Criticisms of altmetrics often seem to be equally applicable to other forms of research assessment, like the Impact Factor. Phill Jones suggests that is not because of a fundamental opposition to altmetrics but a fear that it will suffer the same pitfalls. The solution is to engage more with a somewhat neglected set of stakeholders; Informaticians.
SHARE’s recent summer meeting provided some interesting insights into the organization’s priorities and its ambition to provide a strong, open, and collaborative infrastructure that will maximize the impact of scholarly research. Reasons to be cheerful indeed!
Last week, Jeffery Beall wrote a highly critical blog past of Brazilian publishing co-operative and citation index SciELO. The post generated significant backlash in the blogosphere and on Twitter. Important aspects of the discussion seemed to get drowned out in all the furor: the motivation for SciELO’s founding in the first place and the need to protect local excellence in scholarly research.
Looking to the future, do membership organizations still fit in? How can they maintain and extend their relevance?
There is no shortage of critique of citation metrics and other efforts to quantify the “impact” of scholarship. Will a report calling for “responsible metrics” help researchers, administrators and funders finally wean themselves?
Can network-based metrics allow us to separate true scientific influence from mere popularity?
The Internet operates on a scale unlike anything we have seen before. How must publishing adapt to this scale? This requires more than thinking of the Internet as another format. The scale of the Internet requires us to invite machines into our research and publishing activity.
As the scholarly communication world becomes more complex and the issues we deal with become more politically and emotionally fraught, it becomes increasingly essential that we be able to tell the difference between anlaysis and advocacy. What markers can we look for to help us discriminate between them?
Citation practices vary between and within STM and HSS; they also vary by discipline and within disciplines. Though citation metrics presume evidence of “impact,” in fact a citation may represent a range of intentions. Given the emphasis on citation indices, isn’t it important to query what scholars are actually doing when they cite another scholar’s work?
When we talk about impact and metrics and understanding the customer, we are actually talking about surveillance data. We should have an open debate about what this means.
Journal additions, suppressions, new metrics and an improved user interface are included in this year’s Journal Citation Report (JCR).
Offering researchers credit for performing peer review seems, on the surface, like a good idea. But implementing such a scheme raises some problematic questions.
Scholarly publishing is virtually unique in that it has significant representation by both for-profit and not-for-profit publishers. This alters the very nature of this segment of publishing, making the not-for-profits more business-like and forcing the for-profits to behave at times like mission-based organizations.
Rick Anderson interviews Deni Auclair, VP and Lead Analyst for Outsell Inc., about the recently published report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”
Establishing new citation benchmarks and an international board of academics, Elsevier is poised to take on Thomson Reuters for dominance in the citation metrics market.