USER. Article request received. Check in subscribed databases

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1 Research Networking and other Web based free resources for Electronic Document Delivery Services and user study on Research Scholars of Alliance University Pradeep.P.Kavi Assistant Librarian, Central Library, Alliance University, Chikkahagade Cross, Chandapur-Anekal Road, Anekal , Bangalore Dist, Karnataka pradeep.pk@alliance.edu.in, pradeepkavi@yahoo.com Abstract : The paper discusses free online websites which help researchers and librarians to download research publications like Journals articles, conference proceedings etc uploaded by authors. It consists of two parts; Part A lists the Websites with brief description and links which include major websites in Research Networking, e-print servers and Open Source Resource search engine/gateways. Part B includes user study conducted on awareness and usage of Research Networking websites by Research Scholars of Alliance University. The results reveal that only three websites i.e. researchgate.net, academia.edu and ssrn.com are very popular and mostly used by them. Keywords : Document Delivery Services; DDS; Research Networking; Collaboration; User Study; Social Networking of Research; Electronic Document Delivery Services; Free e- resources; Cloud based library service 1. Introduction Research and DDS (Document Delivery Services) are interconnected. Researchers require full text of articles related to their topic. DDS is concerned with the supply of document to the user on demand either in original or its photocopies irrespective of the location and form of original document. Need: The need for DDS is felt due to ever increasing subscription cost of learned journal that leads to a situation where no library can hold every item required to meet the needs of its user. The emergence of Internet, www, Open Access and now Academic & Research Networking websites have given more choice for librarian s to seek the articles required from these sources. The flow chart shows the steps involved in providing DDS Service. When a request is received, first it is crosschecked whether the article is available in locally subscribed resources. If it is not available, then effort should be made to search research oriented search engines like google scholar and then below mentioned websites. The rapid developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), more and more web based services are available to the researcher s and librarians alike. The websites have been categorised under three broad classes i.e. Interdisciplinary, Science & Technology and Humanities & Social Sciences. Page 1 of 11

2 USER Article request received Available Check in subscribed databases Not available Check Freely available sources like Google scholar, Institutional Repositories, mendeley.com, Academia.edu, researchgate.net, mysciencework etc. Still not available Available 2. Objectives of the study Diagram 1 : Flow chart of steps involved in DDS Service Requests for full text of articles (DDS) are received from users and also on most of the Discussion forums in Library and Information Science. Many times we notice that the requester is not aware of free websites from where they could have obtained it. The main objectives of the paper are : Use services of DELNET, INFLIBNET etc. 1. To provide a ready list of Websites providing free articles which include Research Networking, e-prints, Open-source resource gateways and specialist Search engines 2. To study the awareness of Research Networking (RN) websites among Research Scholars of Alliance University Page 2 of 11

3 Part A List of Research Networking & Open source Resources 3.0 Web sites providing access to free research papers Interdisciplinary subjects Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research. As on date (December 20, 2014), it claims 15 lakh plus members with more than 41 lakh papers and 13,09,530 research interests. Researchers can upload articles for which they have copyright and share with other members. They can follow other researchers who have same interests and also the site provides analytics like number of requests, downloads, people following, citations etc. One time registration is required to avail all the services provided by the portal Researchgate s mission is to connect researchers worldwide and share their scientific output, knowledge and expertise. It has more than 5 million members Registration is compulsory to download articles. If a particular article is not available full text for download, one can request the author through a request box and obtain the full text. There is a difference in requesting the author directly through or through researchgate. Here, the author gets analytics for number of requests and downloads, hence he/she may prefer to share on the website rather than direct request Mendeley.com is a Research networking portal owned by Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of Journals in the world. Users need to register one time and also download the desktop application. Using the application users can set up their profile, search, browse and download articles which are available full text Figshare is a online repository which unlike other websites allows users to upload any type of file (figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets) from their research output and share with them publicly. Researchers need to register and upload their files. The data is stored under Creative Commons licence, waiving copyright where possible and in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner Launched in the year 2013, PhDTree is a Wiki project to document the academic family tree of PhDs worldwide, both past and present. Any researcher can register his topic, upload articles and share with others worldwide. As on date (Feb 20, 2015), it had 8.4 lakh research profiles. As it is still in nascent stage, work is under progress on building a robust site. Page 3 of 11

