Mellon Foundation Essay of Scholarly Publishing Initiatives

Scholarly Publishing Initiatives

2007 Annual Report

Donald J. Waters
Program Officer for Scholarly Communications

Joseph S. Meisel
Program Officer for Higher Education

In 2007, the Scholarly Communications and Research University and Humanistic Scholarship programs collaborated in launching two new initiatives in the area of scholarly publishing, one aimed at increasing the capacity of university presses to publish first books by junior scholars in fields where publication opportunities have become constrained, the other at strengthening the substantive relationship between university presses and their home institutions. These initiatives are described in greater detail in the President’s Report (on pages 16 and 22). This essay is intended to provide some background by focusing on the factors that prompted staff to direct Foundation resources in these particular ways. It begins with an overview of the conditions under which scholarly publishing is currently carried out in university presses. This summary is followed by a brief outline of historical concerns about the role and functions of university presses and a discussion of previous Foundation efforts to support scholarly publishing. Finally, this essay turns to the two new initiatives and considers their objectives in the broader context outlined in the previous two sections.

Full Essay

Digital Copyright Slider

From the Copyright Advisory Network, the Office for Information Technology Policy is now featuring the digital copyright slider to go alongside the first-life slider. Thanks to Michael Brewer, OITP Copyright Advisory Committee member and desiger of both tools.

Digital Copyright Slider -- http://librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/

link: http://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/?p=557

The Scholarly Kitchen: What's Hot and Cooking in Scholarly Publishing?

The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) has established the Scholarly Kitchen - a comprehensive resource and place to go to for exciting dialogue on current trends and information on what's happening in the scholarly publishing community!

The blog, launched this spring, is primarily written by Kent Anderson, an SSP board member and Executive Director, International Business & Product Development at Massachusetts Medical Society/The New England Journal of Medicine. Other frequent contributors include Howard Ratner of the Nature Publishing Group and Phil Davis from Cornell University.

The moderated blog keeps all those interested in scholarly publishing at the forefront of new developments in publishing by pointing to relevant research reports and projects and helps to interpret the significance of this information in a balanced and, occasionally, provocative way. The Scholarly Kitchen also reports and translates findings from related business endeavors in other areas of publishing as well as from online businesses and other related emerging trends.

Since launching, the Scholarly Kitchen has had over 9200 hits and has featured top posts like The "h-index": An Objective Mismeasure? and Market-based Solution to Info-glut.

Come visit us at the Scholarly Kitchen :
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/ and join us for A Balanced Diet of Ideas, Interpretation, and Inspiration!

Submitted on behalf of the Society for Scholarly Publishing by Karen King

DOE Data Explorer (DDE)

From Jannean Elliott on OSTIBlog <http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/>

If you're ready to discover data, then OSTI's newest product is ready for you! The DOE Data Explorer (DDE) <http://www.osti.gov/dataexplorer> is a unique tool that identifies collections of Department of Energy sponsored numeric files, figures and data plots, multimedia and images, computer simulations, specialized databases, and interactive data maps. Browse, run a quick search, or advanced search, then click a link to results. You'll be amazed at the data you can freely see and use, the highly specialized interfaces developed by the owners of the data that will help you delve deeper into their collections, and the software toolkits that allow you to manipulate, compare, visualize, download, and re-use the data.

The DOE Data Explorer will guide you to data collections at national laboratories, data centers, scientific user facilities, colleges and universities ...and across all of the science areas with DOE involvement. The DOE Data Explorer development team sifted through hundreds of these websites so that you would not have to, selecting each collection for inclusion according to strict criteria. <http://www.osti.gov/dde/faq.html>

The Department of Energy has several data centers <http://www.osti.gov/dde/datacenter.html> that provide excellent collections and expert services. Each of these centers specializes in data belonging to a specific subject area or scientific discipline. The DOE Data Explorer will help you find those centers and their collections. However, its unique usefulness is in helping you find the collections that are NOT in a data center. In addition, what if you want to do cross-disciplinary research? Or what if you don't even know what data might be out there or what discipline it might belong to? You need a data discovery tool that will allow you to see ALL of DOE's data - regardless of scientific discipline, regardless of format, and, even, regardless of where the data collection resides. The DOE Data Explorer can do that.

