Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian newsanchor, interviews Richard Smith, former BMJ editor, author of The Trouble with Medical Journals.
30 minute Windows Media video
http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/oneonone/20071124.wmv
Book info at
In an upcoming talk I will be continuing a theme I started at Allen Press, calling for more semantic enrichment of scientific information online (I am of course, only one of many making such calls).
It is therefore timely to see Yahoo offering an open platform for harvesting and returning semantically-enhanced search.
There was a pre-announcement on TechCrunch, followed by the official word on the Yahoo Search Blog
In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.
Yahoo Search Blog - The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem - March 13, 2008
You can sign up for more information at
http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/open.html
So what would an appropriate set of semantic information be for a scientific article, what would your ideal search display include? # of citations? Impact Factor? Chemical and gene sequences? Price? (Sometimes information wants to be expensive...) How much can we fit into a couple of lines that will help to select one article over another in results?
UPDATE: And Yahoo is just one player in this space, as Paul Miller indicates in his posting Looking for a dominant Semantic Web search engine.
via Twitter mostly
Elsevier has launched a beta pilot that supports patients and their family members looking for medical information; providing access to individual full text journal articles from selected Elsevier publications. The articles are delivered via email for a minimal handling fee of $4.95.
http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/about
Permitted Uses
You may access in a given twenty-four hour period a reasonable number of Content items, and you may download and print such Content after it has been delivered to your e-mail address. Such access and use is for your own personal use, although you may also share and discuss such Content with family members and medical professionals involved in your medical care or the care of a family member. You can make further copies for such family members and medical professionals.
Prohibited Uses
Personal use does not include the use by researchers, instructors or students for research purposes or educational use.
http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/terms
You can see the list of journals covered at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/patientresearch
There is a Facebook App, that provides a search box and also lists "popular articles".
It's not clear to me how you search without using the Facebook App. There are some hits on various articles visible in Google. The terms of service says
After ordering the article and confirmation of payment, we will e-mail the document to you typically within 2 hours, but no longer than 24 hours.
Facebook App seen via Carol Serroul.
There are many ways to generate lists of one's publications, Martin Fenner lists a few in
An easy online list of all your publications
Mention is made of both the Scopus author ID, and the Thomson ResearcherID. This makes me wonder what ever happened to the Digital Author Identifier system in the Netherlands.
A Google search turns up
Digital Author Identification (DAI) is a unique national number assigned to every author who has been appointed to a position at a Dutch university or research institute or has some other relevant connection with one of these organisations. SURF and OCLC PICA have set up a link with the PICA thesaurus of personal names that is maintained and updated by the university libraries. One very important factor in this system is the link between the Metis research information system and the repository.
surffoundation.nl - Digital Author Identifier (DAI)
Searching also turns up a paper and running system for UAI_Sys
UAI_Sys is a pilot Java web application allowing each one author to register/update his/her own metadata content and request a unique identifier that s/he is going to retain and make use of for life. Apart from obtaining his/her unique author identifier (codenamed: UAI code), the author specifies the subset of his/her personal (meta)data that s/he wishes to become globally available to all interested parties, including variations of his/her name used in publications s/he has (co-)authored. The system supports the industrial standard interface for other applications to connect to and co-function with, over the Internet.
See UAI_Sys application and paper at DLIST.
Of course, this gets me thinking about Name Authorities and whether there's some way to get a worldwide name authority unique ID. I discover that Lorcan of course has already written about this: Names, Names, Names - VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File)
UPDATE 2008-02-25: I also found a report from a Knowledge Exchange Institutional Repositories workshop - Author identification report (PDF, September 2007).
In December 2007, Ingenta held the first event in their new Publishing Technology Trends seminar series.
Topics:
See their posting (part of their eye to eye February 2008 newsletter) for more information and links to the presentations.