4 3.6 It was started in the year 2011 by two Indian entrepreneurs Rahul Agarwalla and Tarun Arora to address challenges faced by researchers in searching across and accessing multiple information sources. It is a collaborative platform for researchers to share and discuss their ideas and work. It provides many easy to use features like single search box (Discovery tool), Cloud storage, customization of library subscribed journals (Institutional version), etc. Users can create their profile and upload articles. As on date, it claims to index 13,000+ journals in all subjects plus 1.8 million e-books, 27,000+ Online courses and other sources like Theses, Conference Proceedings, Slides, News articles etc Open Access Library : OALib Search: It is a search engine dedicated to open access scholarly articles. It searches all content on the Internet that can be crawled. It harvests metadata only of those articles that are available in full text. As on date, it hosts to more than 2,156,417 open access articles. It includes all subject areas in STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) and Social Sciences FreeFullPDF.com indexes pdf files from open access scientific journals, theses, posters and patents. All scientific subjects are covered and all content are freely available in PDF format. It claims to host 80 million documents Highwire Publishing is a e-publishing platform and partners with independent publishers and provides complete e-journal hosting infrastructure. As of November 2014, it claims to host about 23,88,820 free full-text articles and 7,425,020 total articles The aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals and act as one-stop shop for users of open access journals. As on January 2015, it covered 10,183 Journals with about 18 lakh plus full text articles Open DOAR lists Open access repositories in the world. It provides links to Institutional Repositories as Country wise listing. Users can browse the list by country, organization and search for full text of articles in the repository OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records derived from open access resources that was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). As on date, OAIster includes more than 30 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,500 contributors. It is owned by OCLC Inc. Science & Technology Page 4 of 11

5 It is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. It aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries PubMed Central (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). It serves as a digital repository to NLM s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). As on date (January 4, 2014), it has about 3.2 million articles with content coming from 1581 Journals as full text and 2784 selective deposit journals. All journals published under biomedcentral.com are available under PubMed also ScienceOpen is a freely accessible online platform to share and evaluate scientific information. It acts as a aggregator for users to deposit their research articles online and also serve as a Research networking site. As on December 28, 2014, it claims to host 14.5 lakh plus full text articles. Users can register and set up their personal profile and network with other scientists sharing similar topics of interest MyScienceWork is a Research networking website with a claimed database of more than 31 million publications from over 2500 repositories and publisher database. That is, it harvests these repositories and provides a single window access to full text of articles which are hosted on servers worldwide. Articles are categorised under 31 broad subject headings. Users can register and upload their articles and share the full text with others. It also has paid membership called Premium The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 11.2 million records covering publications in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and the arxiv e-prints. Wherever full text is available, the database provides a link to the URL and if the article is open access, it can be downloaded One of the oldest e-prints server (earlier lanl.gov) started in 1991 is an open access e-prints service in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. It includes both pre-prints and published papers. It is funded by Cornell University and Simons Foundation. As on January 12, 2015, the number of articles has crossed 1 million mark. Page 5 of 11

6 It is an Open Archive of preprints and refereed journal reprints in the fields of Cognitive Sciences: Psychology, Neuroscience, Behavioral Biology, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Philosophy A recent Research Networking site sponsored by European Union and CERN, it aims to provide one stop shop for all research output in all the fields of Science. Researchers should register and can upload any file format as well as both positive and negative results. It is still in nascent stage and provides cloud storage, DOI and several useful features. Humanities & Social Sciences Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a worldwide collaborative of over 267,100 authors and more than 1.7 million users that is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. The elibrary currently contains over 4,77,900 downloadable electronic documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. Though some articles are hosted as paid, the vast majority of downloads of papers from the SSRN elibrary are free RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 82 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. IDEAS is largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics and available freely on the Internet. Over 1.7 lakh items of research can be browsed or searched, and over 1.5 lakh plus articles can be downloaded in full text Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) is a German based Repository which collects electronic full texts from the domain of the Social Sciences and makes these texts available according to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge. Apart from self-archiving of research articles, it sources content through co-operation with institutes, scientific associations, publishers and editors. At present, it has about 31,000 plus articles. Part B User study of Research Networking Websites 4.1 Analysis of DDS requests for articles received from Research Scholars and Faculty of Alliance University. Alliance University was established as a Private University by Karnataka State Act No.34 in the year The University started offering Doctoral programme from the year 2011 onwards. The Library subscribes to 17 databases; the major ones include Ebsco Business Source Complete (BSC), ABI-Inform Proquest Complete, JSTOR, Gale Cengage Infotrac Page 6 of 11

