Swanepoel, Marinus

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    Canadian and South African scholars' use of institutional repositories, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu
    (The Partnership. Provincial and Territorial Library Association of Canada, 2018) Swanepoel, Marinus; Scott, David R.
    Since their initial development in the early 2000s, institutional repositories (IRs) have proliferated around the globe. Due to low faculty participation, however, content recruitment has often posed a significant challenge for librarians and others promoting their use. Through the last decade, academic social networks (ASNs), such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become popular among scholars as a means to communicate with each other and share their research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixty scholars at six universities in Canada and South Africa to explore their views and practices pertaining to IRs and ASNs. Interviews were transcribed and coded to elucidate trends and themes in the data. The study found that few participants were active supporters of their local IRs. Lack of awareness, time limitations, and concerns regarding copyright remain some of the main obstacles to increased faculty participation. Conversely, more than half of the interviewees were active users of either ResearchGate or Academia.edu. These users valued ASNs both as a means of sharing their work and as tools facilitating connections with their colleagues internationally. Though IRs need not compete with these networks, proponents of open access repositories should be prepared to explain to faculty why they should consider having their research made accessible in a repository though they may already actively share their work through ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Significantly, both ASNs and IRs were more popular among South African than Canadian researchers. It is hoped that the results of the study will be helpful in informing the understanding and decisions of librarians and others working to develop and promote IRs and green open access more broadly.
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    Developing a community of practice: report on a survey to determine the scholarly communication landscape in western Canada
    (2015) Swanepoel, Marinus; Kehoe, Inba; Hohner, Michael; Shepstone, Carol; Vanderjagt, Leah; Wakaruk, Amanda; Waller, Andrew; Winter, Christina
    The Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) Scholarly Communications Working Group (SCWG) surveyed COPPUL member libraries with a short questionnaire in November 2012. The stated purpose of the survey was to inform both the educational efforts of COPPUL with regard to scholarly communications, as well as the agenda of a proposed meeting of scholarly communication practitioners in COPPUL libraries. This paper discusses the results in the context of the formation of a Community of Practice (CoP) since conducting the survey. The paper concludes that a CoP has not yet formed; however, it presents the challenges with the formation of the CoP, identifies some of the actions taken so far, and makes recommendations for future direction for continuing to develop the CoP among COPPUL institutions.
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    An annotated bibliography of selected articles on altmetrics
    (2016) Swanepoel, Marinus; Scott, David R.; Spiric, Vanja; Foresster, Deanna
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    [Review of "Scholarly metrics under the microscope: from citation analysis to academic auditing"]
    (Provincial and Territorial Library Association of Canada, 2015) Swanepoel, Marinus
    Book review
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    Aligning open access publications with the research and teaching missions of the public university: the case of the Lethbridge Journal Incubator (If 'if's and 'and's were pots and pans)
    (Michigan Publishing, 2015) O'Donnell, Daniel Paul; Hobma, Heather; Cowan, Sandra A.; Ayers, Gillian; Bay, Jessica L.; Swanepoel, Marinus; Merkley, Wendy; Devine, Kelaine; Dering, Emma; Genee, Inge
    The Lethbridge Journal Incubator is a joint project of the University of Lethbridge Library, School of Graduate Studies, and Faculty of Arts and Science. Its goal is to address the issue of sustainability of gold open access journals by aligning the publication process with the educational and research missions of the public University. In this way, the open access publication, which is more commonly understood as a cost center that draws resources away from a host university's core missions, is transformed into a sustainable, high-impact resourc that improves retention and recruitment. It does this by providing graduate students with ear experience with scholarly publishing (a proven contributor to in- and post-program student satisfaction and career success), highly-sought after research and technical skills, and project management experience. This article provides a background to the problem of financing gold open access publication and reports on the experience of the researchers responsible for establishing the incubator as it leaves its experimental phase and becomes a center of the University.