Search

Purpose: The recent spate of eminence received by the MOOCs (massive open online courses) from media to academia is revolutionary in higher education. MOOCs are a disruptive technological innovation which offers open learning with the aid of the internet and delivered by the faculty of reputed institutions, globally. Since Coursera being one such significant platform, its exploration would display the broader picture of MOOCs. As a result, studying it from various dynamics has been the motive of the current endeavour. Design/methodology/approach: The quantitative study of the collected data was applied with help of descriptive research methodology to measure the contribution of the top six countries namely US, China, Japan, Germany, India and UK. All these six countries were selected on the basis of GDP (harvested from official website World Bank -- data.worldbank.org/ to Coursera -- an online platform providing MOOCs. The involvement of these selected countries was gauged (from the official website of Coursera https://www.coursera.org/) in terms of number, type of contributing institutions, number of courses offered by those institutions, type of courses offered, number of instructors and instructor gender ratio. Findings: The findings reveal that the United States (US) is the top contributor in terms of partner institutes (97), courses (Specialization courses -- 1,267 and degree courses -- 40) and number of instructors (1,290). Interestingly, it was also observed that universities are the major contributor institutes in all six studied countries. Most of the institutes provide specialization courses while a very few provide degree courses. A large number of instructors are involved for imparting these courses online. Instructor gender ratio on average is 2:1 (male: female). It was also observed that there is usually a specific common time of starting courses on Coursera. Originality/value: Online platforms are the main delivery points for MOOCs; therefore, vibrancy and articulacy of such platforms make this innovation a success, and examining such a platform which exhibits such characteristics would present an overall picture of its functionality, development, evolution and future expansion of the innovation (MOOCs).

