Report: Equitable access to research in a changing world

Released in June 2020, a new consultancy report titled “Equitable access to research in a changing world: Research4Life Landscape and Situation Analysis”. This surveys the pressures on the Research4Life aid programmes. Established 20 years ago, Research4Life gives developing countries “free or low-cost” online access to journals and books from some 175 publishers. Along with other aid initiatives, this means that African universities often have better free access to journal databases than do some academics in advanced nations. The new report makes no recommendations, but a key point to note is that…

… some of the most relevant and influential research undertaken in low-and-middle income countries happens outside academia: in specialised research institutes, think tanks, or government-backed research agencies. In some countries, research agencies and institutes conduct research in national priority areas and have direct access to and influence on decision-makers” [yet] “these non-governmental organisations have in the past been excluded from open access debates, and may be unable to take advantage of initiatives such as Research4Life.

It could be useful to quantify that “may”, through further research. Do developing nations find roundabout ways to include their research agencies in Research4Life, such as giving off-campus agency researchers special log-ins to access the national university system? Or are such arrangements rather moot, in the age of open-access and Sci-hub? If not, would there be a real benefit if Research4Life were to be extended to bona fide government research agencies and suitable NGOs? How much would such an expansion actually cost, and what could the returns be in such nations?

Faster than you think…

Two new reports this week…

The Association of Research Libraries has Future Themes and Forecasts for Research Libraries and Emerging Technologies (PDF).

The Institute for the Future has The Hyperconnected World of 2030–2040 (PDF).

Mind the Gap

MIT’s Mind the Gap is a new comprehensive survey report on open source publishing systems that can be used for scholarly purposes. The only one I can see that’s missing is WordPress. Which is open source, free, easy to use and rent a server for, and can be quickly tooled-up with plugins for such purposes. In fact, it’s not even mentioned once, even to explain why it and its plugins were omitted.

The Future of Search

Mindshare UK’s The Future of Search (full report, free in public PDF) for those who use smartphones in the UK…

we tracked people’s search behaviour using ethnography, face-to-face workshops and neuroscience experiments surveying 1,800 UK smartphone users.

Investing in the Podcast Ecosystem

A new free Andreessen Horowitz report, “Investing in the Podcast Ecosystem in 2019”. It’s from an investor perspective, but is very long and has lots of interesting firm-ish numbers and agency segmentations of use to a wider audience interested in free public content.

It doesn’t once mention YouTube though, so it may be overlooking a lot of under-the-radar effectively-a-podcast episodic shows that can be listened to as audio-only, and others that don’t go through the usual podcast delivery channels. No mention either of a leading podcast search-engine which should surely have been in such a report.

Also, many of the services it mentions I’ve never heard of. Who knew that “Apple Podcasts” is apparently the incumbent? I’ve never heard of it before… but then I’m not part of the Apple ecosystem.

A Public Record at Risk

A new report, “A Public Record at Risk: The Dire State of News Archiving in the Digital Age”.

On ResearchGate

What publishers can take away from the latest early career researcher research ($), a five-page “Industry Update” for the journal Learned Publishing, 28th April 2018…

“ResearchGate is unquestionably the scholarly elephant in the room, which despite being just 10 years old boasts 15 million research members and is still growing at a rate of knots. … publisher offerings can look monastic and parochial by comparison. […] It looks rather like the new scholarly world order.” […] “Much depends on whether ECRs [early-career-researchers] take their millennial beliefs in sharing, openness, and transparency into leadership positions. [and if] publishers [start] feeding ResearchGate rather than competing with it – [making it] a publishing Amazon”.

The Update is by the team doing an industry-supported three-year cohort study of search and similar practices. Their first two reports are Early Career Researchers: the harbingers of change? Year One 2016 and now also the Year Two 2017 report, both free and public at the same website. Apparently the cohort of around 100+ is all science and social studies.

Also fairly new, and related, “ResearchGate and Academia.edu as networked socio-technical systems for scholarly communication: a literature review” (OA), in the Research in Learning Technology journal, 20th February 2018…

“a thorough understanding is still lacking of how these sites operate as networked socio-technical systems reshaping scholarly practices and academic identity. This article analyses 39 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals with a specific focus on ResearchGate and Academia.edu.”

Google Search currently suggests circa 72-million full-text PDFs at ResearchGate, although given the above Industry Update statement on ‘the 15m members’ we can probably assume some 10m of those PDFs are just CVs (which are nearly all excluded from JURN, by the way). Remove other fluff and I guess there might be circa 50m proper papers there. It would then be interesting to work out what “the uniques” are, by removing the papers freely available elsewhere in repositories and OA journals and suchlike. I’d very roughly guess that including ResearchGate PDFs in JURN may bring in some 5m to 8m papers not found elsewhere.

A New Age Of Culture

The Economist Intelligence Unit and Google, “A New Age Of Culture: The Digitisation of Arts & Heritage Around the World”. Free online.

It’s a nice counterweight to the recent spate of whining about Google Books, trying to portray it as almost being a shuttered project when it’s not. Which smells to me like big publishers, their PR flunkies and a gaggle of pliable journalists.

On the GRID

Which orgs collaborate with other orgs, and then publish the research in PLOS One? Digital Research has harvested the stated organisational affiliations from PLOS One during 2006-16, and crunched them to produce a report with nice infographics offering national comparisons…

2017 Edge Question – a Kindle ebook conversion

The 2017 Edge Question responses have just been released. Over 200 of the world’s finest minds answer “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?”. As usual the combined single mega-page weighs in at around the length of two novels, on which the likes of Instapaper will choke. So Kindle ereader owners may want the unabridged unofficial .mobi ebook conversion for the Kindle.