to their research. Beyond teaching students how to identify an information need and to effectively and efficiently access and critically evaluate information, library instructors must teach students how information and personal voice are incorporated into research. In doing so, library instruction corrects the common misunderstanding that research equates to integrating resources into a prewritten paper, that any opinionated resource is acceptable to use, that the research process is similar to writing book reports, and that mediation between scholarly voices is unnecessary. By learning about personal voice in library instructional sessions, students begin to develop their own scholarly identity, understand the conversation of scholarship, and realize the function that their personal voice serves, as well as the strength and integrity that the research process lends to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's opinion on the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Consultation Paper. The author questions the initiative's suitability for a discipline like the philosophy of education and presents objections relating to the evaluation of the quality of research, research quality indicators, and the types of behavior the initiative hopes to encourage.

Objective: Students experience the excitement of scholarship by generating their own professional research papers in one semester Courses: Upper Division Communication Research Methods [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a survey aimed at gauging the potential acceptance of a collaborative and Web 2.0 inspired scholarly communication sector. While this sector has seen the birth of a multitude of innovative initiatives, there is still little empirical evidence of the acceptance of such initiatives by researchers. We received 349 completed questionnaires from researchers of many different disciplines. The results of the survey show that there is a strong positive attitude towards Web 2.0 and open publishing approaches. However, the major challenge still resides in combining free dissemination of results with robust and reliable quality control mechanisms. Serials Review 2011; 37:149-156. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cycle of scholarly communication is perpetuated by those who create, evaluate, disseminate, and consume research. This paper distinguishes that the stakeholders most directly involved in this process are researchers, academic publishers, and university libraries. Whereas researchers and libraries often submit and disseminate work for free, academic publishing companies monetize their product. In this instance, the product is research, and the clientele is university libraries, who are coerced into multiyear contracts with publishers, often costing in the upwards of millions, to tens of millions of dollars. With university library budgets squeezed thin, it could be advisable to seek alternative accessible sources, beyond that of the costly subscription journal. This exploratory study surveyed 110 academic professionals to investigate how these users engage with scholarly communication and use open access (OA) resources. The study found that though outcomes of commercialized academic publishing have disrupted the transfer of research, users are hesitant to rely solely upon OA sources, despite the perception that they are of equal value to traditional commercial sources. The author concludes that in order for research to be transferred fairly between all actors of scholarly communication, that both researchers and university libraries must strive to make OA resources commonplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite millions of dollars being spent on research each year in Canada, little attention is paid to the dissemination of the results of research. There is a disconnect between Canadian public policies in this area; although a high priority is assigned to the generation of research, there is a lack of policies addressing its dissemination. Meanwhile, the environment in which research knowledge is being disseminated is undergoing a profound transformation because of several important drivers. In particular, these drivers include new technology, changing research patterns, new users, economics, and commercialization. The major objective of this study was to examine the rapidly transforming environment in which research knowledge is disseminated and determine whether there is a need for a national research strategy to adapt to the new, dynamic scholarly communication environment in Canada. To address the latter question, the study adopted a consensus panel process. A consensus panel of 10 Canadian academic researchers from across Canada from a variety of disciplines and at different stages of their careers was recruited from over 70 volunteers. The objective of the panel was to reach a consensus on priorities for research into scholarly communication in Canada. The consensus panel identified five major themes in which there is a need for research in scholarly communication in Canada: Knowledge systems; knowledge/data storage and retrieval; power and infrastructure within the academy; knowledge production and the social contract; copyright and intellectual property. These themes are expanded upon in more detail in the full paper and specific research topics discussed. The results of this study also clearly support the creation of a more holistic and integrated knowledge ecosystem for scholarly communication. In its report, the consensus panel strongly recommended that, ‘a coherent national policy of knowledge preservation and dissemination must be devised to create a greater cohesion, accessibility, security and access to research findings’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is changing science and research. This paper focuses on the complex process of change of the scholarly communication system and how on we may explain the differences of ICT use among research fields. The author submits a heuristic model of change that sets ICT initially as an independent variable and systematizes a series of intervening variables. He distinguishes between institutional, functional/technical and actor-related factors that contribute to our overall understanding of the path of academe towards ‘cyberscience’. It turns out that the ICT-induced development and hence the differences between research specialities cannot be explained by a small, parsimonious set of factors. The resulting picture is one of multiple causation with a strong emphasis on cultural aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge graphs facilitate the discovery of information by organizing it into entities and describing the relationships of those entities to each other and to established ontologies. They are popular with search and e-commerce companies and could address the biggest problems in scientific communication, according to Sören Auer of the Technische Informationsbibliothek and Leibniz University of Hannover. In his NASIG vision session, Auer introduced attendees to knowledge graphs and explained how they could make scientific research more discoverable, efficient, and collaborative. Challenges include incentivizing researchers to participate and creating the training data needed to automate the generation of knowledge graphs in all fields of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a vision session at the 31st NASIG Annual Conference, Heather Joseph provided an assessment of the Open Access movement addressing how far it has come since its inception, how well it has met its original goals, what has and has not worked well, and what is not happening