The study explores the preservation policy and techniques employed in preserving library materials in three libraries in South Asia: Central University of Kashmir; Islamic University of Science and Technology; and University of Kashmir. The study aims to: investigate preservation policy/plan/division of selected libraries; investigate the current preservation technique used in the libraries; explore the category of staff responsible for preservation of library materials; and identify capacity building programs attended by staff at local, national/international level on preservation. Data collection was employed: results were tabulated, interpreted, and correlated with the published literature to ferret out meaningful findings and draw logical conclusions. The study reveals that: binding (sewing) and fumigation (solid fumigation) are widely employed techniques in preservation; manuscripts are mostly prioritized for preservation; and usually professionals are involved in dealing with preservation. However, none of the libraries possess preservation policies, which are crucial for the preservation of the library collection on a systematic and scientific basis. In order to cope with the changing environment of information preservation and management, libraries regularly organize seminars and conferences on preservation, and it is hoped that stakeholders continue to identify loopholes and to build capacity for preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A tide of new research metrics of social web analysis has drawn the attention of researchers from quite some time now. This new alternative metrics - referred to as the Altmetrics, to some degree, is considered to complement the traditional metric indicators especially the citation metrics. Citations reflect the impact of the research mostly from the academic sections while Altmetrics besides academics demonstrates the consumption of research from a wider community including practitioners, instructors and general public too. Since, both i.e., Altmetrics and citation count are employed to gauge the research impact, therefore, this study attempts to correlate the two in order to determine their extent of comparability and association. The Altmetric scores were compared with the citation counts for the articles associated with the field of Biological Sciences, Earth and Environmental Science, History and Archaeology and Studies in Human Society from the list of top 100 articles, provided by the aggregator - altmetric.com for time period 2014 - 2017. Besides, the harvested articles' altmetric scores were correlated with the SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) of the journals of the respective articles in which they were published. Finally, Spearman's correlation was calculated to gauge the association between the variables. The study found that among the four categories, Earth and Environmental science shows the most significant correlation between the citation count and Altmetric score while for the Altmetrics and SJR score in the said field, no such trend is visible. History and Archaeology also shows the strong correlation between the Altmetrics and citation scores with the exception of articles for the year-2016 and somewhat similar trend was noted for the Altmetrics and SJR score of the publications. Biological sciences show a weak correlation for both the pairs of variables while those pertaining to studies in human society mostly show negative association for both sets of variables. Thus, from analysis it can be deduced that, excluding the category of human society, the other three categories (i.e., Biological Sciences, Earth and Environmental science, History and Archaeology), mostly show positive correlation between the Altmetrics and citation score of publications and also, to some extent, for the Altmetrics and SJR score of the publications. The study would provide an insight in the association and degree of relation between the two-research metrics for their better usability and applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In the present era, research data is a concern for researchers, as they are trying to find new ways to communicate their research findings and conclusions to other researchers in order to increase visibility and credibility. BRICS nations are fast emerging economies and contribute significantly in research output. This study makes an effort to analyze and explore the role of BRICS nations towards open access research data repository registered with Registry of Research Data Repositories. Design/methodology/approach: The data were gathered from re3data repository, and the search was limited to BRICS nations. The data were further analyzed and tabulated as per set parameters, namely, country-wise distribution, types of contents, subject coverage and language diversity. Findings: The findings depict that in terms of strength, India has the highest number of data repositories, thereby achieved the first rank among BRICS nations, and South Africa has the least number of data repositories, whereas in terms of content type and subject coverage, India again is leading among BRICS nations. The English language is used by repositories as the main language of the interface. Practical implications: The study helps to understand the development of research data repositories by BRICS nations. The study is further beneficial to researchers, as Registry of Research Data Repository provides a single platform to access repositories from various disciplines. Readily available data saves time, money and efforts of researchers and helps the researcher in completing their research activity in a very short span of time. Originality/value: The paper has investigated open access data repositories of BRICS nation that has not been attempted earlier. This gives readers comprehensive overview of research data repositories developed in fast emerging economies of the global. The paper can be very helpful for information managers, OA promoters and education and research policy makers to devise plans and policy bearing in mind the evolving research channels in emerging economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to draw a comparison of the Web traffic ranking, usage and popularity of websites of databases of reputed publishers, namely, ScienceDirect and Emerald Insight, that provide access on subscription basis with Sci-Hub, on the basis of data obtained from Alexa databank (www.alexa.com). Sci-Hub is a website that provides pirated open-access to the research literature, where piracy, according to The Economic Times (2020), refers to the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted content. Design/methodology/approach: Under present study, the quantitative study of the collected data was carried out with help of descriptive research methodology. The Alexa databank was singled out as the source of data. This study crawled through Alexa databank on 01.12.2019 and collected relevant data regarding Sci-Hub, ScienceDirect and Emerald Insight using the search terms Sci-hub.tw, Sciencedirect.com and Emeraldinsight.com sequentially. Different criteria were taken into consideration, which include global traffic rank, the average number of page views per user, time taken for uploading, bounce rate, percentage of users, the number of in-links and daily time spent on the site. Findings: The results of this study showed that ScienceDirect has the highest traffic rank and in-linking sites among the surveyed databases. But highest number of page visits were recorded for Sci-Hub with fastest downloading speed. It has also been observed that the users spent less time on ScienceDirect and Emerald Insight as compared to Sci-Hub. This study further observed that Sci-Hub has the lowest bounce rate. Users from both the developing and developed economies use the Sci-Hub, though the highest number of visitors belongs to the developing nations. Originality/value: This study provides an overview of the performance of toll-based publishing databases with pirated database based on different criteria through World Wide Web. Though, this study in no way supports or endorses the unauthorized and illegal access to knowledge, but such data helps in depicting and analyzing how much a particular database is accessed by its users all over the globe and also determines and illustrates the time spent by users while accessing a specific database, thus, providing the user preferences in information seeking activities. This study provides an overall view of adoption of open resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In the present era, research data is a concern for researchers, as they are trying to find new ways to communicate their research findings and conclusions to other researchers in order to increase visibility and credibility. BRICS nations are fast emerging economies and contribute significantly in research output. This study makes an effort to analyze and explore the role of BRICS nations towards open access research data repository registered with Registry of Research Data Repositories. Design/methodology/approach: The data were gathered from re3data repository, and the search was limited to BRICS nations. The data were further analyzed and tabulated as per set parameters, namely, country-wise distribution, types of contents, subject coverage and language diversity. Findings: The findings depict that in terms of strength, India has the highest number of data repositories, thereby achieved the first rank among BRICS nations, and South Africa has the least number of data repositories, whereas in terms of content type and subject coverage, India again is leading among BRICS nations. The English language is used by repositories as the main language of the interface. Practical implications: The study helps to understand the development of research data repositories by BRICS nations. The study is further beneficial to researchers, as Registry of Research Data Repository provides a single platform to access repositories from various disciplines. Readily available data saves time, money and efforts of researchers and helps the researcher in completing their research activity in a very short span of time. Originality/value: The paper has investigated open access data repositories of BRICS nation that has not been attempted earlier. This gives readers comprehensive overview of research data repositories developed in fast emerging economies of the global. The paper can be very helpful for information managers, OA promoters and education and research policy makers to devise plans and policy bearing in mind the evolving research channels in emerging economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an immense growth and success of social Q&A sites; they have become an important venue for individuals to seek information related to their educational as well as personal lives. The success of these sites can be attributed to the fact that people find it more convenient to receive customised answers to their queries, instead of going through long lists of answers provided by search engines. The advancements and popularity of social Q&A sites has attracted attention from the academia and researchers. In this paper, an attempt is made to study the top writers of one such platform. The attributes of these answerers and their contributions to these platforms were studied in order to analyse their characteristics. Further, the types of question for which the answers were furnished by these top writers were also observed, to get an insight into the preference/priority while providing responses on such sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Islam provided great impetus for the human pursuit of knowledge. The first verse that descended on the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) Was Iqra, meaning 'read,' opening the door to read, [...]

