Universality of scholarly impact metrics:
« We present a method to quantify the disciplinary bias of any scholarly impact metric, and introduce a simple universal metric that allows to compare the impact of scholars across scientific disciplines. »
URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6339
Making research data repositories visible: the re3data.org registry :
« Researchers require infrastructures that ensure a maximum of accessibility, stability and reliability to facilitate working with and sharing of research data. Such infrastructures are being increasingly summarized under the term Research Data Repositories (RDR). The project re3data.org – Registry of Research Rata Repositories has begun to index research data repositories in 2012 and offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries and publishers an overview of the heterogeneous research data repository landscape. Information icons help researchers to easily identify an adequate repository for the storage and reuse of their data. This article describes the RDR landscape, outlines the practicality of re3data.org as a service, and shows how this service helps to find research data. »
URL : https://peerj.com/preprints/21v1/
An open-access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent some problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations.
We find that moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample, but the effect varies across the quality of content. Open access increases cites to the best content (top-ranked journals or articles in upper quintiles of citations within a volume) but reduces cites to lower-quality content.
We construct a model to explain these findings in which being placed on a broad open-access platform can increase the competition among articles for readers’ attention. We can find structural parameters allowing the model to fit the quintile results quite closely.
Delayed Open Access – an overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literature:
« Delayed open access (OA) refers to scholarly articles in subscription journals made available openly on the web directly through the publisher at the expiry of a set embargo period. Though a substantial number of journals have practiced delayed OA since they started publishing e-versions, empirical studies concerning open access have often overlooked this body of literature. This study provides comprehensive quantitative measurements by identifying delayed OA journals, collecting data concerning their publication volumes, embargo lengths, and citation rates. Altogether 492 journals were identified, publishing a combined total of 111 312 articles in 2011. 77,8 % of these articles were made open access within 12 months from publication, with 85,4 % becoming available within 24 months. A journal impact factor analysis revealed that delayed OA journals have on average twice as high average citation rates compared to closed subscription journals, and three times as high as immediate OA journals. Overall the results demonstrate that delayed OA journals constitute an important segment of the openly available scholarly journal literature, both by their sheer article volume as well as by including a substantial proportion of high impact journals. »
URL : http://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/en/publications/delayed-open-access%28a2eb7a79-1078-4657-9d57-4f9f5a1ff228%29.html
Subject repositories are open web collections of working papers or manuscript copies of published scholarly articles, specific to particular scientific disciplines. The first repositories emerged already in the early 1990’s and in some fields of science they have become an important channel for the dissemination of research results.
Using quite strict inclusion criteria 56 subject repositories were identified from a much larger number indexed in two repository indexes. A closer study of these demonstrated a huge variety in sizes, organizational models, functions and topics.
When they first started to emerge subject repositories catered to a strong market demand, but the later development of Internet search engines, the rapid growth of institutional repositories and the tightening up of journal publisher OA policies seems to be slowing down their growth.
URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/repositories/Subject_Repositories.pdf
The Openness of the University of the Philippines Open University: Issues and Prospects :
« This paper is a self-reflection on the state of openness of the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU). An exploratory and descriptive study, it aims not only to define the elements of openness of UPOU, but also to unravel the causes and solutions to the issues and concerns that limit its options to becoming a truly open university. It is based on four parameters of openness, which are widely universal in the literature, e.g., open admissions, open curricula, distance education at scale, and the co-creation, sharing and use of open educational resources (OER). It draws from the perception survey among peers, which the author conducted in UPOU in July and August 2012. It also relies on relevant secondary materials on the subject. »
URL : http://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/26
Scientists of many countries in which English is not the primary language routinely use a variety of manuscript preparation, correction or editing services, a practice that is openly endorsed by many journals and scientific institutions.
These services vary tremendously in their scope; at one end there is simple proof-reading, and at the other extreme there is in-depth and extensive peer-reviewing, proposal preparation, statistical analyses, re-writing and co-writing.
In this paper, the various types of service are reviewed, along with authorship guidelines, and the question is raised of whether the high-end services surpass most guidelines’ criteria for authorship. Three other factors are considered.
First, the ease of collaboration possible in the internet era allows multiple iterations between authors and the editing service, so essentially, papers can be co-written.
Second, ‘editing services’ often offer subject-specific experts who comment not only on the language, but interpret and improve scientific content.
Third, the trend towards heavily multi-authored papers implies that the threshold necessary to earn authorship is declining.
The inevitable conclusion is that at some point the contributions by ‘editing services’ should be deemed sufficient to warrant authorship. Trying to enforce any guidelines would likely be futile, but nevertheless, it might be time to revisit the ethics of using some of the high-end ‘editing services’.
In an increasingly international job market, recognizing this problem might prove progressively more important in authorship disputes, the allocation of research grants, and hiring decisions. »