As an appropriate follow-on to my previous post thinking about domain-specific sites on the net, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN DG-elect, shows us what a High-Energy Physics (HEP) e-Infrastructure for Scientific Communication may look like:
1. Build a complete HEP information platform
2. Enable text- and data-mining applications
3. Demonstrate and deploy Web2.0 applications
4. Preservation and re-use of research data
www.scoap3.org/files/APE2008-Heuer.pdf
As you might expect from the URL, there is also some discussion of the SCOAP3 initiative.
Although there are of course aspects that are unique to the HEP community, there are also lots of ideas that are generally applicable to domain portals for other areas of science.
Previously:
June 11, 2007 IATUL 2007 - June 11 - Dr. Rüdiger Voss - Open Access - SCOAP3
June 11, 2007 OA and repositories : beyond green and gold - Jens Vigen - June 11 - IATUL 2007
My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature
Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)
UPDATE 2008-01-24:
The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.
I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.
Download borgman_scholarly.pdf
The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book. This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example. This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent. The wording is considerably clearer in the final version. Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there. Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use. She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.
ENDUPDATE
There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at
http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview
For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.
This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read. Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.
Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users. As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers. You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?
In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors). Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book
The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies. As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...
The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.
While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf. Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.
Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.
You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.
http://researchblogging.org/ is an aggregator that picks up posts (from registered blogs) that have BPR3 tagging to indicate it is a post about peer-reviewed research
via Bora
I think this is a great step in promoting peer-reviewed research on the web.
Previously:
August 09, 2007 the peer review logo
through puppets
via David Flanders - Twitter
The first issue of the Code4Lib Journal is up.
There is an article about the NCSU CatalogWS API - Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform.
I think it's great to have a library journal that can focus on more technical topics.
Previously:
November 06, 2007 NCSU CatalogWS API - DLF Fall Forum 2007
The CFP for ELPUB 2008 is out.
Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB 2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences , and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications.
deadline is January 20, 2008
<marketing-mode>
NRC RP has a new site (which if you know anything about the constraints of Canadian government CLF and official languages is an accomplishment in itself). An explanation of the open access compliance of the journals is prominently featured in the bottom centre of the front page. I find the site has more modern look.
http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/home.html
</marketing-mode>
As I said over a year and a half ago
A lot of science today is very computation and data intense. I think there is a big role for academic libraries as custodians of data and research output.
Science Library Pad - the role of the academic library and librarian - January 13, 2006
Fortunately, there are lots of people thinking about the role of the library in relation to cyberinfrastructure, as well as e-research and publishing.
This month's D-Lib has a number of relevant articles and opinion pieces, including
Library Support for "Networked Science"
by
Bonita Wilson
doi:10.1045/september2007-editorial
Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1: A Cyberinfrastructure Primer for Librarians
Anna Gold, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1045/september2007-gold-pt1
Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 2: Libraries and the Data Challenge: Roles and Actions for Libraries
Anna Gold, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1045/september2007-gold-pt2
The editorial by Bonita Wilson points to "The Dawn of Networked Science" in The Chronicle for Higher Education (which is not open to read, so no link for them).
I also recommend the August 2007 CTWatch Quarterly, which was on the topic "The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure".
A reminder that there will be an E-Science track in the upcoming OECD meeting on October 3, 2007.
For more information on this topic, you can see my E-Science category.
The CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs was recently approved by the CIHR Governing Council. As a publicly-funded agency, CIHR has a fundamental interest in ensuring that research results are available to the widest possible audience and at the earliest possible opportunity in order to maximize the utility and impact of the research it funds. This policy aims to increase the diffusion of research publications supported by CIHR, while respecting the freedom of researchers to publish where they deem their research will have its greatest impact.
...
This policy applies to all grants awarded January 1, 2008 and onward, which have received funding in whole or in part from CIHR. While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to January 1, 2008 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.
...
For now, CIHR has decided to limit this policy to peer-reviewed journal publications and publication-related biomedical research data, which is typically deposited into public databases as a condition of publication. CIHR is committed to improving access to research outputs and will explore broadening the policy to include research materials and other research data in the future.
...
Grant recipients are now required to make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible through the Publisher's website (Option #1) or an online repository as soon as possible and in any event within six months of publication (Option #2).