7 Management & Engineering, Academic One file, IMF e-library and also we have membership with DELNET for obtaining full text of articles and books on ILL. Users request for Document Delivery Services (DDS) for articles not available in any of the subscribed databases. S.No. Year Table 1. Year-wise requests for articles No of Articles Percentage DDS obtained of articles requests from Free obtained received resources on from free Articles obtained from DELNET Internet resources % % % 8 12 Total Articles not obtained Table 1 shows Year-wise requests for articles from Research Scholars (PhD students) and Faculty for last three years. It is worthwhile to note that in the year 2014; about 58% of requests were met by downloading articles from Open source resources. This is followed by 46% in the year 2013 and 35% in Most of the article requests are in the field of Social Sciences, Business and Management. Also, some of the articles could not be obtained during the last three years from any of the sources including DELNET. 4.2 User study of awareness of Research Networking (RN) websites of Research Scholars According to Wikipedia, Research Networking (RN) is about using web-based tools to discover and use research and scholarly information about people and resources. Research Networking tools (RN tools) serve as knowledge management systems for the research enterprise. RN tools connect institution-level/enterprise systems, national research networks, publicly available research data (e.g., grants and publications), and restricted/proprietary data by harvesting information from disparate sources into compiled expertise profiles for faculty, investigators, scholars, clinicians, community partners and facilities. RN tools facilitate the development of new collaborations and team science to address new or existing research challenges through the rapid discovery and recommendation of researchers, expertise and resources. Advantages of using Research Networking (RN) tools Connecting with other Researchers working on similar topic Worldwide networking, discussion and sharing of documents Free access to articles, diagrams, figures etc. uploaded by authors Greater visibility and discovery Page 7 of 11

8 Facility to follow other researchers and get alerts whenever something new is uploaded. More citations Collaboration with experts Ten Research Networking websites were taken as sample and an online survey was conducted for Research Scholars of Alliance University using google docs for collecting data. The Scholars were informed the link through and they were personally requested to participate in the survey. A total of 27 Scholars participated in the survey. They were also asked to list if they were aware of any other RN tool apart from these ten websites. However, none of them were aware of any other from the list Awareness of Research Networking websites Table 2. Awareness of Research Networking websites Aware of Research Networking websites Percentage (%) Aware Not aware of Research Networking Websites Percentage (%) Not aware Table 2 shows that out of the 27 respondents, majority i.e. 25 (93 %) are aware and only 2 (7%) were not aware of Research Networking websites. It is good to note that most of them are aware and for the remaining scholars efforts need to be done to create awareness Awareness of individual Research Networking Websites Table 3. Awareness of individual websites Website Aware Percentage (%) Researchgate.net Academia.edu Mendeley.com 6 21 Figshare.com 0 0 Scienceopen.com 1 4 Mysciencework.com 0 0 Ssrn.com Phdtree.org 5 18 Knimbus.com 2 7 Zenodo.org 0 0 Table 3 shows that about 85% are aware of researchgate.net which is followed by ssrn.com (64%) and academia.edu (61%). The other websites with low level of awareness include mendeley.com (21%), phdtree.org (18%), knimbus.com (7%) and scienceopen.com (4%). None of the respondents were aware of Figshare.com, mysciencework.com and zenodo.org. The reason could be that the research topics falls under Business & management related disciplines, hence they were not much interested in purely science related website. Page 8 of 11

