Identify scientific publications country-wide and measure their open access: The case of the French Open Science Barometer (BSO)

Posté le par

Authors : Lauranne Chaignon, Daniel Egret

We use several sources to collect and evaluate academic scientific publication on a country scale, and we apply it to the case of France for the years 2015–2020, while presenting a more detailed analysis focused on the reference year 2019.

These sources are diverse: databases available by subscription (Scopus, Web of Science) or open to the scientific community (Microsoft Academic Graph), the national open archive HAL, and databases serving thematic communities (ADS and PUBMED).

We show the contribution of the different sources to the final corpus. These results are then compared to those obtained with another approach, that of the French Open Science Barometer (Jeangirard, 2019) for monitoring open access at the national level.

We show that both approaches provide a convergent estimate of the open access rate. We also present and discuss the definitions of the concepts used, and list the main difficulties encountered in processing the data.

The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the respective contributions of the main databases and their complementarity in the broad framework of a country-wide corpus.

They also shed light on the calculation of open access rates and thus contribute to a better understanding of current developments in the field of open science.

URL : Identify scientific publications country-wide and measure their open access: The case of the French Open Science Barometer (BSO)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00179

Contribution of the Open Access modality to the impact of hybrid journals controlling by field and time effects

Posté le par

Authors : Pablo Dorta-González, María Isabel Dorta-González

Purpose

Researchers are more likely to read and cite papers to which they have access than those that they cannot obtain. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze the contribution of the Open Access (OA) modality to the impact of hybrid journals.

Design / methodology /approach

The “research articles” in the year 2017 from 200 hybrid journals in four subject areas, and the citations received by such articles in the period 2017-2020 in the Scopus database, were analyzed. The hybrid OA papers were compared with the paywalled ones.

The journals were randomly selected from those with share of OA papers higher than some minimal value. More than 60 thousand research articles were analyzed in the sample, of which 24% under the OA modality.

Findings

We obtain at journal level that cites per article in both hybrid modalities (OA and paywalled) strongly correlate. However, there is no correlation between the OA prevalence and cites per article.

There is OA citation advantage in 80% of hybrid journals. Moreover, the OA citation advantage is consistent across fields and held in time. We obtain an OA citation advantage of 50% in average, and higher than 37% in half of the hybrid journals. Finally, the OA citation advantage is higher in Humanities than in Science and Social Science.

Research limitations

Some of the citation advantage is likely due to more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not. However, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible bias.

Several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates. Funder mandates can be one of them. Funders are likely to have OA requirement, and well-funded studies are more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies.

Another discussed factor is the selection bias postulate, which suggests that authors choose only their most impactful studies to be open access.

Practical implications

For hybrid journals, the open access modality is positive, in the sense that it provides a  greater number of potential readers. This in turn translates into a greater number of citations and an improvement in the position of the journal in the rankings by impact factor.

For researchers it is also positive because it increases the potential number of readers and citationsreceived.

Originality /value

Our study refines previous results by comparing documents more similar to each other. Although it does not examine the cause of the observed citation advantage, we find that it exists in a very large sample.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09284

Library Publishing Programs at Capacity: Addressing Issues of Sustainability and Scalability

Posté le par

Authors : Johanna Meetz, Jason Boczar

Introduction

This article discusses the changes to overall goals, direction, and services that were made to two library publishing programs at Pacific University and the University of South Florida when they were no longer able to grow their programs due to an inability to hire additional staff and COVID-19-instigated staff reassignments.

Description of Programs

Pacific University’s publishing program grew out of its institutional repository and, at its peak, published seven open access journals. In addition, Pacific University Libraries founded a University Press in 2016, which has published six books as of 2021. The University of South Florida’s publishing program began publishing open access journals in 2008, and it has grown to include over 20 journals.

Lessons Learned

Both the Pacific University and the University of South Florida publishing programs have faced scalability and sustainability issues, which were further exacerbated by COVID-19. The focus of our library publishing programs, as well as many others, has been on continual growth, which is not sustainable without the ability to hire additional staff or allocate staff time differently.

We argue that standardizing services as well as creating a business plan can help ensure that publishing programs are sustainable and scalable.

Next Steps

We hope to begin a conversation among library publishers about acknowledging limits and creating achievable definitions of success outside of continual growth.

