Self-archiving as a way to provide open access to research publications is gaining ground in the area of scholarly publishing. An increasing number of research funders and universities are mandating open access for output associated with their research, which calls for evaluation of the effects of the phenomenon.This two years master?s thesis aims to investigate researchers? experiences of self-archiving. A qualitative web survey was conducted and answered by 41 researchers from several different countries, and a vast majority of the respondents concur with the principle of open access. Although self-archiving shows not to be a guarantee of increased impact for the single researcher, the study shows that might be the case.

This thesis evaluates and compares the retrieval effectiveness of the two search engines Google Scholar and Scirus, which both specialises in indexing scholarly material on the web as well as journal articles. Thirty search queries are used and the first twenty retrieved documents for each query are examined for topical relevance and scholarly content. The search queries are based on legitimate information needs taken from a scientific questionbox on the web. Queries are expressed with advanced search operators and are the same for both search engines. Precise relevance criteria are set up and a binary scale is used when judging.

The following thesis concerns the conceptualization of openness within the open access movement. Open accesscan be understood as a phenomenon or a movement that aims at changing the current system of Scholarly communication.Consequentially, the movements goals arose in relation to the escalating serials crisis in Scholarly communicationand the increasing power of commercial publishers. The purpose of the thesis is to study three centralopen access declarations with the aim of uncovering the different conceptualizations of openness found withinthese texts. Leaning on the theoretical position known as actor-network theory, the declarations role within a surroundingnetwork is explored by focusing on how openness as a concept has been produced and reproduced bycentral actors. Two overarching questions frames the study: How is openness conceptualized within the declarations?And how can openness, as a concept, be understood as an effect generated by a larger network?The first part of the study focuses on the first question.

This study examines the Scholarly communication activities in two scientific fields, chemistry and economics, in a Polish context. The dissertation aims at investigating what characterises the publishing choices of researchers and what supplementary forms for the dissemination of research output are used by scholars. In addition, the paper is looking into what are the views and awareness of open access and institutional repositories within this scientific community. This thesis gives the results of semi-structured interviews and an online survey at two academic faculties at a Polish technical university. As its theoretical framework, the study uses Whitley?s theory of the intellectual and social organisation of academic fields and Latour and Woolgar?s study regarding various motivations for publishing.

Scholarly publishing has since the introduction of electronically distributed periodicals seen a time of change, mainly in the STM-business (Science Technology and Medicine). The roles of the three main participants in the publication process; researcher, publisher and library are developing into new directions. Researchers themselves are taking a more active part in the discussion, with the boycott list from the Public Library of Science organization as an illustrating example. Reforms are being launched partly as an economical and efficiency issue, partly as an increasing desire from researchers to maintain the control of scientific end result. This Master s thesis examines how the partly conflicting goals of the participants affect the conditions for scholarly publication in an electronic environment.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the information use in teacher education students? degree projects. The first study is a reference analysis used to categorize the cited sources in 33 degree projects from the teacher education program at one Swedish university. The aim was to find out what types of sources were used, in particular the amount of citations to scholarly publications. The results of the reference analysis showed that the majority of sources used were text books.

The following thesis concerns the conceptualization of openness within the open access movement. Open accesscan be understood as a phenomenon or a movement that aims at changing the current system of Scholarly communication.Consequentially, the movements goals arose in relation to the escalating serials crisis in Scholarly communicationand the increasing power of commercial publishers. The purpose of the thesis is to study three centralopen access declarations with the aim of uncovering the different conceptualizations of openness found withinthese texts. Leaning on the theoretical position known as actor-network theory, the declarations role within a surroundingnetwork is explored by focusing on how openness as a concept has been produced and reproduced bycentral actors. Two overarching questions frames the study: How is openness conceptualized within the declarations?And how can openness, as a concept, be understood as an effect generated by a larger network?The first part of the study focuses on the first question.

