ScholarlyCommons at Penn: Annenberg update

I've written about ScholarlyCommons before in this blog but it's time to revisit as a lot more Annenberg papers have been uploaded since we last "talked."

To review: "ScholarlyCommons is a repository for the scholarly output of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. It promotes dissemination of their work and preserves it in a freely-accessible, long-term archive. ScholarlyCommons allows researchers and other interested readers anywhere in the world to learn about and keep up to date with Penn scholarship.  Items placed in the Archive are available to all free of charge."  --Research Communication and e-Scholarship Guide

One of the benefits to participating in ScholarlyCommons is the metadata feedback that authors and departments get on a monthly basis.  Last time I reported on the month's most popular articles in communication, that is, the ones that had the highest number of downloads. This time I have a broader metric as reported to me by colleague Sarah Wipperman, ScholarlyCommon's Repository Services Manager and Analyst. According to Sarah, so far in 2014 the Annenberg School ranks highest in impact factor over all other departments and schools at Penn. The impact factor is calculated by dividing the average number of downloaded documents by the total number uploaded. So far, in 2014 Annenberg articles, which  number at 364, have been downloaded 187,404 times across the globe. Now that's impact!

Look for Penn Libraries to be adding more ASC papers to ScholarlyCommons. In addition to faculty papers, the Annenberg section now includes 114 Dissertations (and growing) and will soon include material from the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS).





 

New Alternative Press Resource

It's my pleasure to introduce a new open access database on the block, Independent Voices, a collection of alternative press materials from three pretty important decades of the last century--the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The database is the product of a four-year project by Reveal Digital to digitize over 1 million pages from academic library special collections across the United States.  Source libraries at Northwestern University, Duke Univeristy, University of Wisconsin, University of Buffalo, Michigan State University, University of Texas, University of Kansas and others are contributors.

So far the database is comprised of feminist, GI underground, LGBT, and the (literary) little press.  Other categories to be added will be the African American, Native American, underground campus, anarchist and right-wing press. In addition to newspapers and magazines, the archive includes little magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, and calendars.

Access to proprietary alternative press resources, namely Left Index and Alternative Press Index, is available through the Penn Libraries/ASC homepage.

Indexing of Open Access Journals in Communication

The latest issue of Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian (Jan-March 2014) features research targeted directly at our field,  Open Access Journals in Communication Studies: Indexing in Five Commercial Databases by Sonia Poulin and Robert Tomaszewski. The five databases the authors look at are: Communication Abstracts, Communication and Mass Media Complete (CMMC), Web of Science, Scopus, and EBSCO's Academic Search Complete.

ABSTRACT
This study investigates the degree of indexing of gold open access (OA) journals within the field of communication studies in five major commercial bibliographical databases commonly subscribed to by academic libraries and used by researchers and students. Results of the study indicate that 32 percent of the 147 gold OA journals identified were indexed in the five target databases. The communication studies databases provided the most complete indexing, while among the multidisciplinary databases, Scopus provided more coverage, compared to Academic Search Complete and Web of Science.

Scholarly Commons : Annenberg Papers

The University of Pennsylvania's ScholarlyCommons Repository is a an open access collection of the scholarly output of its faculty, researchers, and graduate students.  It promotes dissemination of the collection and preserves it in a freely-accessible, long-term archive. One can browse by schools, departments and centers, by locally published journals or series, by dissertations and theses, or by disciplines using a very cool color wheel to go from broad to specific topic areas (such as Social and Behavioral Sciences to Communication to Speech and Rhetorical Studies).

The Annenberg School currently has over 300 Departmental Papers posted. Each month I get a usage report on downloads which features the most "popular."  This month, and some others preceding, the three most downloaded papers were:

Mass Communications Research and the Study of Popular Culture: An Editorial Note on a Possible Future for this Journal by Elihu Katz (1959)

The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis by Elihu Katz (1957)

The Effects of Television on Children: What the Experts Believe by Joseph Turow (1985)

Policy & Internet

The Policy Studies Organization has a rich website given the list of open access journals they publish, including Policy & Internet, Poverty & Public Policy, Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, World Medical and Health Policy, and, coming soon, Online Education.

The latest issue of Policy & Internet is on the subject of eHealth, as described below by editors Rik Crutzen, (Maastricht University) and Guodong (Gordon) Gao, (University of Maryland):

The explosive growth of the Internet and its omnipresence in people's daily lives has facilitated a shift in information seeking on health, with the Internet now a key information source for the general public, patients, and health professionals. The Internet has also driven an increase in eHealth initiatives, ranging from Internet-delivered interventions and therapy focusing on specific behaviors or diseases, to maintenance of electronic health records. A lack of policy measures is a common barrier to success of eHealth initiatives; we hope that the empirical research and perspectives gathered here in this Policy & Internet special issue on eHealth will make a significant impact among eHealth policymakers, academics, and professionals, and make a valuable contribution to future policy and research efforts in this area.

For political communication types check out PSO's upcoming conference  in September 2012. Internet, Politics, Policy 2012: Big Data, Big Challenges?

Special issue of Spectra on Academic Publishing

Spectra, a publication of the National Communication Association, is devoted to the issue of academic publishing in its March 2012 issue. There's a lot to read these days about academic publishing and open access but this is a good way to focus on the topic through the filter of our field.

Spectra: The Future of Academic Publishing includes the following articles which address what Rachel Hartigan Shea, NCA Director of Publications, characterizes as the "turbulent" state of publishing in academia today.

Tenure and Promotion in the 21st Century Academy: A Chancellor's Perspective, by Pam Shockley-Zalabak

The Changing Landscape for academic Book Publishing by Todd R. Armstrong

Journal Impact Factors: Uses and Misuses, by Michael J. Beatty and Thomas Hugh Feeley

Exploring the Landscape of Digital Publishing, by Katherine Burton

Spectra is available in the Annenberg Library; oddly, no online access even for members on the NCA site. 

Open Access Journals in Media and Communications

Here's a site to bookmark. The International Association for Media and Communication Research has compiled a list of open access journals in the field (with a brief description of each title and links to sites). Listing over 60 titles, IAMCR plans to maintain and grow this list with the help of its members and visitors to the site. They welcome suggestions of journals to add, reports of broken links and the like. As a before-summer project, I'll make sure all these titles are on the Penn Libraries Communication e-journal list--so we're all one happy family, open access e-journals sitting right amidst our subscription e-journals.