Under the second option, grant recipients must archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts immediately upon publication in a digital archive, such as PubMed Central or the grantees institutional repository. Publications must be freely accessible within six months of publication, where allowable and in accordance with publisher policies. Grant recipients may use the SHERPA/RoMEO database to locate summaries of publisher copyright policies. The SHERPA/RoMEO database will help grant recipients determine which journals allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies. However, CIHR recommends confirming with editorial staff whether archiving the postprint immediately, and making it freely accessible within six months, is permissible.
Grant recipients may also wish to submit their manuscripts to a journal that provides immediate open access to published articles (if a suitable journal exists). CIHR considers the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.
Access to Research Outputs - Modified: 2007-09-04 - Accessed: 2007-09-04
Policy on Access to Research Outputs - September 2007
Disclosure: CISTI is far from a disinterested observer in this development, but as always, if you want any kind of statement about anything CISTI is doing, please contact CISTI Communications, not me.
Previously:
July 21, 2007 Globe and Mail on Open Access
November 29, 2006 CARL and SPARC respond positively to CIHR draft research access policy
October 13, 2006 Institutional Repositories - David Moorman SSHRC
Also see other postings in my Open Access category.
Jean-Claude Bradley instigated a session in Second Life - SciFoo Lives On: Open Science.
![[SF-SL-004]](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1049/1183898497_6481a3debd.jpg)
Next week will be something like "Medicine 2.0".
You can see in the transcript that one part of SciFoo that definitely lived on was a discussion around Open Science and webliometrics, both definitions and how to handle impact. It seems to me that we get tangled in endless debates about definitions. I have proposed that the nodalpoint Open Science wiki page be used to come to a consensus definition, but in the meantime:
(Marked up using HTML definition lists, which you have probably never heard of, which incidentally is why the Semantic Web will fail.)
Yes, there are many types of peer review in different disciplines, and yes, things are often considered published and citable without having gone through peer review, such as conference papers and presentations which often go through a sort of editorial board selection instead.
I know these definitions are far from perfect, but good lord, can we get to good enough and go beyond this debate?
What I keep hearing is, how can we impact factorize open science. Well, the answer is, you can't. Let's stop trying to find some magic algorithm whereby a machine tells us what quality science is. What's completely mad to me about this is that we already have processes to assess science quality. Every time you review a new student, every time you look at a grant proposal, heck, even on the infamous tenure committees and research assessments, a group of humans looks at a portfolio of existing or proposed work, and decides whether it is good enough.
So if I may modestly propose, let's continue to do that, and no one other than journal publishers should ever look at impact factor numbers again. Arise, qualitative assessment, begone quantitive nonsense.
There is still a place for technology, but it's not in providing some bogus seemly-quantitative quality measure. It's in enabling us all to present our scientific portfolios online, or to use Euan's words, our "professional lifestreams". And there is a real problem to be solved. It starts with students and their scholarly output stuck in closed university systems. Students move around. Scientists move around. Their work history should move with them, not be lost in some scholarly dark web, or frozen as some web page at their previous institution that they no longer can access.
The European e-Portfolio is one effort to address this for students.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations is another piece.
The next step is to have those integrate into some, shall we say, flow or... flux (sekrit inside Nature joke) of the rest of their scholarly activity when they graduate. Bookmarks created, databases curated, papers reviewed, etc. etc.
That's the technology piece.
The other piece, however, cannot be solved with technology.
Find better ways for humans to review scholarly portfolios and make decisions based on them. That's going to address this problem of evaluation far better than anything else.
SIDEBAR
And of course you can do some side bits with technology of course
once you have all this info circulating around, like ranking relevance
to help people find the best, most relevant work in the flood of
science that is sloshing around. Usage factor, other metrics, these
may all help in recommending things to read.
