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:

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