Introduction: Growth and Genesis Public libraries arose worldwide along with growth in education, literacy, and publications. Every country has its own public library history with influential leaders. Monarchs, wealthy people, [...]

The study made an attempt to carry out the citation analysis of primary literature archived in select Open Access Institutional repositories in the field of Health Science listed by Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). A total of 99 articles harvested from three select Health Science repositories were tested in two primary literature indexing databases, viz., Web of Science and Google Scholar for citation analysis. Among these, Google Scholar could not retrieve three (10.34 per cent) articles while for Web of Science this number goes to 26 (89.66 per cent). The number of citations received by the deposited contents is higher in Google Scholar (59.57 per cent) as compared to Web of Science (40.42 per cent). However, the average citation per article is higher in Web of Science (3.24) in comparison to Google Scholar (2.53). There are 27 articles in the resource corpus which have not received any citation. Number of such articles in Google Scholar and Web of Sciences are 20 (20.83 per cent) and 7 (9.59 per cent), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the growth and development of open access repositories that have registered in OpenDOAR database. The study reveals many aspects of open access repositories and attempts to provide a clear sign of their overall development. Next, gives a full description of the e - repositories in terms of geographic presence in the country represented by the continent (India) and specialist distribution ( objective) . In addition , the study deeply focuses on the Asian contributions and show detailed profiles about Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open Courseware (OCW) is one of the www's indispensable tools which are highly useful for stakeholders. But the utility and visibility of such resources can increase manifolds if they are highly index-able and visible through search engines. This paper is an endeavour to assess format diversity, web traffic, and visibility of select OCW repositories. The work sheds light on retrieval efficiency of different search engines vis-à-vis OCW. Open Courseware repositories that were enlisted under science and Technological Subjects in 'Catalogue of Open Courseware Consortium' were sifted and selected after thorough review of their OA policies. Out of 20 repositories indentified only 18 proved to be AO. A total of four repositories were short listed by way of random sampling for in-depth study in terms of their content diversity and visibility by prominent and special search engines (07). Among various formats, pdf is the most common format (52.31 per cent) archived by OCW repositories. OCW visibility differs from search engine. 'Google' turned to be most reliable tool by retrieving 73.58 per cent OCWs while 'incywincy' retrieved none. General search engines (73.58 per cent - 52.44 per cent) have shown very good performance compared to special search engines (42.68 per cent - 0 per cent). Among the repositories 'Open Michigan' is most visible Open Courseware repository with 70 per cent average visibility whereas 'NJIT' is least visible (29.82 per cent.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is to identify the collections and the downloading patterns in software repositories. Data was collected from three major software repositories (i.e., softonic.com, wareseeker.com, and download.com) from 1st April 2011 to 30 April 2011. The findings reveal that softonic.com (2,242) leads the Microsoft Windows-based educational software, followed by wareseeker.com (1,506), and download.com (991). However, Softonic.com provides the highest number of Mac-based software programs (278) while Linux-based software programs are only present in wareseeker.com (97). Accordingly, most security software programs are Windows-compatible. wareseeker.com provides 14,493 software programs for free trial. wareseeker.com provides 39,638 gaming software programs and 22,836 Internet-related free software programs. 4,683 Windows-based communication software programs are available in wareseeker.com while 2,388 are provided by download.com. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the findings of the study which aims to implement a web-based knowledge management system (WBKMS) for university libraries that will support the creation, dissemination, utilization, and storage of the institution's digital knowledge assets. It cites several aims of implementing WBKMS in libraries including to encourage coordination between libraries and library uses, improve library staff's professionalism, and to promote knowledge innovation. The study revealed that the said WBKMS will help in achieving satisfaction levels on both users and library professionals. Further, it implied that knowledge innovation in a web-based environment will aid in the creation of better knowledge based society.

This paper throws light on the growth and development of open repositories registered with OpenDOAR database. The study explores various facets of open repositories and tries to present a lucid picture of their overall development. The study provides a detailed description of repositories in terms of continent, country and subject wise distribution. The study further delves deep into the Asian contributions and brings to light detailed profiles of Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]