Scientometrics and OA
Posted on 21 June 2008
Filed under Academia, Open access, Publishing, Science
Three mathematics societies have issued a report on scientometrics, cautioning against overreliance on the impact factor.
Scientometrics is a very relevant topic to open access: the potential impacts on tenure, funding, and the like seem never to be far from an author’s mind when considering publishing activities. As long as these factors are perceived to be in favor of traditional, closed journals and against OA, we’re at a disadvantage. I won’t go so far as to say that more accurate and reliable criteria would always benefit OA, but it would certainly help make the issues clearer in researchers’ minds (and, based on experience, there is a great deal of misinformation and confusion about these issues — not helped by the perceived opacity of review processes and the high stakes involved; this confusion tends to make authors less, not more, receptive to OA).
In particular, the decoupling of journal from author/article rankings should benefit OA, both gold and green:
- Because most gold journals are young, and therefore have less-established reputations and impact factors, a groundbreaking paper published in a young OA journal may expect to be significantly more influential than the journal as a whole (whereas a groundbreaking paper published in an established, high-impact journal is unlikely to be significantly more influential than the journal as a whole, which has routinely published groundbreaking papers for decades). This characteristic is not unique to OA journals — the weakness of the impact factor as an average is highlighted in the report — but it is exacerbated by their relative youth, and assuaged by their relative accessibility.
- Because green self-archiving may provide an additional boost of readers/citations beyond that attributable to the distribution of the journal, a self-archived paper published in a closed journal may also expect to be more influential than similar papers published in the same journal but not self-archived, although the same impact factor will be imputed to both. (In fact, self-archiving would help boost the journal’s impact factor, with a non-excludable benefit even to authors who don’t self-archive — although the higher the rate of self-archiving by a journal’s authors, relative to other journals in the same field, the greater the overall benefit to the journal.)
Comments
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Recent Posts
- On digital eviction; responsibilities of online service providers
- A new year
- Wanted: standardized behavior for email list unsubscribe
- How to improve OJS: a reader’s perspective
- Opening research proposals; thoughts on virtual collaboration
- Top U.S. health official calls for “interoperability”, decries “proprietary systems”
- Announcing Free Culture DC, a new blog and calendar for the DC area
- Creative Commons birthday party in DC, this Tuesday
- Growth of DOAJ: steady 2003-2007, major spike in 2008
- Submission fees: a means of defraying costs for OA journals?
Categories
- Academia
- Administrative
- Conservation
- Copyright
- Creative Commons
- DC
- DRM
- E-commerce
- Florida
- FOSS
- Free speech
- Internet
- Journalism
- Libraries
- Licenses
- Linux
- Music
- OneWebDay2007
- Open access
- Open content
- Open education
- Open formats
- Open government
- Personal
- Political science
- Politics
- Privacy
- Public domain
- Publishing
- Science
- Students for Free Culture
- Telecom
- Whatever
Archives
- January 2009
- December 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- April 2007
