Impact Factors Skewed by a Few Articles and not the Entire Journal

Sick of Impact Factors

Posted on  August 13, 2012  Stephen Curry (Reciprocal Space)
 
I am sick of impact factors and so is science.

The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years.

By the early 1990s it was clear that the use of the arithmetic mean in this calculation is problematic because the pattern of citation distribution is so skewed. Analysis by Per Seglen in 1992 showed that typically only 15% of the papers in a journal account for half the total citations. Therefore only this minority of the articles has more than the average number of citations denoted by the journal impact factor. Take a moment to think about what that means: the vast majority of the journal’s papers — fully 85% — have fewer citations than the average. The impact factor is a statistically indefensible indicator of journal performance; it flatters to deceive, distributing credit that has been earned by only a small fraction of its published papers.

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Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) Announces Print Archiving Milestone

 

Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) Announces Print Archiving Milestone

 

 

The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), a partnership to create a distributed retrospective print journal repository in the western United States, has completed its first round of print journal archiving under a three-year program jointly funded by WEST members and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In this first cycle in the 2011-12 academic year, 12 WEST libraries serving as archive holders on behalf of the partnership have archived more than 6,100 journal titles, comprising more than 160,000 volumes. These totals include almost 5,100 titles archived at the Bronze level (no validation; also have digital preservation), more than 500 titles archived at the Silver level (validated for completeness at the volume level) and more than 500 titles validated at the Gold level (validated for both completeness and condition at the issue level).

The WEST validation levels are designed to ensure that library collections are preserved and made available for long-term use by future generations of students and scholars, while investing in archiving efforts appropriate to the level of risk. These WEST archiving commitments have been recorded in the OCLC WorldCat database and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR) using Print Archives Metadata Guidelines developed in conjunction with an OCLC pilot project last year, making this information available in a standardized form to libraries across the U.S.

Building on these archiving commitments, WEST has produced individualized collection comparison reports for most of its members — an important benefit of WEST membership. To aid in making collection management decisions, each member library that provided information about its print journal holdings has received a report listing the titles in its collection that have been archived by another WEST partner library.

WEST also is pleased to welcome eight new members who joined in 2012: California State University – Northridge; New Mexico State University; and, through the consortial membership of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), California Baptist University, La Sierra University, Santa Clara University, University of Redlands, University of San Diego and Whittier College. This brings the total WEST membership to 109 libraries in 18 states, many through consortial partners Orbis Cascade Alliance and SCELC.

More information about WEST is available at www.cdlib.org/west.

About WEST

Western Regional Storage Trust is a distributed retrospective print journal repository program serving more than 100 research libraries, college libraries and university libraries, and three library consortia, in the western part of the United States. WEST is funded by member fees and by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The California Digital Library (CDL) serves as the administrative host for WEST.

About the California Digital Library

The California Digital Library supports the University of California libraries in their mission of providing access to the world's knowledge for the UC campuses and the communities they serve through the development and management of digital collections, innovation in scholarly publishing and the long-term preservation of digital information. The University of California library system, which includes more than 100 libraries on the 10 UC campuses, collectively is the largest research/academic library in the world. More information about CDL is available at www.cdlib.org.

Data Mining Astrophysical Literature - Interview with ADS

Mining the astronomical literature

A clever data project shows the promise of open and freely accessible academic literature.

by Alasdair Allan  |  O'Reilly Radar (http://s.tt/1kStE)

"There is a huge debate right now about making academic literature freely accessible and moving toward open access. But what would be possible if people stopped talking about it and just dug in and got on with it?

NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS), hosted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), has quietly been working away since the mid-’90s. Without much, if any, fanfare amongst the other disciplines, it has moved astronomers into a world where access to the literature is just a given. It’s something they don’t have to think about all that much.

The ADS service provides access to abstracts for virtually all of the astronomical literature. But it also provides access to the full text of more than half a million papers, going right back to the start of peer-reviewed journals in the 1800s. The service has links to online data archives, along with reference and citation information for each of the papers, and it’s all searchable and downloadable."

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http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/08/data-mining-the-literature.html

How Fair Use Can Help Solve the Orphan Works Problem

Jennifer M. Urban

University of California, Berkeley - School of Law

June 18, 2012

Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 27, 2012
UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper

Abstract:     
Many works that libraries, archives, and historical societies, among others, would like to digitize and make available online are "orphan works," that is, works for which the copyright holder either is unknown or cannot be located after a diligent search. Encountering orphan works can be stymieing because the lack of an owner means that there is no way to obtain permission to use them. While Congress nearly passed legislation to deal with the orphan works problem in 2008, its ultimate failure to enact this bill has left those who possess orphan works in limbo. Because of the risk of high statutory damages if an owner later shows up, nonprofit libraries and similar institutions have been reluctant to digitize these works and offer them to the public. The orphan status of these works thus creates a barrier to access to important cultural and historical information despite recent improvements in digitization technologies that could bring these works out of obscurity and make them much more widely useful. As such, there is international consensus that the “orphan works problem” must be addressed.

Download full paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2089526

Open Access Publishing Mandate at UC San Francisco

UCSF joins trend offering published research free

Erin Allday

Thursday, June 21, 2012

"UCSF has joined the growing ranks of academic institutions that are offering most, if not all, of their research free to the public, by requiring that all published scientific studies be added by their authors to a university repository accessible to everyone.

The policy change at UCSF, which was announced last month, is part of a global shift toward "open access" - improving the exchange of scientific information by allowing free and widespread dissemination of research that has long been contained in subscription-only journals.

With most academic research now available online, there's no reason to restrict access to it, many scientists argue."

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Peer J Inc.- New Open Access Model

New OA Journal, Backed by O’Reilly, May Disrupt Academic Publishing

By Michael Kelley on June 12, 2012 Comments

From

An open access academic publishing company called Peer J Inc. launched today, and its notable co-founders are promising that the company’s business model will revolutionize the field.

The company’s co-founders are Jason Hoyt, formerly the chief scientist and vice president for research and development at Mendeley, and Peter Binfield, until recently the publisher of PLoS One. The duo said they are poised to exploit a looming “wholesale move” toward open access in academic publishing, and they “expect to be at the forefront of a revolution in how academic content is published and distributed.”

“It was incredibly satisfying to run PLoS ONE, and I believe that PLoS ONE has been one of the major forces for change in the industry,” Binfield said. “However, I wanted to break out and see how much further I could push the envelope towards new, and innovative, modes of open access publication, while all the time maintaining the highest standards of professional publication.”

PeerJ will do without the widely employed and often expensive article-processing charge (commonly called author fees) of other OA journals, which average about $900 per published paper, according to a recent study.

Instead, PeerJ will use a “pay once, publish for life” model, which will offer individual membership plans starting at $99. Authors who join are granted lifetime rights to publish for free in the company’s peer-reviewed journal, also called PeerJ. Each author on a paper must be a member.

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MLA Journals to Shift Copyright to Authors - Ticker - Chronicle of Higher Education - June 6, 2012

Good news for Humanists on the Scholarly Communications issue of authors rights for retaining copyright. MCB

With New Agreement, MLA Journals Shift Copyright to Authors

June 6, 2012, 8:47 am    The Chronicle of Higher Education

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"The journals of the Modern Language Association will switch to a new author agreement that leaves copyright with writers, the scholarly group announced on Tuesday. The MLA had previously asserted that the journals themselves held copyright.

Under the new agreement—which takes effect with the next full issue of each journal—authors will also be permitted to post their manuscripts on personal or departmental Web sites, or in open-access repositories."