Evaluating the Impact of Open Access at Berkeley: Results from the 2015 Survey of Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) Funding Recipients

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) was one of the first campus-based open access (OA) funds to be established in North America and one of the most active, distributing more than $244,000 to support University of California (UC) Berkeley authors. In April 2015, we conducted a qualitative study of 138 individuals who had received BRII funding to survey their opinions about the benefits and funding of open access.

Most respondents believe their articles had a greater impact as open access, expect to tap multiple sources to fund open access fees, and support the UC Open Access Policy and its goal of making research public and accessible. Results of the survey and a discussion of their impact on the BRII program follow.

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2015/11/05/crl15-824.short

 

Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles

Purpose

To examine whether National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded articles that were archived in PubMed Central (PMC) after the release of the 2008 NIH Public Access Policy show greater scholarly impact than comparable articles not archived in PMC.

Methods

A list of journals across several subject areas was developed from which to collect article citation data. Citation information and cited reference counts of the articles published in 2006 and 2009 from 122 journals were obtained from the Scopus database. The articles were separated into categories of NIH funded, non-NIH funded and whether they were deposited in PubMed Central. An analysis of citation data across a five-year timespan was performed on this set of articles.

Results

A total of 45,716 articles were examined, including 7,960 with NIH-funding. An analysis of the number of times these articles were cited found that NIH-funded 2006 articles in PMC were not cited significantly more than NIH-funded non-PMC articles. However, 2009 NIH funded articles in PMC were cited 26% more than 2009 NIH funded articles not in PMC, 5 years after publication. This result is highly significant even after controlling for journal (as a proxy of article quality and topic).

Conclusion

Our analysis suggests that factors occurring between 2006 and 2009 produced a subsequent boost in scholarly impact of PubMed Central. The 2008 Public Access Policy is likely to be one such factor, but others may have contributed as well (e.g., growing size and visibility of PMC, increasing availability of full-text linkouts from PubMed, and indexing of PMC articles by Google Scholar).

URL : Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0139951

The data sharing advantage in astrophysics

We present here evidence for the existence of a citation advantage within astrophysics for papers that link to data. Using simple measures based on publication data from NASA Astrophysics Data System we find a citation advantage for papers with links to data receiving on the average significantly more citations per paper than papers without links to data. Furthermore, using INSPEC and Web of Science databases we investigate whether either papers of an experimental or theoretical nature display different citation behavior.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02512

The Scaling Relationship between Citation-Based Performance and Scientific Collaboration in Natural Sciences

The aim of this paper is to extend our knowledge about the power-law relationship between citation-based performance and collaboration patterns for papers of the Natural Sciences domain. We analyzed 829,924 articles that received 16,490,346 citations. The number of articles published through collaboration account for 89%. The citation-based performance and collaboration patterns exhibit a power-law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.20, SD=0.07. We found that the Matthew effect is stronger for collaborated papers than for single-authored.

This means that the citations to a field research areas articles increase 2.30 times each time it doubles the number of collaborative papers. The scaling exponent for the power-law relationship for single-authored papers was 0.85, SD=0.11. The citations to a field research area single-authored articles increase 1.89 times each time the research area doubles the number of non-collaborative papers.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05266

The presence of High-impact factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) disciplines

Statut

The present study means to establish to what extent high-quality open access journals are available as an outlet for publication, by examining their distribution in different scientific disciplines, including the distribution of those journals without article processing charges.

The study is based on a systematic comparison between the journals included in the DOAJ, and the journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Science edition 2013, released by Thomson Reuters.

The impact factor of Open Access (OA) journals was lower than those of other journals by a small but statistically significant amount. Open access journals are present in the upper quartile (by impact factor) of 85 out of 176 (48.8%) categories examined. There were no OA journals with an Impact Factor in only 16 categories (9%).

URL : The presence of High-impact factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) disciplines

Alternative location : http://leo.cineca.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/11257

A New Ranking Scheme for the Institutional Scientific Performance

Statut

We propose a new performance indicator to evaluate the productivity of research institutions by their disseminated scientific papers. The new quality measure includes two principle components: the normalized impact factor of the journal in which paper was published, and the number of citations received per year since it was published. In both components, the scientific impacts are weighted by the contribution of authors from the evaluated institution.

As a whole, our new metric, namely, the institutional performance score takes into account both journal based impact and articles specific impacts. We apply this new scheme to evaluate research output performance of Turkish institutions specialized in astronomy and astrophysics in the period of 1998-2012. We discuss the implications of the new metric, and emphasize the benefits of it along with comparison to other proposed institutional performance indicators.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03713

The metric tide : Report of the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management

Statut

“This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. The review was chaired by Professor James Wilsdon, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and administration.

This review has gone beyond earlier studies to take a deeper look at potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators. It has explored the use of metrics across different disciplines, and assessed their potential contribution to the development of research excellence and impact. It has analysed their role in processes of research assessment, including the next cycle of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has considered the changing ways in which universities are using quantitative indicators in their management systems, and the growing power of league tables and rankings. And it has considered the negative or unintended effects of metrics on various aspects of research culture.”

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015_metric_tide.pdf

Related URL : http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/Independentresearch/2015/The,Metric,Tide/2015_metric_tide.pdf