Category: Scholarly Journals

"Does Evaluative Scientometrics Lose Its Main Focus on Scientific Quality by the New Orientation towards Societal Impact?"

Lutz Bornmann and Robin Haunschild have published "Does Evaluative Scientometrics Lose Its Main Focus on Scientific Quality by the New Orientation towards Societal Impact?" in Scientometrics.

Here's an excerpt:

In this Short Communication, we have outlined that the current revolution in scientometrics does not only imply a broadening of the impact perspective, but also the devaluation of quality considerations in evaluative contexts. Impact might no longer be seen as a proxy for quality, but in its original sense: the simple resonance in some sectors of society. This is an alarming development, because fraudulent research is definitely of low quality, but is expected to have great resonance if measured in terms of altmetrics.

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"Scholarly Context Adrift: Three out of Four URI References Lead to Changed Content"

Shawn M. Jones et al. have published "Scholarly Context Adrift: Three out of Four URI References Lead to Changed Content" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Increasingly, scholarly articles contain URI references to "web at large" resources including project web sites, scholarly wikis, ontologies, online debates, presentations, blogs, and videos. Authors reference such resources to provide essential context for the research they report on. A reader who visits a web at large resource by following a URI reference in an article, some time after its publication, is led to believe that the resource's content is representative of what the author originally referenced. However, due to the dynamic nature of the web, that may very well not be the case. We reuse a dataset from a previous study in which several authors of this paper were involved, and investigate to what extent the textual content of web at large resources referenced in a vast collection of Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles published between 1997 and 2012 has remained stable since the publication of the referencing article. We do so in a two-step approach that relies on various well-established similarity measures to compare textual content. In a first step, we use 19 web archives to find snapshots of referenced web at large resources that have textual content that is representative of the state of the resource around the time of publication of the referencing paper. We find that representative snapshots exist for about 30% of all URI references. In a second step, we compare the textual content of representative snapshots with that of their live web counterparts. We find that for over 75% of references the content has drifted away from what it was when referenced. These results raise significant concerns regarding the long term integrity of the web-based scholarly record and call for the deployment of techniques to combat these problems.

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"Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: A Review of Publisher Policies"

Jessica Lange has published "Scholarly Management Publication and Open Access Funding Mandates: A Review of Publisher Policies" in Ticker: The Academic Business Librarianship Review.

Here's an excerpt:

This article will compare publishing policies from top management journals to funding agencies' open access requirements in order to determine which journals meet these conditions. . . . Results show that 80% of journals in the sample set are compatible with open access funding mandates. Of the journals which are compatible, 48% require an APC and 52% permit self-archiving in an acceptable time-frame.

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"Elsevier Implements Data Citation Standards to Encourage and Reward Authors for Sharing Research Data"

Elsevier has released "Elsevier Implements Data Citation Standards to Encourage and Reward Authors for Sharing Research Data."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced that it has implemented the FORCE11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles for over 1800 journals. This means that authors publishing with Elsevier are now able to cite the research data underlying their article, contributing to attribution and encouraging research data sharing with research articles.

The FORCE11 data citation principles were launched in 2014 with the aim to make research data an integral part of the scholarly record.

See also: "An Introduction to the Joint Principles for Data Citation."

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"Evaluating the Consortia Purchase: Journal Usage in a Multi-Institution Setting"

Elsa K. Anderson, Stephen Maher, and Bill Maltarich have published "Evaluating the Consortia Purchase: Journal Usage in a Multi-Institution Setting" in Collaborative Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

When two or more institutions share a license, how do they measure use and value? For over a decade, the Levy Library at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Library at the New York University School of Medicine, and New York University Libraries at New York University have shared several publisher packages and journal title subscriptions. In this paper, we present our analysis of usage data to assess the value of some of these consortial arrangements in their totality and to each library. Based on this analysis, we were able to adjust how each institution contributes to consortial arrangements. The paper will discuss challenges in analyzing consortial arrangements based on usage data and offer suggestions for how consortia-based acquisitions can be an effective allocation of library funds and strengthen support for the library in its institution.

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"Does Online Access Promote Research in Developing Countries? Empirical Evidence from Article-Level Data"

Frank Mueller-Langer et al. have self-archived "Does Online Access Promote Research in Developing Countries? Empirical Evidence from Article-Level Data."

