Librarians as a Resource for African Journals Partnership Project (AJPP)

Journals

Christine Wamunyima Kanyengockanyengo@unza.zm

ckanyengo@yahoo.com

Presentation Outline• Introduction;

• What Librarians can do for African Medical Journals?;

• Future…

Introduction• Librarians help the journal production process in several ways;

• They help support biomedical scholarship by helping authors use information that have already being published;

• They verify references after articles have been published in journals, so that the articles are in conformity with international citation standards;

• The Network of African Medical Librarians (NAML) are especially qualified to contribute to journal production of African medical journals.

How Librarians Can Help Improve Medical Journal Publishing

• Copyright Agreements and Policies; • Metadata for journals; • Persistent Identifiers; • Web Sites and Mobile Applications; • Coverage in traditional bibliographic/indexing systems; • Plagiarism;• Training in Reference Management;• Effective Searching;• Preservation—can we guarantee permanent access to digital

content?;• Future…

Copyright Agreements and Policies

• Copyright is important in journal production; especially in the digital age;

• In future, Journals need to have the flexibility to use distribution venues that were unforeseen when they first started publishing;

• In this context, publication agreements and copyright policies should provide as much flexibility as possible for both the journal and the author to achieve their scholarly goals.

Metadata for journals

• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) Compliant ;

• Standards for other web-based content;

• Taxonomies and Ontologies;

• Metrics/Statistics.

Coverage in traditional bibliographic/indexing systems

• Librarians could become more proactive in facilitating inclusion of their journals in traditional indexes, full-text databases, and other traditional bibliographic tools used by libraries and researchers.

¾International Standard Serial Number; ¾Directory of Open Access Journals; ¾Table of contents services ;¾Full-text and indexing/abstracting databases such as

PubMed/Medline etc.

Persistent Identifiers

• Unlike URLs, which point to a physical spot on a computer, persistent identifiers point to the resource itself, regardless of whether the resource moves to another location;

• DOIs are like the International Standard Book Number (ISBN)—no matter what shelf a book is assigned to, the ISBN identifies the same book;

• Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) - connects the identifier with the current location of the resource;

• So even if a resource moves, a researcher using the identifier will be able to find the resource anywhere.

Web Sites and Mobile Applications

• Journals should adapt the content to be available on mobile devices;

• Services such as Google Analytics can be utilised to make journal websites more user friendly. It can also facilitate accountability;

• The more journal content is available on multiple platforms; the visible that content will be.

Distributing Content Through Social Media

• Academic journals are increasingly utilising social media, such as Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter;

• African Medical Journals need to participate in such channels so that they can have more avenues for increasing their visibility;

• In this regard, Librarians are well situated to know which Web 2.0 channels are ideal venues for marketing journals or individual articles.

Plagiarism Detection

• Plagiarism is something that is critical in the journal production process; but sometimes difficult to detect;

• Plagiarism can undermines the core of a journals’ mission – that of advancing biomedical knowledge;

• Especially difficult for journal editors are authors who recycle their articles without necessarily declaring it.

Plagiarism Detection…

• Some authors reuse (verbatim or with minor edits) parts of their own published work in new articles without acknowledging the earlier publication;

• What issues arise out of this?

The scholarly debate is not advanced and that readers are misled regarding the provenance of the article’s arguments;

• There are several softwares that could be utilised but…

Training in Reference Management

• Referencing is a tedious and time consuming task;

• And for most authors referencing is something they would want to avoid if they could;

• Librarians are already holding training workshops on referencing using various software; Endnote, Zotero.

Effective Searching

• Information available and accessible online is massive;

• Therefore a user should have search skills that include being familiar with several search techniques.;

• The use of search techniques and strategies aims at helping the user retrieve relevant and quality information;

• Search preparation and the application of search techniques help the user to have successful and focused searches so as to, save time and effort.

Preservation—can we guarantee permanent access to digital content?• Strategies for permanent access to digital scholarly

resources;

• The electronic environment is complex. Information is constantly changing;

• Provide the leadership in seeking solutions that will ensure preservation and permanent access to our journal content;

• Perhaps focus can be on the following: enabling policy environment, standardized archiving policies, etc.

Future• Librarians are uniquely situated to help medical

journals evolve and flourish in a world where modes of publication are changing at a rapid pace;

• Working collaboratively; librarians can help ensure that there is integrity, accessibility, and relevance of this important area of scholarship;

• However, are we able to commit to future generations in Africa having guaranteed permanent access to this digital content?

Future…• Please work with the Network of African Medical

Librarians;

• In addition to Librarian training from elsewhere; they are all trained at the National Library of Medicine (NLM)– together they have a wealth of different expertise; but particularly they are knowledge able about NLM;

• And we know if you are a medical/health person; and your article gets indexed into PubMed/Medline then you have arrived…

Acknowledgements

• Keele, B. J., & Pearse M. (2012). How Librarians Can Help Improve Law Journal Publishing. Law Library Journal. 104(3), 383-410.

• Kanyengo, W. C. (2009). Managing Digital Information Resources in Africa: Preserving the Integrity of Scholarship. The International Information and Library Review. 41(1), 34 – 43.

• African Journals Partnership Project

• The National Library of Medicine

• Network of African Medical Librarians

• David Ofori-Adjei for organising and hosting the meeting