Meta-Research: Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

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Authors : Erin C McKiernan, Lesley A Schimanski, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Lisa Matthias, Meredith T Niles, Juan P Alperin

We analyzed how often and in what ways the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) documents of a representative sample of universities from the United States and Canada. 40% of research-intensive institutions and 18% of master’s institutions mentioned the JIF, or closely related terms.

Of the institutions that mentioned the JIF, 87% supported its use in at least one of their RPT documents, 13% expressed caution about its use, and none heavily criticized it or prohibited its use. Furthermore, 63% of institutions that mentioned the JIF associated the metric with quality, 40% with impact, importance, or significance, and 20% with prestige, reputation, or status.

We conclude that use of the JIF is encouraged in RPT evaluations, especially at research-intensive universities, and that there is work to be done to avoid the potential misuse of metrics like the JIF.

URL : Meta-Research: Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47338.001

The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

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Authors : Alexandra Jobmann, Nina Schönfelder

The strategic goal of the project “National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE” is to create the conditions for a large-scale open-access transformation in accordance with the Alliance of German Science Organizations.

In close collaboration with the publisher transcript, we developed a business model that strengthens the transformation process for e-books in the humanities and social sciences.

It largely addresses the drawbacks of existing models. Moreover, it is manageable, sustainable, transparent, and scalable for both publishers and libraries. This case report describes the setup of the model, its successful implementation for the branch “political science” of transcript in 2019, and provides a Strengths–Weaknesses–Opportunities–Threats (SWOT) analysis.

We believe that it has the potential to become one of the major open-access business models for research monographs and anthologies in the humanities and social sciences, especially for non-English e-books.

URL : The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030055

The Impact of Open Access on Teaching—How Far Have We Come?

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Authors : Elizabeth Gadd, Chris Morrison, Jane Secker

This article seeks to understand how far the United Kingdom higher education (UK HE) sector has progressed towards open access (OA) availability of the scholarly literature it requires to support courses of study.

It uses Google Scholar, Unpaywall and Open Access Button to identify OA copies of a random sample of articles copied under the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) HE Licence to support teaching. The quantitative data analysis is combined with interviews of, and a workshop with, HE practitioners to investigate four research questions.

Firstly, what is the nature of the content being used to support courses of study? Secondly, do UK HE establishments regularly incorporate searches for open access availability into their acquisition processes to support teaching? Thirdly, what proportion of content used under the CLA Licence is also available on open access and appropriately licenced? Finally, what percentage of content used by UK HEIs under the CLA Licence is written by academics and thus has the potential for being made open access had there been support in place to enable this?

Key findings include the fact that no interviewees incorporated OA searches into their acquisitions processes. Overall, 38% of articles required to support teaching were available as OA in some form but only 7% had a findable re-use licence; just 3% had licences that specifically permitted inclusion in an ‘electronic course-pack’.

Eighty-nine percent of journal content was written by academics (34% by UK-based academics). Of these, 58% were written since 2000 and thus could arguably have been made available openly had academics been supported to do so.

URL : The Impact of Open Access on Teaching—How Far Have We Come?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030056

The rising tide: Open source’s steady transformation

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Authors : Matt Germonprez, Jonathan Lipps, Sean Goggins

Open source projects are transforming. Today, work within open source projects has come to be influenced by a growing set of companies and individuals who receive financial remuneration for their engagement.

As such, there is a central focus on commoditization and commercialization of open source products, which drives a trend towards a concealment of the various inner workings that produce these products.

Within this shift, the product becomes a central aim of open source project engagement, and the means of production becomes incidental.

In this paper, we explore the HCI research and design implications of the transformation of open source projects as part of commercial work and how we can come to better understand and protect the rising tide of open source projects.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i8.9297

Acceptance rates of scholarly peer-reviewed journals: A literature survey

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Author : Bo-Christer Bjórk

The acceptance rate of scholarly journals is an important selection criterion for authors choosing where to submit their manuscripts. Unfortunately, information about the acceptance (or rejection rates) of individual journals is seldom available.

This article surveys available systematic information and studies of acceptance rates. The overall global average is around 35-40%. There are significant differences between fields of science, with biomedicine having higher acceptance rates compared to for instance the social sciences.

Open access journals usually have higher acceptance rates than subscription journals, and this is particularly true for so-called OA mega-journals, which have peer review criteria focusing on sound science only.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.07

The citation from patents to scientific output revisited: a new approach to the matching Patstat / Scopus

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Authors : Vicente P. Gerrero-Bote, Rodrigo Sánchez-Jiménez, Félix De-Moya-Anegón

Patents include citations, both to other patents and to documents that are not patents (NPL, Non-patent literature). Among the latter include citations to articles published in scientific journals.

Just as the scientific impact is studied through the citation of articles and other scientific works, the technological impact of scientific works can also be studied through the citation they receive from patents.

The NPL references included in the patents are far from being standardized, so determining which scientific article they refer to is not trivial. This paper presents a procedure for linking the NPL references of the patents collected in the Patstat database and the scientific works indexed in the Scopus bibliographic database.

This procedure consists of two phases: a broad generation of candidate couples and another phase of validation of couples. It has been implemented with reasonable good results and affordable costs.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.01

Skills, Standards, and Sapp Nelson’s Matrix: Evaluating Research Data Management Workshop Offerings

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Authors : Philip Espinola Coombs, Christine Malinowski, Amy Nurnberger

Objective

To evaluate library workshops on their coverage of data management topics.

Methods

We used a modified version of Sapp Nelson’s Competency Matrix for Data Management Skills, a matrix of learning goals organized by data management competency and complexity level, against which we compared our educational materials: slide decks and worksheets.

We examined each of the educational materials against the 333 learning objectives in our modified version of the Matrix to determine which of the learning objectives applied.

Conclusions

We found it necessary to change certain elements of the Matrix’s structure to increase its clarity and functionality: reinterpreting the “behaviors,” shifting the organization from the three domains of Bloom’s taxonomy to increasing complexity solely within the cognitive domain, as well as creating a comprehensive identifier schema.

We appreciated the Matrix for its specificity of learning objectives, its organizational structure, the comprehensive range of competencies included, and its ease of use. On the whole, the Matrix is a useful instrument for the assessment of data management programming.

URL : Skills, Standards, and Sapp Nelson’s Matrix: Evaluating Research Data Management Workshop Offerings

Alternative location : https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol8/iss1/6/