Is it possible that the team missed a collection somewhere? Yes, of course. This is why we invite each one of you out there to let us know if we neglected to include a collection of data that you generate or maintain or even just use. The DOE Data Explorer website has a comment form <http://www.osti.gov/dde/comment.html>, and we want you to use it!

Stay tuned to the OSTI blog <http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog> over the next few weeks as we write about the data included in the DOE Data Explorer. We will try to give you a feel for the vast amount of unique information represented by this exciting new product.

Tim Byrne
Information International Associates, Inc.
DOE/Office of Scientific and Technical Information
P.O. Box 62
Oak Ridge,TN 37831
Phone: 865-241-2358
E-mail: byrnet@osti.gov

British Medical Journal to shift to 'continuous publication'

BMJ 2008;336:1450 (28 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.a491

Editorials

Continuous publication

The next logical step

The BMJ is about to undergo another shift in the way that it publishes its content, which we hope will provide benefits for both readers and authors. From the beginning of July we will be publishing content continuously on bmj.com. All our articles will be published on line as they become ready, so bmj.com will update several times a day. Once published, articles will then be selected for a subsequent print issue.

Why are we doing this? It’s a logical extension of what we’ve been doing for some time with online first publication of research, and it will give all articles the benefit of faster publication.¹ This makes most sense in the context of research, news, and other topical items, but all authors appreciate seeing their work published as soon as possible.

Continuous publication also gives readers more flexibility in the way they engage with our content: as a continuous . . . [Full text of this article]

Fiona Godlee, editor, Tony Delamothe, deputy editor, Jane Smith, deputy editor

¹ BMJ, London WC1H 9JR

jsmith@bmj.com

Citation Statistics; report from IMU of imapct factors and citation ranking

International Mathematical Union announces Citation Statistics report
Numbers with a number of problems

http://www.mathunion.org/Publications/Report/CitationStatistics

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

The International Mathematical Union today released the Citation Statistics report. Citation-based statistics, such as the impact factor, are often used to assess scientific research, but are they the best measures of research quality? Three international mathematics organizations have today released a report, Citation Statistics, on the use of citations in assessing research quality – a topic that is of increasing interest throughout the world's scientific community.

The report is written from a mathematical perspective and strongly cautions against the over-reliance on citation statistics such as the impact factor and h-index. These are often promoted because of the belief in their accuracy, objectivity, and simplicity, but these beliefs are unfounded.

Among the report’s key findings:

• Statistics are not more accurate when they are improperly used; statistics can mislead when they are misused or misunderstood.
• The objectivity of citations is illusory because the meaning of citations is not well-understood. A citation's meaning can be very far from "impact".
• While having a single number to judge quality is indeed simple, it can lead to a shallow under-standing of something as complicated as research. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.
  

The report promotes the sensible use of citation statistics in evaluating research and points out several common misuses. It is written by mathematical scientists about a widespread application of mathematics. While the authors of the report recognize that assessment must be practical and that easily- derived citation statistics will be part of the process, they caution that citations provide only a limited and incomplete view of research quality.

Research is too important, they say, to measure its value with only a single coarse tool.

The report was commissioned by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). It draws upon a broad literature on the use of citation data to evaluate research, including articles on the impact factor (the most common citation-
based statistic) and the h-index along with its many variants. The work was also based on practices as reported from mathematicians and other scientists from around the world.

IMU, ICIAM, IMS
About the International Mathematical Union (IMU): IMU is an international non-governmental and non-profit scientific organization, with the purpose of promoting international cooperation in mathematics. More information at http://www.mathunion.org/.

Contact: Martin Groetschel, Secretary of the International Mathematical Union
Zuse Institute Berlin, Takustr. 7 D-14195 Berlin, Germany
e-mail: secretary@mathunion.org, phone: +49 30 84185 210

To Share or Not To Share: Publication and Quality Assurance of Research Data Results

Recently released report from UK Research Information Network (RIN) http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-publication has a summary as well as links to the full report. The report is based upon analysis on 100+ in-depth interviews.

Couple of suggestive results to us are:

1. a number of factors (e.g. lack of explicit career rewards, a wish to retain exclusive use of the data until their publication value has been exhausted, a lack of time, resources, expertise, or an appropriate archive service) constrain the publishing of research data; and
   
2. there is need for evaluating quality of research data and making them more searchable accessible, and usable.