Scientific Journals: Challenges & Trends

Scientific Journals:

Challenges & Trends

JASIST

&

ARIST

Editor-in-Chief: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2009-

Editor: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 2001-2011.

Authors Readers ASIS&T (The Society) Subscribers (Libraries) Reviewers Infrastructure Provider (Scholar One) JASIST Editor-in-Chief Managing Editors, Production Editor, Copy Editors &

Proofreaders Editorial Board Wiley-Blackwell (The Publisher)

Slow Publishing

• Policing to prevent salami-slicing/LPU/ “self-plagiarism” • Plagiarism fraud, error detection … retraction

Peer Review

• Expertise mapping,

referee fatigue, system stress

• Single vs. double blind

vs. open vs. hybrid

Language

• Linguistic hegemony • Vernacular vs. vehicular language • Effort-cost of maintaining standards

Data

• Accessibility of data for checking, replication, re-use, exploitation • Accessibility of instruments, protocols, software, primary data

• How to cite data

• How to reward data creators • How to peer review data sets

• Need for sharing of data management plans • How to reward secondary analysis of data

Journal Impact Factor

“… high IF journals are losing their stronghold as the sole repositories of high-quality papers, so

there is no legitimate basis for extending the

IF of a journal to its papers, much less to individual researchers.”

Coercive Citation

Editors force

authors to cite

articles from

Proportion of WoS papers on arXiv, by specialty (2010-2011). Inset: Proportion of WoS papers on arXiv, by specialty, 1995-2011.

Larivière, Macaluso, Sugimoto, Milojevic, Cronin, & Thelwall (2013)

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% Optics Applied Physics Computers Acoustics Chemical Physics Fluids & Plasmas Applied Mathematics Probability & Statistics Miscellaneous Physics Miscellaneous Mathematics Solid State Physics General Mathematics General Physics Nuclear & Particle Physics Astronomy & Astrophysics

Percentage of WoS-papers (2010-2011) 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 1995 2000 2005 2010 Pe rc en tag e o f a rti cle s

Nuclear & Particle Physics

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Accés Obert

• Removal of tolls & filters

• ‘Bibliodiversity’

• APCs: cost shifting

• Open peer review/

‘wisdom of the crowds’ • Visible impact measures

Open Access (humanly readable PDFs)

Open Data (machine

readable, mineable, reusable, licensable)

Workers’ Revolt?

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

600,000 authors,~ $1 billion

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

“I think publishing is a

cost of research in the same way as buying a centrifuge is a cost of research”

Perceptions & Reality

Dallmeier-Tiessen et al., 2011 About 2/3 of (~9,000) OA journals do not charge APCs. Medical sciences

highest; A & H lowest.

OA Journal Publishing, 1993-2009

• $9 million start-up support

• 7 Gold OA journals • Efficiencies of scale

• Costs down, charges up?

• PLoS One revenues provide cross-subsidy (cash

PLoS: A Publishing Phenomenon

~2,000 papers per month

• APC = $1,350

• Peer reviewed mega journal

• 3% of STM literature • 65% acceptance rate

• STM publisher of 220 OA, online, peer-reviewed

journals.

• Acquired by Springer. Revenues = $20M (?)

• Authors pay APC, retain copyright and license

work under CC-BY

• From hybrid (2004) to fully OA (2007) • 500+ peer reviewed journals • Rejection rate ~60% • 10% no APCs

• APCs range from $0 ->

$1,500

• Institutional

membership

•Accelerated peer review

Hindawi Revenues

Sage Open

• Peer-review ‘Gold’ OA journal covering social

& behavioral sciences and the humanities

• Discounted APC ==> $99

http://www.

elifesciences

.org/

• Howard Hughes +

Welcome + Max Planck

• Senior scientists on

editorial board

• Free for now

• Seeks out high

F1000Research is an original open access

publishing program for life scientists, offering immediate publication, transparent peer

review (post-publication) and full data

deposition and sharing. All scientifically sound

articles are accepted, including single findings, case reports, protocols, replications,

null/negative results and more traditional articles.