The objective of this thesis is to examine which form value-adding qualities specific for the Web take and to what extent they exist in a selection of electronic scholarly editions of literary works. The examination was concentrated on the qualities hypertextuality, interactivity and hypermediality. Besides extent and form, the research questions focused on whether or not the form of the editions correspond to theories and guidelines about how electronic scholarly editions should be designed to generate an added value from a scholarly point of view. The empirical approach was qualitative and the selection consisted of 31 editions. They were examined according to theories about the value-adding features of the qualities.

The aim of this bachelor-thesis is to study how postgraduates approach open access during times of change within Scholarly communication. Our theoretical framework is based upon Knorr Cetinas epistemic cultures and Cullen & Chawners theory that there is a paradigmatic conflict within Scholarly communication due to the fact that open access has failed to reach the same level of prominence among researchers as it has within research libraries. We interviewed six postgraduates at Malmö högskola in order to find answers to our research questions. We identified a shared epistemic culture among the postgraduates, which can be explained by the fact that being postgraduates, they all share similar experiences and values. We chose to call this epistemic culture the horizontal epistemic culture.

Institutional repositories are now being created to manage, preserve, and maintain the digital assets and intellectual output of a university. The incentives to change the process of Scholarly communication have also begun serving as a strong motivator. There are problems to consider and questions to be solved when dealing with electronic publishing and the implementation of institutional repositories. At present time no summary exists regarding the activities of scholarly electronic publishing at Swedish universities and university colleges.This Master's thesis aims to describe the current situation regarding electronic publishing and the development of institutional repositories at Swedish universities and university colleges. To investigate the situation, a questionnaire was sent out to 38 academic libraries since they are normally responsible for the electronic publishing within institutions of higher education.

Adopting a socio-cultural approach to the study of cold war historiography, this master?s degree essay is a comparative study of the two main disciplinary fields of cold war scholarship, diplomatic history and international relations theory (IR). The study applies the theory of scientific development formulated by Thomas Kuhn and the concept of paradigm on the field of cold war research.Diplomatic history and IR shows many similarities in their development, and in the importance different schools has had in scholarly debate. These different schools are analysed as paradigms, a concept that has been more willingly adopted within IR than in diplomatic history. The transition from what historian John Lewis Gaddis has termed Old Cold War History to New Cold War History is discussed in terms of paradigms and paradigm shift.

This master?s thesis investigates publishing of Swedish literary classics on the web. The purpose is to find out who is publishing and why, and what practice of publishing is used. The purpose is also to find out what importance the publishers attach to textual quality and proofreading. For these questions the ?Guidelines for editors of scholarly editions? by MLA is used.

There is an ongoing evolution in Scholarly communication. The traditional way of communicating scholarly results through scientific journals is beginning to be replaced by other means of dissemination. One new channel for scholars to communicate their results is digital publication in so-called open archives. An open archive is a kind of full text database, where a scholar may archive/publish his or her articles, as a complement or a substitute to publishing in scientific journals. There are discipline-oriented archives and institutional archives.

The aim of this master thesis is to study electronic publishing, and our main purpose is to examine different strategies of publishing such as: markup languages and page description formats. We examine in what context these strategies are used for publishing, when it comes to scholarly documents produced by Swedish universities and university colleges during the spring of 2002. We apply a sociological perspective as the theoretical framework for to identify the main purposes for scientists to publish their work. We also discuss properties belonging to the different formats: XML, HTML, PDF and PostScript. By doing a content based survey of the websites at Borås University College and at Gothenburg University, we have found that the most common form of electronic publishing, regarding scholarly documents, are lists with bibliographical information on publications and presentations of current research.

This is a study about the communication interaction in the context of the reference work at some public university-libraries and some private company libraries in Gothenburg and Borås. The primary purpose of the study is to investigate the communication interaction in a library situation. The second purpose is to deepen the knowledge, understanding and to establish what is important in this communication. Focus has been on how the intermediaries communicate and how she or he perceives this communication. The intermediary needs to manage the communication with all the different patrons and different information needs of the patrons.