Data repositories are an essential component of data infrastructure. This article explores their functionalities with accompanying examples with a focus on open, quantitative data sets. Based on researcher needs, the principle of data friendliness is presented, which involves data context (data characteristics), research context (individual circumstances and research settings) and the context of reuse paths (conditions allowing access to, understanding of and use of data). An examination of data context suggests that metadata and data enrichment are required to provide successful data context. Enrichment is also required for orientation of the research context to provide greater insights across data sets. Finally the article considers the reuse paths, and the say that data paths intersect human interaction and how these are being addressed by different repositories. The review concludes that data repositories need to focus on how to present data that is fully interoperable and allows for reuse as well as access.

Academic books are essential to humanities scholars. With the rapid development of digital publishing, digital reading has become mainstream, and electronic academic books are gradually being absorbed by humanities scholars. In this case, it is important to understand their use of reading tasks and strategies when reading electronic-academic books, and to summarize the characteristics of their e-book reading behaviour. This study therefore outlined the academic reading characteristics of humanities scholars, as well as their e-book reading strategies and tasks. Subsequently, a user reading strategy questionnaire was compiled, and a survey conducted. Finally, descriptive statistics and sample paired t-tests were adopted to obtain the usage of e-book reading strategies of Chinese humanities scholars. Results showed that prior knowledge was the most used strategy, followed by understanding and decision-making, selfregulation, and self-monitoring strategies. Significant differences in the frequency and preference of reading strategies in different e-book reading tasks were also identified. This paper further discusses the characteristics of e-book reading behaviour of humanities scholars, and the future direction of electronic academic book construction.

Due to the growing capacities of research articles and journals, the tasks of selecting interesting articles and quickly identifying interesting sections of articles have become primary challenges faced by researchers. Therefore, the notion of Highlights, a novel introductory section included in academic publications, has been proposed to directly emphasise the novelty and value of research articles to improve article retrieval and knowledge dissemination. In this article, we developed a classification schema featuring five categories to analyse the content and explore the features of sentences contained in the Highlights sections of articles. Subsequently, we conducted an experiment by using the fields of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Computer Science (CS) as examples to statistically analyse domain differences in the arrangement of Highlights sections. The experiment focused on both the sentence level and the article level and emphasised differences in research paradigms and principles of evaluation. In particular, we discovered that LIS is relatively ‘result-heavy’, while CS is ‘method-heavy’; furthermore, in self-evaluated contributions, LIS authors concentrated more on academic contributions and applications, while CS authors preferred to demonstrate the value of their articles by comparing their research with previous studies.

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Students and junior researchers are important stakeholders in scholarly publishing, but there is relatively little research into their reading needs and barriers. This study hoped to understand the similarities and differences between junior researchers and students, between this group and more senior researchers and between different disciplines. The research comprised two parts: initial interviews to ascertain the main barrier and needs items, followed by a large-scale online survey. The survey received 673 responses from Chinese students and junior researchers.The survey revealed that poor presentation leading to poor understanding was a common barrier, but there were disciplinary differences, with humanities scholars having fewer barriers than other disciplines. Postgraduates reported more barriers than undergraduates, and also scored information needs more highly. The results identify needed improvements in the presentation of articles and explanation of terminology in order to better engage with students and junior researchers.