The Impact of Online Learning on Global Intellectual Property Issues

Intellectual Property (IP) has long been an issue of debate among higher education institutions in the United States and other countries. However, determining ownership and the income dispersion of creative works is still a relatively new phenomenon which compounds delivery of education in a virtual world that knows no boundaries. Intellectual Property (IP) issues are numerous and often complex in higher education because colleges and universities are major suppliers and consumers of online learning, particularly in a global context. Many higher education institutions claim ownership of the materials created by faculty for online courses, and often the courses themselves; many more are plagiarized or used without the author's permission as a result of teaching in an online environment. In addition, global copyright laws are very unclear regarding the ownership of works created in an electronic environment. In the past, instructors created materials have been considered the intellectual property of the creator. The potential economic value of multimedia and online course materials has raised the stakes for higher education institutions and prompted them to critically examine how online learning has opened old wounds regarding the ownership of intellectual property.

Enhancing Scholarly Communication through Research Culture

Research is a vital part of the social tapestry of a modern society. It is imperative to find suitable ways to respond to societal priorities. It can be an open-ended enquiry into the essence of phenomena, of who we are, individually and collectively, and of the world we inhabit. It not only enables derived knowledge, but is also a means of preserving, fabricating and resynthesizing existing knowledge and/for creating new knowledge. Apart from that research is a vital pillar of higher education. Moreover, in knowledge society today, research is deemed to be of more value when it rightly augments the economic development processes. Through in depth literature review and contextual analysis, the aim of this chapter is to aid institutions and scholars in recognizing the gains of adapting inclusive approach, suggesting strategies for promoting research culture so as to enhance scholarly communication apart from being a support system in knowledge society, so that the world of academia continues to excel in its role of knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and knowledge dissemination.

Managing Open Access (OA) Scholarly Information Resources in a University

Open Access (OA) to scholarly information has now become a reality. Due to the efforts of OA supporters worldwide now even commercial publishers have started supporting open access to their content through various open access models. Many public institutions like universities and R&D Labs have realized the importance of OA in developing the society in general. As a result, these institutions have come up with OA repositories, archives and libraries. As with any such proliferation of information, OA resources have increased manifold and can easily overwhelm even an experienced user. Also different repositories may use various digital library software, which presents the problem of multifarious search interfaces and features. The solution can be found in the open community of open source software and open standards. The open source metadata harvesting software PKP-OHS and the open protocol for metadata harvesting i.e. OAI-PMH come to the rescue. This chapter discusses how PKP-OHS was implemented as a pilot study at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP).

Construction of a Proper Research Report

Any study undertaken involves the congruous understanding of the subject matter and presentation of subject matter after the research is very much paramount. It is necessary that the research has to be reported in a proper manner and a systematic way. There are various parts of a research report and each part is equally important to adhere. Effective report writing is also an art as well as science. This paper analyses the importance of the research report and also the parts of the research report.

Digital Libraries, Copyright Limitations, and Access for Purposes of Subsequent Academic Publishing

The chapter aims to analyse the current European Union legislation on digital copyright from the perspective of the public interest in scientific research, by studying the digital exclusive rights framework granted to creators and to database owners and by contraposing it with the foreseen narrow field of public interest based limitations on exclusive rights. Concepts like digital libraries, fair use and limitations on exclusive rights, tpm and drm, copyleft and free/open source contents is analysed. The chapter concludes by identifying the necessity of a redefinition of a new internal balance of copyright law which can respect authors' and database owners' legitimate economic interests and simultaneously promote the dissemination and the access to works for scientific research and publishing purposes and the renewal of the creative cycle.

Measuring Research Impact of Scholarly Publications Using Altmetrics

In present modern world, there are number of conversations, academic discussions and scholarly activities happen online each day. Popularly in scholarly and scientific publishing fraternity, Altmetrics is playing an important role to know shift from non-traditional metrics proposed as an alternative to more traditional citation impact metrics, namely impact factor and h-index. The purpose of present research article is to assess the research impact of Thapar University through Non-Traditional Metrics (known as Altmetrics). The Content analysis is carried out through publication of Thapar University obtained from the SCOPUS database. The data was analysed for assessing research impact through Altmetrics. However, Network analysis, data sharing properties reflected on social networking websites and other bibliographic management tools have been carried out. The analysis of the Thapar University publication over a period has given a positive impact over time.

Altmetrics

In this era of knowledge enormous research work is being published by various modes of publications. It can be a journal, conference proceedings, open and online resources or any other. Many of them are used by other researchers with due citations. Traditionally these citations are measured by Bibliometrics. Over a period of time publication platforms changed from traditional counting to web based counting called Webometrics. Teaching faculty are always struggling to find new ways of providing evidence of their changing scholarly value. Open access and online availability of scholarly information changed the scenario of mentions. People are using information from any scholarly publications and mention in their blog, Twitter account, Facebook or any other social media. These mentions are as important as citations for an author's tenure and promotions. To calculate this entire web based mentions an alternative metrics method is coined ‘as Altmetrics.' This article discusses basics of Altmetrics, its importance, use in scholarly impacts and tools for providing data to calculate Altmetric scores.

Research Methodology

The most important of research methodology in research study it is necessary for a researcher to design a methodology for the problem chosen and systematically solves the problem. Formulation of the research problem is to decide on a broad subject area on which has thorough knowledge and second important responsibility in research is to compare findings, it is literature review plays an extremely important role. The literature review is part of the research process and makes a valuable contribution to almost every operational step. A good research design provides information concerning with the selection of the sample population treatments and controls to be imposed and research work cannot be undertaken without sampling. Collecting the data and create data structure as a organizing the data, analysing the data help of different statistical method, summarizing the analysis and using these results for making judgements, decisions and predictions.

Citation Essentials in Scholarly Communication

This Chapter defines Citations, Citation Standards/Style Manuals and Scholarly Communication. It explains the importance of Scholarly Communication, and use of Citations in meeting the objectives of Scholarly Communication, especially in avoiding the accidental danger of plagiarism. It also explains how Bibliographic Management Systems (software)—both open / free and proprietary—have been helpful to the academics and researchers in providing standard methods of citations that is, both in-text citations and references list at the end of the text of the document while writing documents. It concludes by emphasizing the need for use of standard citation or style manual for proper dissemination of scholarly communications. There is a need for gaining adequate knowledge on how to cite and provide references in correct form in the publications to make them quality and scholarly works and also to avoid from the accidental danger of plagiarism.

Local Linguists Mastering Academic Writing in English

This chapter describes the differences in how scholars present their findings in Research Articles (RA) in international journals in English and in local journals in Russian. It also attempts to present the reasons for these differences, seeking explanations in the sociocultural contexts in which these RAs were written. To achieve this aim, six RAs in English and six RAs in Russian, published in peer reviewed international and local journals, were examined. The analysis draws upon the theory of contrastive rhetoric, which stresses the necessity of studying texts in the contexts of society. The methodology used to unveil discursive conventions of RAs relies on a contrastive approach, which identified the structural differences and linguistic features of RAs in both English and Russian. The conclusion is made that the RAs differ in terms of writer / reader responsibility, form / content orientation, and reader engagement level. These differences are a result of sociocultural environments that affect the process of identity construction in academic discourse.