Juan Pablo Alperin (Website: „A doctor in the making„) hat in diesem Monat seine an der Graduate School of Education der Stanford University geschriebene Dissertation veröffentlicht. Die Arbeit trägt den Titel «The public impact of Latin America’s approach to open access» und kann unter der Adresse purl.stanford.edu/jr256tk1194 heruntergeladen werden. Sie beschäftigt sich mit der Open Access Verbreitung in Lateinamerika unter bibliometrischen Gesichtspunkten:
This study explores the extent to which research published in Latin America — where the vast majority of which is made freely available to the public — has an impact and reach beyond the academic community. It addresses the ways in which the study of research impact is moving beyond the counting citations, which has dominated bibliometrics for well over the last 50 years. As more of the world’s research is made freely available to the public, there is an increasing probability that the impact and reach of research extends beyond the confines of academia. To establish the current extent of public access, this study explores who the users of Latin American research are, as well as their motivations for accessing the work by using a series of simple pop-up surveys, which were displayed to users of the two largest scholarly journal portals in Latin America. …
Neben dem Blick auf den OA-Ansatz Latein Amerikas ist die Forderung nach zukünftigen wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen zum freien Zugang und zum Teilen von Informationen in Sozialen Netzwerken im Schlussteil der Arbeit (5.6 Directions for future research, S. 112) bemerkenswert:
…for further study of Twitter users, and extends this call to the study all those who share research articles on any social media. Qualitative or otherwise detailed study of these users and their contexts can yield a better understanding of the “diverse actors, motivations, processes, and outcomes embedded in interpretations of altmetric data” (Haustein et al., 2013, p. 18). These interpretations will be instrumental in assessing the potential of altmetrics for capturing and measuring alternative impact, and in determining where and how they might be appropriately used.
