The Scholarly Communications Needs of Faculty: An Evidence-Based Foundation for the Development of Library Services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objectives – This exploratory research seeks to broadly understand the publishing behaviours and attitudes of faculty, across all disciplines, at the University of Saskatchewan in response to the growing significance of open access publishing and archiving. The objective for seeking this understanding is to discover the current and emerging needs of researchers in order to determine if scholarly communications services are in demand here and, if so, to provide an evidence-based foundation for the potential future development of such a program of services at the University Library, University of Saskatchewan. Methods – All faculty members at the University of Saskatchewan were sent personalized email invitations to participate in a short online survey during the month of November 2012. The survey was composed of four parts: Current Research and Publishing Activities/Behaviours; Open Access Behaviours, Awareness, and Attitudes; Needs Assessment; and Demographics. Descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated. Results – The survey elicited 291 complete responses – a 21.9% response rate. Results suggest that faculty already have a high level of support for the open access movement, and considerable awareness of it. However, there remains a lack of knowledge regarding their rights as authors, a low familiarity with tools available to support them in their scholarly communications activities, and substantial resistance to paying the article processing charges of some open access journals. Survey respondents also provided a considerable number of comments – perhaps an indication of their engagement with these issues and desire for a forum in which to discuss them. It is reasonable to speculate that those who chose not to respond to this survey likely have less interest in, and support of, open access. Hence, the scholarly communications needs of this larger group of non-respondents are conceivably even greater. Conclusion – Faculty at the University of Saskatchewan are in considerable need of scholarly communications services. Areas of most need include: advice and guidance on authors’ rights issues such as retention of copyright; more education and support with resources such as subject repositories; and additional assistance with article processing charges. The University Library could play a valuable role in increasing the research productivity and impact of faculty by aiding them in these areas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.143 | 0.362 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".