What Faculty Need to Know About Open Access & Increasing Their Publishing Impact by Ben Wagner

What faculty need to know about Open Access & increasing their publishing Impact A. Ben Wagner, Sciences Librarian University at Buffalo

The Message
Used to be Publish or Perish .
Now it’s increasingly Get Cited or Perish .
Open Access: more readers, more citations, more impact
It’s your work; retain a few rights, at least posting manuscript to repository.
Sure you publish for prestige, but you also publish to be read!

The Classic: Journal Impact Factors
The number everyone knows when they see it, but can’t really define it.
Reported in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database < http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/jcr.html >
Reports the number of times the average article is cited in a given journal by subsequent articles in the body of scholarly journal literature.

2005-2006 Child Abuse & Neglect (journal) 158 articles 2007 All scholarly articles in journals covered by SSCI 238 Cites 2007 Impact = 238 2007 cites = 1.506 Factor 158 2005-06 articles

Journal Impact Factor (JIF) Definition
The journal impact factor is the average number of times articles from a given journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year.
Calculated by dividing the number of citations from the entire body of scholarly articles in the JCR [current] year by the total number of articles published in a given journal in the two previous years.

So what?
JIF is a measure of extreme currency – 2 year window.
JIF is a GROSS average. Ave. article in Child Abuse & Neglect cited 1.506 times, but the citations RANGE from 0-25 times.
Never ever intended to measure quality of an individual article or author.
http://forums.thomsonscientific.com/t5/Citation-Impact-Center/Preserving-the-Integrity-of-The-Journal-Impact-Factor-Guidelines/ba-p/1218#M14

Dirty little secrets
Impact factors can be manipulated by journal editors by:
Publishing more review articles
Encouraging citations to one’s own journal
Only journal article-to-journal article citations are counted. Book, report, conference paper citations ignored.
The data is dirtier and less complete than generally believed.

Two Questions
Citation patterns and nature of research differ across disciplines. How can we compare JIF from different disciplines?
Is there a better citation metric than JIF that can be used as a component in evaluating a scholar’s work?

Comparing Journal Impact Factors
Normalize them within discipline (top journal=100%, bottom journal=0%)
Every discipline has top journal and a bottom journal.
Social Work – top journal – JIF 2.352
Psychiatry – top journal – JIF 15.97
Details in my article: http://www.istl.org/09-spring/refereed1.html

Top 5 Social Work Journals by NIF Abbreviated Title JIF NIF Child Maltreatment 2.352 100% Trauma Violence Abus 1.806 96% Child Abuse Neglect 1.506 92% Soc Work Res 1.200 88% J Soc Policy 1.117 85%

Same journal in multiple JCR subject categories Child Abuse Neglect JIF NIF Social Work Category 1.506 92% Sociology Category 1.506 88% Psychology Category 1.506 65%

A Better Citation Metric
H-Index (Hirsch Index)
An H-Index of 11 means a person (or dept.) has 11 articles cited at least 11 times.
Easily calculated from Web of Science http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/webofscience.html

Critique of H-Index
Rewards longevity, but not least-publishable-unit or sheer quantity.
Recent and old work rewarded equally
Does not reward highly cited papers
Many variants (g-index, m-index, etc. proposed to weight age, recent work, & highly cited papers) – see bibliography
Relatively insensitive to manipulation.

Other alternatives to JIF
Eigenfactors - http://www.eigenfactor.org/
New, open access direct competitor to JIF
Reports to “rank journals much as Google ranks websites” by analyzing the vast network of citations in scholarly web documents.
Other JCR metrics including 3 new ones as of this year. http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/jcr.html

Citation Indexes – Many more players -1
SciFinder
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Amazon (Search inside this book)
Google Scholar/Harzing’s POP
Scitation/Spin Web/PROLA
Citation Bridge (US Patents)
USPTO
Optics InfoBase

Citation Indexes – Many more players -2
CiteSeer (primarily computer & info sci)
ScienceDirect
PsycInfo
IEEE Xplore
Spires (High Energy Physics
IOP Journals
CrossRef

My Take
For an individual or department:
H-Index plus
Total cites to all published articles plus
Citation Report graphs from appropriate the citation databases (SCI, SSCI, AHCI,+?)
Give a pretty good take on the impact of one’s journal articles within the limits of available citation data.
Demonstrably superior to JIF

A Free, New Citation Tool
Harzing’s Publish or Perish
Install from: http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
Automatically analyzes citations from Google Scholar for any author.
Interesting to compare Web of Science citation report with Harzing’s report.
Warning: Dirty data, don’t take at face value.