Here's an excerpt:

Universities in developing countries have rarely been able to subscribe to academic journals in the past. The "Online Access to Research in the Environment" initiative (OARE) provides institutions in developing countries with free online access to more than 5,700 environmental science journals. Here we analyze the effect of OARE registration on scientific output by research institutions in five developing countries. We apply a difference-in-difference estimation method using panel data for 18,955 journal articles from 798 research institutions. We find that online access via OARE increases publication output by at least 43% while lower-ranked institutions located in remote areas benefit less.

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"Funding Article Processing Charges, SPEC Kit 353, Published by ARL"

ARL has released "Funding Article Processing Charges, SPEC Kit 353, Published by ARL."

Here's an excerpt:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released Funding Article Processing Charges (APCs), SPEC Kit 353, an exploration of the strategies that ARL member institutions are using to address APCs. This SPEC Kit covers how the funds are established and how they are handled (e.g., policies, applications, budgets, administration, outreach activities, etc.), sources of funding, and whether and under what circumstances libraries are partnering with other units (or other libraries) to fund this aspect of open access. . . .

Read/download SPEC Kit 353.

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"The Location of the Citation: Changing Practices in How Publications Cite Original Data in the Dryad Digital Repository"

Christine Mayo, Todd J. Vision, and Elizabeth A. Hull have published "The Location of the Citation: Changing Practices in How Publications Cite Original Data in the Dryad Digital Repository" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

While stakeholders in scholarly communication generally agree on the importance of data citation, there is not consensus on where those citations should be placed within the publication – particularly when the publication is citing original data. Recently, CrossRef and the Digital Curation Center (DCC) have recommended as a best practice that original data citations appear in the works cited sections of the article. In some fields, such as the life sciences, this contrasts with the common practice of only listing data identifier(s) within the article body (intratextually). We inquired whether data citation practice has been changing in light of the guidance from CrossRef and the DCC. We examined data citation practices from 2011 to 2014 in a corpus of 1,125 articles associated with original data in the Dryad Digital Repository. The percentage of articles that include no reference to the original data has declined each year, from 31% in 2011 to 15% in 2014. The percentage of articles that include data identifiers intratextually has grown from 69% to 83%, while the percentage that cite data in the works cited section has grown from 5% to 8%. If the proportions continue to grow at the current rate of 19-20% annually, the proportion of articles with data citations in the works cited section will not exceed 90% until 2030.

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Virginia Steel on Open Access 2020 and the Pay-It-Forward Study: "An Open Letter to the Academic Community"

Virginia Steel, UCLA University Librarian, has released "An Open Letter to the Academic Community."

Here's an excerpt:

I fully support the laudable goals of all members of the open access movement and am proud to count myself among them . However, I feel quite strongly that the mechanism OA2020 proposes to achieve those goals [article processing charges] would not be workable across the broad international spectrum of research institutions, funding bodies, and publishers. Based on the limited amount of research that has been done to date, the model appears likely to cost more in both the short and longer term, making it as financially unsustainable as the current system.

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"Ingenta Launches New Open Access Platform"

Ingenta has released "Ingenta Launches New Open Access Platform."

Here's an excerpt:

The platform hosts content from all scholarly disciplines and caters for multiple formats, including whole books, chapters, monographs, single articles and entire journals. It will eventually provide access to millions of Open Access articles, whether they are hosted on the platform itself, indexed via third party services such as DOAJ & OAPEN.

Ingenta Open provides users with access without any registration requirements, while offering a clean and responsive design, a simple interface and an easy-to-use search function.

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"On the Cost of Knowledge: Evaluating the Boycott against Elsevier"

Tom Heyman Pieter Moors, and Gert Storms have published "On the Cost of Knowledge: Evaluating the Boycott against Elsevier" in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics.

Here's an excerpt:

To get an idea about the success rate of the "won't publish" resolution, we checked signatories' publication history after they signed the petition. Using ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, ScienceDirect, and lab or personal websites, we were able to compile a bibliography for a large sample of "won't publish" signatories. Due to the time-consuming nature of this research, we limited ourselves to two subject areas, Chemistry and Psychology, each with approximately 500 signatories.

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"New University Presses in the UK: Accessing a Mission"

Andrew Lockett and Lara Speicher have published "New University Presses in the UK: Accessing a Mission" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

In the space of just a year, five new university presses were launched in the UK. Although very different in size and stages of development, all but one were launched first and foremost as open access presses, based in or supported by their university's library. Why should there have been such a significant flurry of activity in such a short space of time, and what can the stated objectives and activities of these presses tell us about the current UK scholarly publishing environment? To answer some of those questions, this article looks back to the original mission of the founding university presses, examines the policy and funding environments in which the new presses are operating, looks at overseas developments in recent years for comparison, and concludes with a review of the challenges these young presses face as well as the benefits all university presses, but particularly open access ones, can confer to their institutions.

