Evolutions in Scholarship

Impact of impact

Monday, July 8, 2013 2:08 pm

If you’ve been around the scholarly journal publishing scene, either as an author or a librarian, you’ve likely heard talk of impact. Often, that’s impact with a big “I” – the Journal Impact Factor. Published annually each June by Thomson Reuters, the impact factor is a metric that ranks journals by the average number of citations to articles published in that journal in the preceding two years. Researchers look to it when identifying top journals in their field. Librarians look to it when making collection decisions. P&T review committees look to it when assessing journal quality and influence.

The 2012 impact factors were recently announced, and one journal in particular saw a precipitous 16% drop in its impact score from 2011 to 2012. The journal? PLoS ONE. Now, PLoS ONE is a revolutionary journal, and not just because it is open access. It is a massive, multidisciplinary, rapid peer-reviewed journal that has been making waves since 2006. It publishes tens of thousands of articles a year, and its early success – its impact – is only serving to increase annual publication rates. As one blogger explains, the fall in PLoS ONE’s impact factor is the victim in PLoS ONE’s own success.

But is it a victim? Notice that when I quickly explained the impact factor above, I noted that it is a metric, not the metric. Too often, impact factors are (mis)used as an evaluative tool to quickly assess a journal’s influence, and by extension, the presumed influence of an author’s article/research. But it only counts citation rates, and citations can be gamed. Citations also aren’t the only measure of impact, as not every use of an article will be cited in a formal publication. What about articles that get blogged? Tweeted? Facebooked? Picked up by news media? Shared by patient advocacy groups? Incorporated into classroom teaching? How are those legitimate impacts being measured? Not by impact factors, that’s for sure.

Enter altmetrics. Recognizing that the scholarly ecosystem has evolved beyond paper-based journal publication and citation to include online tools for discovering, indexing, and sharing influential articles, altmetrics “reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem.” ImpactStory and Plum Analytics are two altmetrics tools to aid researchers in assessing the broader, richer impact of their research. I don’t know much about either one, yet, but what I do know is exciting! In the coming months, I’ll be exploring altmetrics in greater detail, and expect to share what I learn with you here. Stay tuned!

Looking back, looking forward

Friday, February 15, 2013 4:05 pm

Until yesterday, 2013 has not been a year of positive movement in the scholarly communication realm. In early January, many were shocked and saddened to learn of the death of Aaron Swartz, a leading advocate for open access. Although his methodology has been questioned by some, the principles that inspired his actions are sound. In late January, updates I heard from various lawyer-librarians on the Kirtsaeng v. Wiley case before the Supreme Court and the implications for ALL, not just libraries, if Wiley gets even a partial “win” (Miss Pollyanna here refuses to believe an outright “win” is possible) were disheartening.

February didn’t get any better, as the publishers in the Georgia State copyright case filed their appeal at the end of January, and February greeted us with the chilling news that the US Dept. of Justice requested additional time to determine if they were going to file an amicus brief not in support of GSU, but either for the publishers or for neither party. (See Nancy Sims’s take for an excellent analogy to eating fast food burgers.) Then we learned that an academic librarian is being sued by a publisher, and another academic librarian has been threatened with litigation. After a particularly uplifting 2012 – Research Works Act squashed; researchers rebelled; victories one, two & three rolled in – this has been a difficult year to stomach.

But yesterday, on the 11th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which launched the Open Access movement (and also Valentine’s Day no less), hope glimmered again with the introduction of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) in both the US House and Senate. This is an updated version of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which was introduced in the past but never brought for a vote. FASTR would require all Federal agencies that fund $100 million+ in extramural awards annually to make publications stemming from funded research available to the public within 6 months of publication. But FASTR is better in two critical ways: 1) it would also require that the publications be in formats open to reuse for “computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies” (that’s text-mining, baby!), and 2) it was introduced simultaneously in both the House and Senate, with bipartisan support, in a non-election year. SPARC and InfoDocket have additional information.

May the glimmer become glitter this year!

Blogging as Scholarship

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 8:03 am

Updated July 8, 2010 – see below.

Blogging. For many, the term evokes thoughts of cringe-worthy diary-esque posts by angry teenagers, or bland breakfast tweets by bored acquaintances. But in many fields, including the sciences, law and librarianship, blogging has become vital to the advancement of scholarship. Blogs provide outlets for scholarly exchanges and expression of ideas that might otherwise be lost among the cacophony of hallway conversations and hastily-jotted margin notes. Blogs expand the conversation beyond a handful of colleagues gathered in the same physical space to an online intersection of scholars, students and interested individuals who are able to share insights in a more real-time manner than traditional exchanges via letters and rebuttal articles in journals. Blogging advances an idea or argument, and that is the ultimate goal of scholarship.

Blogging has changed dramatically, both since its genesis in the late 1990s and again within the last five years. In 2005, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a pseudonymous article titled, Bloggers Need Not Apply, which was soon followed by Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs by Robert S. Boynton on Slate. Although Boynton was critical of the claim that blogging automatically had an adverse effect on career success, Mark Sample best summed up the objection to blogging within the academy when he stated that “…the real problem with academics who blog is that they leave evidence that they’re not at that precise moment engaged in research or teaching. A blog is an index to one’s daily ‘unproductive’ activity” (Sample Reality blog).