END SIDEBAR
References
Richard Monastersky, "The Number That's Devouring Science", Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 52, Issue 8, Page A12 (2005)
The PLoS Medicine Editors, "The Impact Factor Game", PLoS Med 3(6): e291 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291 (2006)
Peter A. Lawrence, "The Mismeasurement of Science". Current Biology, 17 (15), r583. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.014 (2007)
Bruno Granier, "Impact of research assessment on scientific publication in Earth Sciences" (PDF), a presentation at ICSTI June 2007 Public Conference on Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information
Richard Akerman, "Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone" (PDF), a presentation at ICSTI June 2007 Public Conference on Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information
Corie Lok, "Scifoo: day 1; open science" (2007)
Alex Palazzo, "Scifoo - Day 2 - Science Communication" (2007)
Alex Palazzo, "Scifoo - Day 3 (well that was yesterday, but I just didn't have the time ...)" (2007)
Previously:
June 2007 Science Library Pad: ICSTI 2007 category
It is not so funny that, in the real world of science, dodgy evaluation criteria such as impact factors and citations are dominating minds, distorting behaviour and determining careers.
Modern science, particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quantity and quality of research. Scientists are ranked according to these measures, a ranking that impacts on funding of grants, competition for posts and promotion. The measures seemed, at first rather harmless, but, like cuckoos in a nest, they have grown into monsters that threaten science itself.
The Mismeasurement of Science. Current Biology,
August 7, 2007: 17 (15), r583.
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.014 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.014 )
via DC's goodscience
via nsaunders Google Starred links
UPDATE 2007-08-20: Also see new posting open science and the impact factory.
In the session "Reinventing scientific publication (Web 2.0, 3.0, and their impact on science)" led by James Hendler at SciFoo, one of the items was an idea from Geoffrey Bilder, for publishers to provide a "peer review logo" that could be attached to (at this point I am interpreting based on my own understanding) e.g. blog postings, some sort of idea of a digital signature to indicate peer reviewed content. (I know the list well since I'm afraid my major contribution to the evening, despite having thought about this topic a lot, was transcribing the list).
2) ID, logoing, review status tag, trust mechanisms
- other peer review status
I wonder if we should make a wiki where we list all of the grand (and not so grand) challenges of web science communication and discovery, and then people can pick off projects. The SciFoo prototypes list is one angle on this. Of course, in the perpetual-beta web world, it's probably faster to just create a wiki, than to try to start a discussion about whether one should be created. It's in that "just do it" spirit that I'm pleased to find there is already a peer review logo initiative in the works, although the angle is to indicate that you're writing about a reviewed work, not that your work itself has been reviewed. From Planet SciFoo:
Cognitive Daily - A better way for bloggers to identify peer-reviewed research, by Dave Munger
[we] have decided to work together to develop such an icon, along with a web site where we can link to bloggers who've pledged to use it following the guidelines we develop
via Bora Zivkovic, via Peter Murray-Rust
(it's strange and also good to be blogging now about people that I've finally met)
UPDATE: I do have a vague idea in a similar space, which would be a "repeatability counter".
As I have learned more about peer review, I have understood that it has many aspects, but preventing fraud is not one of them. Peer review can help to create a paper that is well-written and has "reasonable" science, but it can't stop a determined fraudster. (This isn't my insight, but comes from a presentation I saw by Andrew Adrian Mulligan of Elsevier - "Perceptions and Misperceptions - Attitudes to Peer Review".) What does address fraud, and keep science progressing, is falsifiability: someone else does the experiment and sees if they get the same results. Now I realise there are many different classes of results, but it's interesting that many of these are not publishable, and are maybe not captured in the current system:
So I think it would be interesting to have a sort of "results linking service" where you would click and you would get links to all the people who had tried to reproduce the results, and indications of whether or not they succeeded. We use citation count as a sort of proxy for this, but it's imperfect, not least of which because there is no semantic tagging of the citation so you don't know if it was cited for being correct or incorrect. I think this kind of experiment linking might add a lot of value to Open Notebook Science and to protocols reporting (whether in the literature like Nature Protocols, or in a web system like myExperiment). Otherwise I worry that the amount of raw information from a lab notebook makes it hard to extract a lot of value from it.