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"Why Marriage Matters: A North American Perspective on Press/Library Partnerships"

Charles Watkinson has published "Why Marriage Matters: A North American Perspective on Press/Library Partnerships" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

Key points

  • Around 30% of campus-based members of the Association of American University Presses now report to libraries, more than double the number 5 years ago.
  • Beyond reporting relationships, physical collocation and joint strategic planning characterize the most integrated press/library partnerships.
  • The main mutual advantages of deep press/library collaboration are economic efficiency, greater relevance to parent institutions, and an increased capacity to engage with the changing needs of authors in the digital age.
  • There is emerging interest in collaboration at scale among libraries and presses that may extend the impact of press/library collaboration beyond single institutions.

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"SCOAP3 Journals Double Downloads"

SCOAP3 has released "SCOAP3 Journals Double Downloads."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The four largest journals participating in SCOAP3, two published by Elsevier and two by SpringerNature in partnership with the Italian Physical Society (SIF), and the Italian Institute for Advanced Studies (SISSA) have now analysed their logs to understand the impact of SCOAP3.

Elsevier announced that downloads to their two journals, Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B have doubled since they became Open Access at the start of SCOAP3 in January 2014. This increase is remarkable as SCOAP3 covers the most recent 3,500 articles in the journals, while most of the historic content of over 77,000 articles, is available to subscribers.

SpringerNature announced that since January 2014 they have observed a doubling of downloads across their two learned-society journals participating in SCOAP3: European Physical Journal C and the Journal of High Energy Physics.

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"How Do Scientists Define Openness? Exploring the Relationship between Open Science Policies and Research Practice"

Nadine Levin et al. have published "How Do Scientists Define Openness? Exploring the Relationship between Open Science Policies and Research Practice " in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

Here's an excerpt:

This article documents how biomedical researchers in the United Kingdom understand and enact the idea of "openness." . . . This study is based on 22 in-depth interviews with U.K. researchers in systems biology, synthetic biology, and bioinformatics, which were conducted between September 2013 and February 2014. Through an analysis of the interview transcripts, we identify seven core themes that characterize researchers' understanding of openness in science and nine factors that shape the practice of openness in research.

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"Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to Re-think the Institutional Repository?"

Richard Poynder has published "Q&A with CNI's Clifford Lynch: Time to Re-think the Institutional Repository?" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

Moreover, today we can see that the interoperability promised by OAI-PMH has not really materialised, few third-party service providers have emerged, and content duplication has not been avoided. And to the exasperation of green OA advocates, author self-archiving has remained a minority sport, with researchers reluctant to take on the task of depositing their papers in their institutional repository. Given this, some believe the IR now faces an existential threat.

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"Successful SCOAP3 Global Open Access initiative Continues for Three More Years"

CERN has released "Successful SCOAP3 Global Open Access initiative Continues for Three More Years."

Here's an excerpt:

After three years of successful operation and growth, CERN1 announced today the continuation of the global SCOAP3 (link is external) Open Access initiative for at least three more years. SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, is an innovative partnership of over 3 000 libraries, funding agencies and research organisations from 44 countries. It has made tens of thousands of scientific articles freely available to everyone, with neither cost nor barrier for any author worldwide.

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"What It Means to Be Green: Exploring Publishers’ Changing Approaches to Green Open Access"

Elizabeth Gadd and Denise Troll Covey have published "What It Means to Be Green: Exploring Publishers' Changing Approaches to Green Open Access" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

To test the theory that publishers are in reality discouraging open access as defined at Bethesda and preferred by authors, we took a look at the number of publishers meeting the criteria for RoMEO Green over time and the number meeting the criteria for a 'redefined green', namely, allowing immediate deposit of the post-print in an institutional repository. We found that whilst the percentage of RoMEO Green publishers had increased 8% over the 12 years, the percentage meeting the 'redefined green' criteria decreased by 35% (Figure 1).

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"What Kind of World Is STM Living In?

The League of European Research Universities has released What Kind of World Is STM Living In.

Here's an excerpt:

4 September saw the International Association of STM publishers (STM) issue a response to the EC's proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which flies in the face of LERU's views contained in its own Press Release. Amongst other things, STM is calling for the extension of ancillary copyright to cover academic publishing, implying that they will take legal action if this does not happen. . . . Ancillary copyright in this case would extend copyright protection, not allowing academics and universities freely to link to/use the world of information on the Internet, placing publishers in control of the information environment. LERU rejects this as counter to academic freedom and to the EC's vison for Open Science.