In the five years since “career killing blogs” first “attacked,” blogs and specifically scholarly blogging have matured. Publishers, such as Nature Publishing Group, and higher education media outlets, including the Chronicle, have blogs, speaking to the importance of blogging within research fields and higher education generally. The the rise of vetted blogging communities and the evolution of publications via blogs/blogging platforms point to the rising value of blogs as an outlet for scholarship. Noted examples of these communities and publications include:

  • ScienceBlogs – 80+ bloggers covering various aspects of science; sharing and assessing research, discussing science news and events; launched in January 2006
  • ResearchBlogging.org – over 1,000 blogs/10,000 posts; aggregates blog posts on peer reviewed articles, posts similar to review articles; started in mid-2007
  • In the Library with the Lead Pipe – peer-reviewed (one external, one internal) blog authored by six librarians, with submissions by guest authors; has an ISSN; peer reviewers named but reviews not public; average 2 articles per month, 2,000-5,000 words; publication began in October 2008
  • Hacking the Academy – book project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; collected in one week in May 2010 through crowdsourcing, using hashtags (e.g., #hackacad); over 300 contributions from nearly 200 authors; full content available online, print edition forthcoming from Digital Culture Books

Despite such projects, written scholarly output in many fields is still expected to appear in a journal or monograph, vetted by pre-publication blind peer review. To engage in written discourse that does not have the peer review stamp of approval prior to distribution seems folly to many. Even fields with a healthy culture of sharing articles pre-peer review via repositories such as arXiv or SSRN eventually feed that scholarship into traditional publication structures.

Admittedly, the lack of editorial oversight and traditional peer review are strikes against blogging as scholarship. But to automatically dismiss blogs from the realm of scholarship, even while desiring universal electronic access to information (ahem, that’s scholarship folks!), is to fail to “stop trying to pound the square peg of digital scholarship into the round hole of analog scholarship” (Mills Kelly, Making Digital Scholarship Count (2), edwired). As Kathleen Fitzpatrick, author of Planned Obsolescence, notes, the criteria used during a scholar’s tenure and promotion review usually tries to assess impact on the field through the tally of peer-reviewed publications. But, she argues, “why should the two-to-three readers selected by a journal/press, plus that entity’s editor/editorial board, be the arbiter of the authority of scholarly work–particularly in the digital, when we have so many more complex means of assessing the effect of/response to scholarly work via network analysis?”

If scholars are to be truly evaluated on their impact to the field, a blog that fosters healthy debate and discussion, and ideally advances ideas or problems within the field, is a strong indicator of immediate impact. Blogging busts through access barriers that are currently limiting scholarly advancement by tying scholarship that “counts” to a centuries-old system that often fails to connect and engage scholars expediently. Through commenting and response posts, blogging has even evolved its own peer review system, albeit post-publication. Do you believe it is time for blogging to be validated by the academy as a means of scholarly discourse?

UPDATE: This week, an event has taken place that might have undermined my argument that blogging is scholarship, but I believe it actually underscores it. ScienceBlogs (SB) has come under scrutiny for a move that angered many of its bloggers and brought its credibility into question. Because this event did not pass by unnoticed, but sparked intense debate across the SB blogosphere and beyond, it confirms that blogging is actively monitored and reviewed by an engaged peer community that takes threats to credibility and autonomy very seriously. Read more from the Columbia Journalism Review, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT, The Guardian’s Science Blog, and Carl Zimmer at The Loom.

Sharing Your Research

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 8:19 am

Discoverability of research is vital to scholarship and the expansion of knowledge. Expectations for access to scholarly publications are changing. Are your publications optimized for maximum reach and impact?

As published research output increasingly becomes digitally delivered, expectations for easy access are the new norm. While faculty and students affiliated with large universities and colleges are typically able to access the full text of needed research outputs through electronic journals and ebooks with minimal clicks, researchers at smaller institutions or independent research firms are more likely to encounter barriers. Although there are options to gain access, many researchers have neither the time nor money to pursue access for an article or book that only might be beneficial to their scholarship.

As a scholarship producer, you have the power to lower or remove access barriers to your published research. Many publishers automatically allow authors to post the peer-reviewed-but-not-copyedited version of their papers on individual and institutional websites. Some publishers allow authors to archive those versions in subject or institutional repositories, such as arXiv or PubMed Central. Other publishers allow you to keep your copyrights and retain control over the final published version of your article by publishing under an open access model. For consultations on maximizing research accessibility, you can contact the Scholarly Communication Librarian.

Resources exist to help you determine what rights you have as an author when publishing in a particular journal, as well as to help you ask for rights you don’t already have or to find more rights-friendly publication venues.

  • SHERPA/RoMEO: database of author permissions normally granted in publication agreements; searchable by journal or publisher name; provides information on funder archiving requirements and author archiving allowances
  • DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals: search for free, full-text journals to find scholarship or explore publication venues
  • SPARC Author Rights: information on how to negotiate for author rights when publishing using the SPARC Author Addendum
  • Open Access Guide: resource guide on all things open access, including initiatives happening at Wake Forest University

Easy access to the full text of published research is not only desired, but by many is already expected. Researchers have unequivocally stated that if they cannot get access on the first couple of clicks, they move on. You do not want your research to be bypassed due to access barriers. Might you alter your publication strategies to ensure broader access?


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