Archives des mots-clés : research impact

Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

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Authors : Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon

Background

In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk.

Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model.

Methods

The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model.

Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich’s periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal.

A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data.

Results

Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996.

OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/73

Promotion of research articles to the lay press…

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Promotion of research articles to the lay press: a summary of a three-year project :

“The promotion of scholarly journal articles to journalists and bloggers via the dissemination of press releases generates a positive impact on the number of citations that publicized journal articles receive. Research by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. shows that article-level publicity efforts and media coverage boosts downloads by an average of 1.8 times and were found to increase citations by as much as 2.0-2.2 times in the articles analyzed in this study. We evaluated scholarly journal articles published in nearly 100 Wiley journals, which were also covered in 296 press releases. The results in this case study suggest a need for greater investment in media support for scholarly journals publishing research that sparks interest to a broad news audience, as it could increase citations.”

URL : http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2012/00000025/00000003/art00007

Beyond citations Scholars’ visibility on the social Web…

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Beyond citations: Scholars’ visibility on the social Web :

“Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web, establishing presences in a growing variety of social ecosystems. But how wide and established is this presence, and how do measures of social Web impact relate to their more traditional counterparts? To answer this, we sampled 57 presenters from the 2010 Leiden STI Conference, gathering publication and citations counts as well as data from the presenters’ Web “footprints.” We found Web presence widespread and diverse: 84% of scholars had homepages, 70% were on LinkedIn, 23% had public Google Scholar profiles, and 16% were on Twitter. For sampled scholars’ publications, social reference manager bookmarks were compared to Scopus and Web of Science citations; we found that Mendeley covers more than 80% of sampled articles, and that Mendeley bookmarks are significantly correlated (r=.45) to Scopus citation counts.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5611

The Accessibility Quotient A New Measure of Open…

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The Accessibility Quotient: A New Measure of Open Access :

“INTRODUCTION: The Accessibility Quotient (AQ), a new measure for assisting authors and librarians in assessing and characterizing the degree of accessibility for a group of papers, is proposed and described. The AQ offers a concise measure that assesses the accessibility of peer-reviewed research produced by an individual or group, by incorporating data on open availability to readers worldwide, the degree of financial barrier to access, and journal quality. The paper reports on the context for developing this measure, how the AQ is calculated, how it can be used in faculty outreach, and why it is a useful lens to use in assessing progress towards more open access to research.

METHODS: Journal articles published in 2009 and 2010 by faculty members from one department in each of MIT’s five schools were examined. The AQ was calculated using economist Ted Bergstrom’s Relative Price Index to assess affordability and quality, and data from SHERPA/RoMEO to assess the right to share the peer-reviewed version of an article.

RESULTS: The results show that 2009 and 2010 publications by the Media Lab and Physics have the potential to be more open than those of Sloan (Management), Mechanical Engineering, and Linguistics & Philosophy.

DISCUSSION: Appropriate interpretation and applications of the AQ are discussed and some limitations of the measure are examined, with suggestions for future studies which may improve the accuracy and relevance of the AQ.

CONCLUSION: The AQ offers a concise assessment of accessibility for authors, departments, disciplines, or universities who wish to characterize or understand the degree of access to their research output, capturing additional dimensions of accessibility that matter to faculty.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/7/

Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research for…

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Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research for Voluntary and Charitable Sector Organisations :

“This study was carried out by The Office for Public Management (OPM) in partnership with the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). We were commissioned in July 2011 by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on behalf of the Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) to conduct research into the benefits of open access (OA) to scholarly research outputs to voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations.”

URL : http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/576/

Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research to…

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Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research to the Public Sector :

“The objective of this project was to synthesise and generate evidence on the benefits that Open Access to scholarly research outputs has generated to the public sector, and to provide case studies of organisations that have realised such benefits. The project considered the benefits of Open Access for researchers in public sector organisations. It did not aim to be comprehensive in its coverage of the public sector, as there are many organisations for which research is only a very small part of their activity, and has only very limited impact on their policies and decisions. We have also focused on Open Access to research articles, as these still make up the largest proportion of research outputs used in analysis, policy and decision-making: research data is becoming more important but is still nascent in its influence in the organisations we surveyed. These organisations in any case often generate their own data through commissioned surveys and other tools as their needs tend to be very specific.”

URL : http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/575/

Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

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In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or “altmetrics”, sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science.

We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone.

There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact “flavors”, capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745