The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers‘ citations in the digital age

The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers' citations in the digital age

George A. Lozano, Vincent Lariviere and Yves Gingras, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada on how the Impact Factor could lose its supremacy as evaluation method on quality in scientific publishing through publishing process in the digital age.

(…) Since 1990, the overall proportion of highly cited papers coming from high impact factor journals has been decreasing, and of these highly cited papers, the proportion not coming from highly cited journals has also been increasing. Should this pattern continue, it might bring an end to the use of the Impact Factor as a way to evaluate the quality of journals, papers and researchers.

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“Academic Journals and the Price of Knowledge”, Future Tense, radio program on Radio National, ABC.
Interviews are held with, amongst others, Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Harvard University, and Dr Tyler Neylon, Mathematician and organiser of the ‘cost of knowledge’ petition and website.

Open access to research is inevitable, says Nature editor-in-chief

Open access to research is inevitable, says Nature editor-in-chief

Philipp Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature said at a briefing by academic publishers on open access at the Science Media Centre:

“In the future, there will be text mining and tools … that need to get into that literature - I see that as a key part of the future and it’s hard to see how that could work without open access.”

The Guardian.

Beyond Open Access: Open Source Scientific Software

Beyond Open Access: Open Source Scientific Software

This article points out that the open access debate has to go further into opening up scientific software.

Computers need software, and some of that software will be specially written or adapted from existing code to meet the particular needs of the scientists’ work. This makes computer software a vital component of the scientific process. It also means that being able to check that code for errors is as important as being able to check the rest of the experiment’s methodology. And yet very rarely can other scientists do that, because the code employed is not made available.

Open access will bankrupt us, publishers’ report claims

Open access will bankrupt us, publishers’ report claims

A report for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers (ALPSP) and The Publishers Association claims that the impact on all publishers’ revenues would be considerable. The findings of the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project announced it had found no evidence that the self-archiving of academic papers threatened journal viability.

The Right to Read Is the Right to Mine

The Right to Read Is the Right to Mine

The Open Knowledge Foundation set definition, principles and stragegies on text / content mining.

While Open Access (OA) is improving the ability for researchers to read papers (by removing  access barriers), still only around 20% of scholarly papers are OA. The  remainder are locked  behind paywalls. As per the vast majority of subscription contracts, Subscribers may read paywalled papers, but they may not mine them.

Call for Entries: AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards

Call for Entries: AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards

Deadline: All entries must be postmarked on or before 1 August 2012.

Entries are now being accepted for the 2012 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. The awards program was established in 1945 and recognizes outstanding reporting for a general audience in the sciences, mathematics and engineering. The contest is administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and endowed by the Kavli Foundation.

Elsevier-Boykott: Akademischer Frühling in Deutschland eher verregnet

Elsevier-Boykott: Akademischer Frühling in Deutschland eher verregnet

For all the German readers, a couple of days old, but still interesting thoughts on Germany in regards to the Elsevier boycott:

Deutsche Wirtschaftswissenschaftler sympathisieren zwar mit Elsevier-Boykott und Open Access, hängen aber am etablierten Reputations- und Rankingsystem

There are also some nice graphics to illustrate the issue.