Predatory Journals

• Low quality

journals

• Dubious editorial

practices

• Scholarly vanity

presses

~4,000?

Accés Obert -- Libres

• OA book publisher • Not for profit

• Rigorous peer review • Free online

• Make tables, graphs, stats interactive

• Make code, data etc. reader-verifiable

• From (fixed) paper to (dynamic) process to

Identifying great research in biology and medicine F1000 is an in-depth directory to the top articles in biology and medicine, as recommended by our Faculty of over 5,000 expert scientists and clinical researchers, assisted by 5,000 associates.

Liquid Publications

“blogs, scientific

experiments,

comments on

somebody else’s paper, reviews, slides, videos, demos, even data”

“evolutionary, collaborative …” Baez & Casati, n.d.

Force 11 Manifesto

http://force11.org/white_paper

We see a future in which … every claim, hypothesis, argument – every significant

element of the discourse – can be explicitly

represented, along with supporting data,

software, workflows, multimedia, external

commentary, and information about provenance.

What is a Nanopub?

http://www.nanopub.org/

A nanopublication is the smallest unit

of publishable information: an assertion about anything that can be uniquely

identified and attributed to its author. Find, connect, aggregate, curate

Nano Publication

Status Quo

Nano-centric Publication

An Open Access ‘Evidence Rack’

(Peter Suber , December 2012)

1. Identify basic propositions in a paper/sub-field/field

2. Create separate OA webpage for each proposition

3. Fill each webpage with evidence supporting the proposition

Force 11 Manifesto

http://force11.org/white_paper

Notions such as journal impact factor are poor

surrogates for measuring the true impact of scholarship … we need to derive new

mechanisms that will allow us more accurately to measure true contributions.

Assessing Research Quality

“Impact is defined as an effect on, change or

benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or

quality of life, beyond academia…”

Beyond Bibliometrics

Citations miss important traces … are lagged reference managers, blogs, bookmarking, slide-sharing services

and social media

• Scholars read, use and then cite

• Non-scholars read and use, but don’t cite

• Citations measure a particular kind of use;

Invoked on the Web

(Cronin et al., 1998) “genres of invocation” “polymorphous mentioning” “presence density”

“diverse ways in which academic influence is exercised and

Alternative Metrics

• Acknowledgments • Data citation counts • Micro-attributions for data curation

• Social media mentions • Recommendations • Downloads • Links/hits/click-throughs • Mentions in extra- scientific texts • Press coverage

Alt.metrics

Platforms

Transparency?

Usability?

Persistence?

Cost?

Complements or Correlatives?

• Citations in Wikipedia correlate with JCR data (Nielsen,

2007)

• Articles in the top quartile of tweets were 11 times more

likely to be in top quartile of citations 2 years later (Eysenback, 2012)

• High positive correlation between F1000 score and JIF

(Nature Neuroscience, 2005)

• Positive correlations between inclusion in reference

managers and citation counts

(Bar-Ilan, 2012; Li etal. 2011; Priem et al., 2012)

• Downloads predict /correlate with subsequent citation

Downloads vs. Citations in Science Direct (source: Elsevier)

“Quantified Control”

Lock & Martins, 2011

“an Orwellian surveillance net” Sosteric, 1999 “contemporary ‘metricization’ of the academy” Burrows, 2012

The data speak for themselves …. Or

do they?

Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting

Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, Nicolás Robinson-García, Daniel Torres-Salinas arXiv.org, Submitted on 4 Dec 2012

We created six documents authored by a faked author and we uploaded them to a researcher’s personal website under the University of Granada’s domain. The result of the experiment meant an increase of 774 citations in 129 papers (six citations per paper) increasing the authors and journals H index.

The Holy Grail of Holism

Multidimensional indicators of impact, influence, worth and trends

A matrix of established

& alternative metrics A unified

measure/composite

Trends

• Liberation theology

• Incremental, interactive, evolutionary products

• Atomization of effort, outputs • Multiple impact measures

• Fetishization of metrics • Transparency vs. triviality