9 4.2.3 Frequency of visit to Research Networking websites Table 4. Frequency of visit to Research Networking websites Frequency of visit to Research Number of visits Percent (%) Networking Websites Once in a week Once in a month 5 18 More than a month/as per need 6 22 Table 4 shows the frequency of visits to Research Networking websites. About 60 % visit the sites at least once in a week which shows the active interest and collaboration involved in their work. About 18 % and 22% of respondents visited the websites once in a month or as per their research need Downloading of articles from Research Networking websites Table 5. Downloading of articles Website Downloaded articles Percentage (%) (responses) Researchgate.net Academia.edu Mendeley.com 5 19 Figshare.com 0 0 Scienceopen.com 0 0 Mysciencework.com 0 0 Ssrn.com Phdtree.org 2 7 Knimbus.com 1 3 Zenodo.org 0 0 Table 5 shows that about 74% have downloaded articles from researchgate.com followed by ssrn.com (59%) and mendeley.com with 19%. This shows the prominence to these websites in terms of relevance and availability of articles in their topics Ratings of Research Networking Websites Researchg ate.net Table 6. Ratings of Research Networking Websites Academia. edu Mendel ey.com Fighs are.co m Scienceo pen.com Myscien cework. com Ssrn.c om Page 9 of 11 Phdtr ee.or g Knimb us.co m Excellent Good Satisfact ory Not relevant to me Zeno do.or g

10 Researchers were asked to rate the websites based on the content, ease of use and user friendly features. In the Table No.6, for ssrn.com a maximum i.e 13 of them have rated it as Excellent followed by researchgate.net and academia.edu as Good by 12 respondents each. The ratings again show that these three websites are extremely popular and heavily used. Four of the websites were rated as Not relevant by all the respondents. These four websites are related to Science & Technology and the Research Scholars are working in Management, Business & Social Science related subjects. 5.0 Limitations The websites mentioned above include Academic and Research networking, Institutional Respositories, E-print servers and open access search engines. The paper does not include general search engines like google scholar and many other open source e-journals portals like Plos etc. While there are still many other websites which offer full text of articles free, it is beyond the scope of the paper to list all such sites due to practical limitations. As the business model and source of funding varies with each site, there is no guarantee that all these sites will continue to exist in the future. Evaluation of these sites is also beyond the scope of the paper. 6.0 Conclusion The preceding chapter lists and briefly discusses 23 websites which can be used as a source of obtaining full text articles for free. Research networking sites are providing good services for Research Scholars in their own way. While there are copyright issues to be looked into before uploading and downloading articles, each site addresses the issue in its own way. At best, librarians can make an attempt to search these sites whenever full texts of articles are not available in locally subscribed sources. We have been able to download more than 50% of requests received from Research scholars and Faculty using these websites. Librarian s can bookmark these websites in their browser and search for articles. The list is not comprehensive and more can be added in the future. In the user study conducted on Research Scholars of Alliance University, the results show that most of them were aware of just two or three Research Networking websites and had used them for collaboration and downloading articles. The proliferation of more such websites, leads to clutter, hence only the best sites providing good features will be used heavily and stand out in the crowd. The survey shows that only three websites i.e. Researchgate.net, academia.edu and ssrn.com are very popular and mostly used by them. 7.0 References 1. BORAH, DIPANKAR (et.al) (2014) Online Collaborative Research Platform: A Tool to Scholars with a Special Study on Research Scholars of Gauhati University. In Capacity Building in Library and Information Services. Proceeding of the 9 th Convention PLANNER- 2014, Dibrugarh University, Assam. 25 th -27 th, September 2014, pp Ahmedabad: INFLIBNET Centre 2. (Accessed on December 20, 2014) 3. (Accessed on December 20, 2014) Page 10 of 11

11 4. (Accessed on December 20, 2014) 5. (Accessed on December 25, 2014) 6. (Accessed on December 25, 2014) 7. (Accessed on December 26, 2014) 8. (Accessed on December 26, 2014) 9. (Accessed on December 26, 2014) (Accessed on December 27, 2014) (Accessed on December 28, 2014) (Accessed on January 4, 2015) (Accessed on December 28, 2014) (Accessed on December 29, 2014) (Accessed on December 29, 2014) (Accessed on December 29, 2014) (Accessed on December 29, 2014) (Accessed on December 29, 2014) (Accessed on December 29, 2014) (Accessed on February 15, 2015) / (Accessed on February 15, 2015) (Accessed on March 1, 2015) (Accessed on March 1, 2015) (Accessed on March 2, 2015) 25. ofiling_systems (Accessed on March 1, 2015) Page 11 of 11