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"Discriminating between Legitimate and Predatory Open Access Journals: Report from the International Federation for Emergency Medicine Research Committee"

Bhakti Hansoti, Mark I. Langdorf, MD, and Linda S. Murphy have published "Discriminating between Legitimate and Predatory Open Access Journals: Report from the International Federation for Emergency Medicine Research Committee" in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health.

Here's an excerpt:

OA journals are proliferating rapidly. About half in EM are legitimate. The rest take substantial money from unsuspecting, usually junior, researchers and provide no value for true dissemination of findings. Researchers should be educated and aware of scam journals.

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"Measuring Scientific Impact Beyond Citation Counts"

Robert M. Patton, Christopher G. Stahl and Jack C. Wells have published "Measuring Scientific Impact Beyond Citation Counts" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

The measurement of scientific progress remains a significant challenge exasperated by the use of multiple different types of metrics that are often incorrectly used, overused, or even explicitly abused. Several metrics such as h-index or journal impact factor (JIF) are often used as a means to assess whether an author, article, or journal creates an "impact" on science. Unfortunately, external forces can be used to manipulate these metrics thereby diluting the value of their intended, original purpose. This work highlights these issues and the need to more clearly define "impact" as well as emphasize the need for better metrics that leverage full content analysis of publications.

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Walt Crawford: "Ethics and Access"

Walt Crawford has released "Ethics and Access."

Here's an excerpt:

The last ETHICS AND ACCESS piece appeared in December 2015—not only a whole-issue essay but a long one at that. This one will also make up a whole issue (partly because I'm spending more time investigating "gray OA") but be shorter. As before, it will cover a lot of ground and may seem somewhat random. But no exclamation points.

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"Hybrid Open Access—A Longitudinal Study"

Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk have published "Hybrid Open Access—A Longitudinal Study" in the Journal of Informetrics.

Here's an excerpt:

This study estimates the development of hybrid open access (OA), i.e. articles published openly on the web within subscription-access journals. Included in the study are the five largest publishers of scholarly journals; Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage. Since no central indexing or standardized metadata exists for identifying hybrid OA an explorative bottom-up methodological approach was developed. The individual search and filtering features of each publisher website and a-priori availability of data were leveraged to the extent possible. The results indicate a strong sustained growth in the volume of articles published as hybrid OA during 2007 (666 articles) to 2013 (13 994 articles). The share of hybrid articles was at 3.8% of total published articles for the period of 2011-2013 for journals with at least one identified hybrid OA article. Journals within the Scopus discipline categorization of Health and Life Sciences, in particular the field of Medicine, were found to be among the most frequent publishers of hybrid OA content. The study surfaces the many methodological challenges involved in obtaining metrics regarding hybrid OA, a growing business for journal publishers as science policy pressures for reduced access barriers to research publications.

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"Truth in Science Publishing: A Personal Perspective"

Thomas C. Südhof has published "Truth in Science Publishing: A Personal Perspective" in PLoS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

Scientists, public servants, and patient advocates alike increasingly question the validity of published scientific results, endangering the public's acceptance of science. Here, I argue that emerging flaws in the integrity of the peer review system are largely responsible. Distortions in peer review are driven by economic forces and enabled by a lack of accountability of journals, editors, and authors. One approach to restoring trust in the validity of published results may be to establish basic rules that render peer review more transparent, such as publishing the reviews (a practice already embraced by some journals) and monitoring not only the track records of authors but also of editors and journals.

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"Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level"

B. Ian Hutchins et al. have published "Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level" in PLoS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

Despite their recognized limitations, bibliometric assessments of scientific productivity have been widely adopted. We describe here an improved method to quantify the influence of a research article by making novel use of its co-citation network to field-normalize the number of citations it has received. Article citation rates are divided by an expected citation rate that is derived from performance of articles in the same field and benchmarked to a peer comparison group. The resulting Relative Citation Ratio is article level and field independent and provides an alternative to the invalid practice of using journal impact factors to identify influential papers. To illustrate one application of our method, we analyzed 88,835 articles published between 2003 and 2010 and found that the National Institutes of Health awardees who authored those papers occupy relatively stable positions of influence across all disciplines. We demonstrate that the values generated by this method strongly correlate with the opinions of subject matter experts in biomedical research and suggest that the same approach should be generally applicable to articles published in all areas of science. A beta version of iCite, our web tool for calculating Relative Citation Ratios of articles listed in PubMed, is available at https://icite.od.nih.gov.

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