at all. She talked about the importance of open (in all senses--open access, open education, and open data) as a public good, and shared feedback from a recent strategic review of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and the Open Access movement. Joseph also explored the implications of using open as an enabling strategy for researchers, scholarly publishers, policymakers, and the larger academic community, and emphasized the importance of deliberately considering what outcomes open can help each community achieve--rather than thinking about open as an end to itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on participation by Kenyan scholars in collaborative networks, specifically the extent of scholars’ participation in professional societies; levels of scholarly interactions among colleagues in universities in Kenya, and the nature of scholarly collaboration between scholars in Kenya and their international peers. The study’s theoretical lens was the Social Network Theory and employed a survey within a multiple case study design. Data was collected from 350 faculty and 370 postgraduate students using self-administered questionnaires. The study implied that limited participation by scholars in collaborative networks hinders creation of new knowledge and lowers scholars’ research productivity. The study recommends institutional interventions to nurture scholarly collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the academic world becomes increasingly aware of the need to improve the dissemination of research, this article considers some of the theoretical issues involved in the communication of research to non-specialist audiences. It also demonstrates how theory can be put into practice using the case study of a UNICEF Innocenti Report Card on childhood injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citations have a central role in the dynamic process of knowledge development and as measures of research performance – yet little is known about their role in educational research or the qualities they are assumed to measure. Based on a citation context analysis, this study shows how a paradigmatic reference within classroom research has been used in 90 articles in educational research journals. Four types of content and four citation functions were identified in the immediate context of the citation symbols. Surprisingly, no critical citations or discussions of the validity of the cited study were found. The results are discussed in relation to the conditions for communication within a field without disciplinary cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dissatisfaction between students and faculty is not uncommon, but the majority of students do not complain to their instructors when they have issues that need addressing. Because complaining to instructors gives them the potential to fix student problems, we conducted this study to determine why students choose not to complain to their instructors when they experience dissatisfaction. We used a qualitative approach to answering this question and asked a sample of 186 participants to report their reasons for withholding rhetorical dissent. Our data indicated that students withheld dissent from their instructors due to organizational factors and, to a lesser extent, relational and personal factors. We discuss these results and identify implications for instructors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open access (OA) publishing is now accepted as an integral part of the emerging trends within scholarly communication. Business librarians, like their subject specialist colleagues in other disciplines, are increasingly called upon to interpret scholarly communication trends to their faculty. This study surveys 1,293 business faculty from American schools of business accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Issues explored include business faculty publishing practices within the discipline and how these affect academic advancement, obtaining articles for their own research, electronic publishing, self-archiving, and their perceptions about OA publishing generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of open access publishing, the development of institutional repositories, and the availability of millions of digitized monographs and journals are rapidly changing scholarly communication. This case study looks at the current and possible uses of these tools by Michigan's three largest universities: Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University. The authors explore their usefulness in fostering collaboration within the University Research Corridor (URC), an alliance of the three universities, as a specific example of scholarly research collaborations. The study also examines whether any shared use of these tools would further the related missions of the URC as well as their member universities and libraries toward the ultimate goal of helping the Michigan economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Future Voices in Public Services column is a forum for students in graduate library and information science programs to discuss key issues they see in academic library public services, to envision what they feel librarians in public service have to offer to academia, to tell us of their visions for the profession, or to tell us of research that is going on in library schools. We hope to provide fresh perspectives from those entering our field, in both the United States and other countries. Interested faculty of graduate library and information science programs, who would like their students' ideas represented in these pages, are invited to contact Nancy H. Dewald at nxd7@psu.edu. Brigitte Burris is a graduate student at Drexel University's iSchool and also works as a librarian at the University of Pennsylvania. At a time when many librarians hope for the expansion of open access to scholarly resources, Burris here proposes a method of adding attributes to articles in institutional repositories in order to increase faculty members' incentive for depositing their scholarly articles. ***** The iSchool at Drexel's Master of Science in Library and Information Science, MS(LIS), is the second oldest program of its kind in the nation, and one of just 56 ALA-accredited programs. More technologically oriented than other programs, the MS(LIS) prepares graduates for a wide variety of positions including academic librarian, knowledge management specialist, systems librarian, digital librarian, Web developer, and competitive intelligence analyst. The 2009 edition of U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Graduate Schools" rated the MS(LIS) program 11th in the nation overall, with specialties in information systems and digital librarianship ranking fifth and sixth, respectively. The iSchool at Drexel's faculty has been nationally recognized, ranked by Academic Analytics, a third party company benchmarking academic excellence, as 8th in the nation for scholarly productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To help students learn to identify dependent and independent research variables. Course: Communication Research Methods (suitable for online or face-to-face class) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the process of disseminating scientific information to the public by analyzing cold-fusion research. Major issues involved in the study of scholarly communication and three stages of scientific communication cycle; Description of popularized scientific idea with regard to social representations of science; Details on cold-fusion issue culture and package; Importance of popularization in scientific idea.