Friday, September 02, 2011

Searching Open Access Publications : identify you affiliation output


In order to increase the visibility of open access scientific and scholarly publications of the University Medical Center Groningen and thereby promoting their increased usage and impact, I am trying to create an automatically updating overview of OA publications of the UMCG, next to the beta WordPress blog that is being constructed to show all UMCG scientific publications
With the masive attention the Open Access "movement" in international publising and media, I expected to this to be an easy task.
But very quickly after trying to identify the resources to find these publications, it became clear that there are some serious difficulties. I won't go into details about the effects of publicing in OA or the impact factors of OA Journals, just making them visible.
Many resources and overviews focus heaviliy on journal titels and sets, instead of the actual publications.
Search opties are often limited, poor and it is not always possible to search for the publications. Search for affiliation details is dffficult or impossible.

And when you do find publications, it is not always possible to create an RSS, or even download or save records.
In platforms of publishers that offer certain Open Access packages it is not possible to identify or limit your search to specific Open Access publications.

These are the resources so far collected to find our medical publications:

  • Directory of Open Access Journals 
    • Search articles:                  YES
    • Search Affiliation:              No(but in the Abstract address seems to be available)
    • Advanced search/limits:     NO (just Boolean operators to combine two terms)
    • Save / Download records: NO
    • Save search as RSS:         NO (just an RSS for new journals)
    • Hits on "medical center groningen" (10) or "groningen" (36)
  • BioMed Central
    • Search articles:                  YES
    • Search Affiliation:              YES 
    • Advanced search/limits:     YES 
    • Save / Download records: YES
    • Save search as RSS:         NO (just an email alert via MyBiomedCentral)
      I created an RSS feed for the UMCG BMC articles via Feedity & Feedburner
    • Hits on "medical center groningen" (498)
      BMC has the most options, tools and web 2.0 functionality.
      The Central Medical Library of the UMCG is Supporter Member (institutional overview page). We have to look deeper into how articles are connected to this institutional page, ánd how to improve the search to include all related research institutes (using different/wrong affiliation address), like Center for Life Sciences.
  • Public Library of Science
    • Search articles:                  YES
    • Search Affiliation:              NO ("Groningen" is found only 4 times)
    • Advanced search/limits:     YES (But it's unclear to what fields, no phrase searching)
    • Save / Download records: NO
    • Save search as RSS:         YES (just an RSS for new journals)
    • Hits on "groningen" 
  • UMCG Repositories; Master Theses, Dentistry, Mondzorgkunde, SHARE, Student Theses Medicine and other studies, Science Shop of Medicine and Health
    • Search articles:                  YES
    • Search Affiliation:              not relevant ("it's just our stuff)
    • Advanced search/limits:     NO 
    • Save / Download records: NO
    • Save (search) as RSS:         YES (every repository has it's own RSS)
    • See all syndicated publications published on daily basis on the Blog "AtUMCG"
  • Sherpa/Romeo (Journals Only)
    • Search articles:                  NO
    • Search Affiliation:              NO
    • Advanced search/limits:     NO 
    • Save / Download records: NO
    • Save (search) as RSS:       NO
  • SpringerLink (OpenChoice)
    • Search articles:                  YES, 
    • Search Affiliation:              NO (But "medical center groningen" as phrase works)
    • Advanced search/limits:     YES (but Open Access material can nor be selected or set as limit, not can I leave out the included BMC publications)
    • Save / Download records: YES
    • Save (search) as RSS:       YES (but it's not useful: Open Access material can not be selected or set as limit, & I can not leave out the included BMC publications
  • NARCIS : the gateway to scholarly information in the Netherlands
    • Search articles:                  YES, 
    • Search Affiliation:              NO (But organisational structure can be entered)
    • Advanced search/limits:     YES (but limits & facetting is not focussed on further identifying Faculties or the UMCG. UMCG repositories are not optimal, and certainly not completely indexed/harvested. The CMB is working on this, together with the University of Groningen Library)
    • Save / Download records: NO
    • Save (search) as RSS:       YES (but it's not useful since the UMCG repositories are not optimally used. 

If anyone knows of other ways of identifying OA publications, or better ways to tackle this, please let me know!
Other Useful links:

1 comment:

digicmb said...

Update: BioMedCentral, Chemistry Central and SpringerOpen are one and the same now.
The UMCG is Supporter Member of all ... http://www.springeropen.com/inst/209105