URL : Library Publishing Programs at Capacity: Addressing Issues of Sustainability and Scalability

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.12909

RipetaScore: Measuring the Quality, Transparency, and Trustworthiness of a Scientific Work

Posté le par

Authors : Josh Q. Sumner, Cynthia Hudson Vitale, Leslie D. McIntosh

A wide array of existing metrics quantifies a scientific paper’s prominence or the author’s prestige. Many who use these metrics make assumptions that higher citation counts or more public attention must indicate more reliable, better quality science.

While current metrics offer valuable insight into scientific publications, they are an inadequate proxy for measuring the quality, transparency, and trustworthiness of published research.

Three essential elements to establishing trust in a work include: trust in the paper, trust in the author, and trust in the data. To address these elements in a systematic and automated way, we propose the ripetaScore as a direct measurement of a paper’s research practices, professionalism, and reproducibility.

Using a sample of our current corpus of academic papers, we demonstrate the ripetaScore’s efficacy in determining the quality, transparency, and trustworthiness of an academic work.

In this paper, we aim to provide a metric to evaluate scientific reporting quality in terms of transparency and trustworthiness of the research, professionalism, and reproducibility.

URL : RipetaScore: Measuring the Quality, Transparency, and Trustworthiness of a Scientific Work

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.751734

What Is Wrong With the Current Evaluative Bibliometrics?

Posté le par

Author : Endel Põder

Bibliometric data are relatively simple and describe objective processes of publishing articles and citing others. It seems quite straightforward to define reasonable measures of a researcher’s productivity, research quality, or overall performance based on these data. Why do we still have no acceptable bibliometric measures of scientific performance?

Instead, there are hundreds of indicators with nobody knowing how to use them. At the same time, an increasing number of researchers and some research fields have been excluded from the standard bibliometric analysis to avoid manifestly contradictive conclusions.

I argue that the current biggest problem is the inadequate rule of credit allocation for multiple authored articles in mainstream bibliometrics. Clinging to this historical choice excludes any systematic and logically consistent bibliometrics-based evaluation of researchers, research groups, and institutions.

During the last 50 years, several authors have called for a change. Apparently, there are no serious methodologically justified or evidence-based arguments in the favor of the present system.

However, there are intractable social, psychological, and economical issues that make adoption of a logically sound counting system almost impossible.

URL : What Is Wrong With the Current Evaluative Bibliometrics?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.824518

Pratiques de citation en sciences de la communication : Analyse bibliométrique de neuf revues françaises

Posté le par

Auteur.e.s/Authors : Madjid Ihadjadene, Anna Lezon Rivière, Cécile-Marie Martin

L’objectif de cette étude est de donner un aperçu des pratiques de citation des chercheurs publiant dans neuf revues françaises en sciences de la communication. Notre analyse comprend un total de 77 566 citations tirées à partir de 3 195 articles publiés de 1992 à 2016.

Nous discutons dans cet article des supports utilisés et nous montrons que les monographies et les articles de périodiques constituent le principal mode de diffusion des connaissances en sciences de la communication. Nos résultats mettent en évidence que la liste des revues françaises et étrangères les plus citées est sensiblement différente de celle utilisée par les instances françaises des sciences de l’information et de la communication.

Nous avons également constaté que les pratiques de citation ne varient pas considérablement entre les neuf revues.

URL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-questions-de-communication-2020-2-page-395.htm

Evaluation and Merit-Based Increase in Academia: A Case Study in the First Person

Posté le par

Author : Christine Musselin

This article provides a reflexive account of the process of defining and implementing a mechanism to evaluate a group of academics in a French higher education institution. The situation is a rather unusual case for France, as the assessed academics are not civil servants but are employed by their university and this evaluation leads to merit-based salary increases.

To improve and implement this strategy was one of the author’s tasks, when she was vice-president for research at the institution in this case.

The article looks at this experience retrospectively, emphasizing three issues of particular relevance in the context of discussions about valuation studies and management proposed in this symposium: (1) the decision to distinguish between different types of profiles and thus categorize, or to apply the same criteria to all; (2) the concrete forms of commensuration to be developed in order to be able to evaluate and rank individuals from different disciplines; (3) the quantification of qualitative appreciation, i.e. their transformation into merit-based salary increases.

URL : Evaluation and Merit-Based Increase in Academia: A Case Study in the First Person

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2021.8.2.73-88