UPDATE: Christina in the comments rightly chides me on my loose use of "falsifiability". Basically I'm trying to get at two aspects of testability: 1) is there enough information in the paper to test the author's claims? 2) What are the results of such a test?
This is some very interesting work and a huge project that should greatly enrich our understanding of the usage of scientific information.
Johan Bollen - Los Alamos National Laboratory
"Scholarly impact: from ranking to assessment"
Scholarly evaluation matters
- qualitative and quantitative indicators
many features in scholarly status space
- prestige
- novelty
- visibility
etc.
[MESUR project]
various opportunity to extract metrics in the scholarly life-scucle
- usage data
- review data
- citation data
usage data is available before citation data
public.lanl.gov/jbollen/Publications.html
From ranking to assessment
we're in mode ranking 0.6
- single data source
- single criterion
... to assessment 3.0 [yecch]
- situate item in value landscape
- multiple sources of scholarly information
question: which dimensions to choose?
1) MESUR project
- survey wide range of possible indicators
2) Peer review
- study peer review process
Marko Rodriguez and others
Can we improve on citation data and the impact factor?
- perhaps usage data applies to a larger subset of the scholarly community,
capturing more scholarly objects and activities beyond journal articles
usage: COUNTER, IRS [?], SUSHI, CiteBase
MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources
1 ontology to model the scholarly process
2 beg for usage data
3 dedupe
4 create semantic network
2/5th through the project
[ontology]
data 700million usage events and 1 bilion citations
10-15 billion triples
COUNTER logs, item-level data, SFX, etc.
link resolver data very good
[paper in JCDL 2006 about link resolver data gathering architecture]
they are using Franz's AllegroGraph triplestore
Network usage: usage graphs
"we should stop counting: we should look at relationships"
journal network - 50,000 journals
Example: Flow of information
[pretty network]
Metrics survey
many large organizations and sites are participating
U Texas case study...
[my comment: but isn't there an undergrad effect based on the articles they are assigned?]
principle component plot
[paper at JCDL 2007]
many issues and challenges
Denis Jérome - CNRS, Académie des Sciences
"Evaluation based on scientific publications: experiences in physics"
* public funding is needed for basic research
* evaluation is needed
* can one use publications to evaluate research
[chart showing 64% of (european) physics letters published in US]
Paradox
* Europe is the first (largest) contributor to physics publications
* yet EU is a minor actor for scientific publications
A Mandatory Plurality
* an overwhelming concentration is dangerous
* need a variety of editorial policies
The need for evaluation
* peer review [of grants, and scientists]
* but also bibliometrics
* e.g. Impact Factor
IF is an indicator for publishers
*** misuse of IF for individual evaluation ***
Nature: 25% of articles receive 90% of citations
Nature & Science only have small number of physics papers therefore:
ban IF for evaluation
IF is about journal popularity, not about the actual citations
Need indications about quality
Physicists publish mostly in small number of journals listed in Web of Science
Databases
Google Scholar
Scopus
NASA ADS adsdoc.harvard.edu
ISI Thomson
Hirsh Index: H
Leo Egghe, 2006 "G" index
analysis: G seems to be more reliable than H
Grain of Salt
* clean scientist names [need unique scientist numbers]
* self-citations
* team work
* negative citations
* cronyism
* quality of citations
must be handled by scientists
Ulrich presented a very interesting open review model for publications, unfortunately his talk was a bit rushed due to factors outside his control. Definitely an approach worth investigating further.
Ulrich Pöschl - Max Planck Society
"Interactive open access publishing and collaborative peer review for improved scientific communication and quality assurance"
www.mpch-mainz.mpg.de/~poeschl
* many motivations to do open access
- improve scientific quality assurance
with OA you can do collaborative peer review
problems with scientific publications
- fraud
- carelessness
speed vs quality
- but then neglect thorough review
Two-stage OA publication with collaborative peer review
www.egu.eu
* they [the journals] are financially viable
* they have good impact factor
Bernard F. Schultz - Albert Einstein Institute - Future styles? of assessment
Vision
- OA to high quality scientific publications
- documentation of scientific discussion (e.g. publish referee comments)
- demonstration of transparency and rationalism
Proposition
- prescribe OA to publically funded research
- transfer funds for subscription to OA
- foster OA publishing and collaborative peer review
- mere access is not enough (need to get all layers, data etc.)
