JISC

Lara Burns, Nicki Dennis, Deobrah Kahn and Bill Town, April 2009

Report summary

The results of a research project into the communications needs of scholars working in economics and chemistry.

JISC wishes to encourage the use of new technologies, and discipline-based advocacy programmes are needed to do that. This report was designed to find out the resources available to scholars in economics and chemistry, how they communicate now, what they require and how advocacy programmes might work for them in the future.

A desk-based overview and literature review first summarises the new technologies available to researchers and past articles that have been written about academics’ information literacy. They also look at how much academics are sharing the results of their work – and how easy it is for them to do so. Open Access – and how to make it work more effectively – is one of the key subject areas here. They bring out the key points that advocacy needs to be long-term, tailored to individual disciplines and aimed at creating cultural change.

There is then a more specific overview and history of communications within chemistry and a look at more recent developments with particular reference to Open Access  (and current projects like current projects like SPECTRa) and “data mining” – the process of digging through data to find trends using sophisticated statistical analysis and modelling techniques.

Economics follows, following the same format. They note that although economists are less likely to share their results, they are keeping up with communications technology.

The survey itself is based on 440 responses from chemists and 252 from economists. They are shown to use a wide variety of teaching and research resources. These are detailed in the report. The researchers note that books are still heavily used. The economists use more Web 2.0 resources in teaching than chemists. They are more likely to store data on their own computers than in repositories and they communicate primarily through email, phone and email lists. Though again, they use a wide variety of methods.

The main inhibitors to using new technologies were lack of time, training and institutional financial support.

The discussion reiterates the need for advocacy plans looks at way s to make them effective. It suggests organisations to work with when planning this advocacy such as CHUDE and Economists Online. They put forward a number of general discipline-tailored action plans to put the advocacy programmes into effect.

Key points

“…the way that the RAE judges the work of economists actively discourages collaboration.”

“Data is still often seen as a private resource within economics.”

“… it has become clear that advocacy needs to be linked to specific researcher priorities and needs at a subject level and should take into account the local culture and infrastructure of the organisation.”

“…researchers need to be convinced by their peers within their discipline of the efficacy of any innovation.”

“…over 20% in both disciplines do not know the difference between copyright assignment contracts and licence to publish agreements – which suggests that advocacy is needed in this area.”

“…research data is still mainly stored on researchers own computers or in paper format, with only a proportion of the data being stored in departmental, institutional or national repositories. Despite the large amount of advocacy being carried out around data repositories, this implies that behaviour has not changed very much.”

How researchers can move to OA

More advocacy around how researchers can apply for OA publication funds is needed:

The issues researchers have about protecting their discoveries and copyright need to be addressed in order to encourage data sharing.

“In a recent survey for the JISC Scholarly Communications Group, only 28% of biomedical researchers in Higher Education Institution believed that they had not received any guidance from their employer on the payment of publication fees…”

Institutions

“An example of where policies and practice need to change and where those changes need to be adequately communicated is around open access mandates.”

Read the full report (PDF)