- evaluate individual papers
- refine statistical parameters for citation, downloads, usage, interactive commenting and rating
Bruno Granier - University of Western Brittany
"Impact of research assessment on scientific publication in earth sciences"
- Misuse of IF [impact factor]
citation: "The number that's devouring science"
- The Goal
* the only common goal is how visible you are...
because visibility is the qualitative factor used to assess your work
he started an OA journal - Notebooks in Geology
As an author
- (particularly in industry) you may want paper published ASAP
- you may reiterate your message in other publications
- in academe you want impact factor
ways to increase visibiity
- slicing
- bogus signatures / invitation
- author names appear in alternate positions in similar papers
- selective or inexact quotations
- self-citation
- cutting and pasting
- lift information
Evaluators should use weighted averages for multi-author papers, 1st authorship worth much more
Question: How to detect frauds?
Answer: You need a good reviewer
As a reviewer
- the reviewer remains the sine qua non of the evaluation process
As an editor
- blacklist repeat offender authors
- use computer programs to detect plagiarism
- often citations are incorrect or not relevant
As a publisher
- OA gives happy google effect
- monitoring
shall i use new tools/facilities (couunters) to discriminate the kind of papers that
get the larger readership
Impact Factor
- a huge part of the scientific inofmration is not given any consideration,
since IF covers only well-established journals
The use and misuse of metrics is responsible for the death of many lab, museum etc. publications in
France and elsewhere.
Conclusion
- bibliometrics or not, the only goal remains to increase your visibility
- the Google effect is at our doors
Ok, they called it
Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing (MP3)
but I refuse to use such buzzterms. Or to call it a podcast when it's just an audio file. Anyway, it's interesting listening. The panel members are
Moderator: John Wilbanks Exec Dir of Science Commons, Creative Commons
Matthew Cockerill Publisher, BioMed Central Ltd
Melissa Hagemann Program Mgr, Open Society Institute
Timo Hannay Dir of Web Pub, Nature Publishing Group
Amit Kapoor Managing Dir, Topaz
Mitch just launched ChemRank, a website where we can comment on and vote thumbs up or down for scientific articles.
via chem-bla-ics
So far what it appears to tell us is that the Blue Obelisk chemoinformatics people like articles about Blue Obelisk and chemoinformatics...
Seems to me that this is a niche within a niche, but it is nevertheless a real need.
PublicationsList.org exists to let researchers and research organizations maintain a reliable web-based record of their academic output without any fuss.
They will also provide (for a fee) space for hosting self-archived papers (although I would imagine you have to check your publisher rights, usually it says something like "on your work web site or in your institution's repository").
They do have a number of options for embedding the generated list in your own website / blog etc., which is very nice to see.
via HubLog
In Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond, Cathy Davidson discusses many aspects of how cyberinfrastructure can and is transforming teaching and research
That brings me to another point, which may appear tangential but which is at the heart of the matter. New ways of thinking need support. If, at present, academic rewards go to the author of a monograph, especially one that posits a different analytical or interpretive hypothesis, for Human Sciences 2.0 we need to think of ways to reward teams of scholars working cross-culturally on collaborative projects. Collaborative work should count, and here humanists can use models that scientists have developed for determining credit in co-authored projects with multiple investigators.
...
We also need to rethink paper as the gold standard of the humanities. If scholarship is better presented in an interactive 3-D data base, why does the scholar need to translate that work to a printed page in order for it to “count” towards tenure and promotion? It makes no sense at all if our academic infrastructures are so rigid that they require a “dumbing down” of our research in order for it to be visible enough for tenure and promotion committees.
CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 2, May 2007.
As a side note, the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch) blog relaunched on May 25, 2007.
Previously:
March 25, 2005 Cyberinfrastructure Tech Watch Blog operational
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