Harzing’s POP Statistics
Total number of papers & citations
Ave. number of citations per paper & per author
Ave. number of papers per author & per year
Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
Egghe's g-index
Other variations on the h-index
Age-weighted citation rate
Number of authors per paper

Primer on Open Access (OA)
OA simply means free-to-read.
OA is fully compatible with rigorous peer review.
OA does not necessarily mean author-pay (there are many models being tested).
OA journals can be low or high quality, just like subscription journals.

Can OA have Prestige?
PLOS Biology
JIF=13.5 (7 th out of 263 biochem journals)
Started in October 2003
Future of Children (Princeton Univ.)
JIF=4.76 (Top Family Studies Journal)
PLOS One (in 2010 will be the largest science journal in the world) – est. 8,000 articles

OA – a flash in the pan?
More than 4,000 fully OA, peer reviewed journals
2 new titles per day
1,500 OA repositories, new repository every day.
Scientific Commons – 30 million OA items. http://www.scientificcommons.org/
20% medical lit avail. Free within 2 years
Over 100 OA publication mandates

SO WHAT!
We publish for prestige, but we also publish to be read & cited.
What if I point you to actual research that shows OA articles are cited 25-250% more than toll access (TA) articles?
http://www.buffalo.edu/~abwagner/OACiteImpactBibliography.doc

Some OA Cite Advantage Studies (OA-CA)
88% OA-CA in Sociology
(Norris & Rowland, 2008) The citation advantage of open-access articles. JASIST, 59 (12), 1963-1972.
OA-CA: Math (91%), PolSci (86%); Philosophy (45%)
( Antelman 2004) Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries. 65 (5): p. 372-382.

And what you’ve been waiting for
OA Citation Advantage for Social Work
64% OA vs. non-OA
Hajjem, C., et al. Open access to research increases citation impact . 2005. Available from: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11687/

What you should know about OA
Know what your OA options are.
www.doaj.org
OA journal not the whole story
Institutional and discipline repositories (IR/DR)
UB institutional repository – any day now
Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their articles in an IR/DR.
See http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

More on Institutional Repositories
You have rights! Retain right to mount your hard work to an IR/DR.
Done right it will be visible to Google Scholar, OAIster, & other OAI harvestors.
www.oaister.org
Wide variety of formats & document types

The OA Advantage
As scholar, enlarge your audience/impact.
As reader, enjoy free online access to the literature.
As teacher, your students have free, liability-free access (fair use, course pack).
Moving away from an unsustainable journal publishing system.

6 Things Researchers Need to Know about OA – P. Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm
What OA journals exist in your field?
OA more than journals. Also OA archives/repositories.
OA archiving only takes a few minutes.
Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in an OA repository.
Journals w/Ingelfinger Rule - shrinking minority. (7%)
OA enlarges your audience and citation impact.

Check out:
Open the channels of communication in your field.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/OpenAccess.pdf
Create Change (SPARC) http://www.createchange.org/
Making Change Work for You
Practical steps as faculty, researcher, reviewer, editor, society member, teacher.
http://www.createchange.org/change/index.shtml

From Opportunity Assessment Instrument
ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit: http://www.acrl.ala.org/scholcomm/
“ 10 Things You Should Know About Scholarly Communication” http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/scholcomm/docs/SC%20101%2010%20Things%20You.pdf .
“ Open Access Overview” (Peter Suber): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook: Practical Steps for Implementing Open Access: http://www.openoasis.org/
“ Transforming Scholarly Communication and Publishing” (UB Libraries – for faculty and students): http://library.buffalo.edu/scholarly/index.php .
ScholCom Staff Wiki (UB Libraries – internal): http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu/aslstaff/sc/

Personal Story
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling Article

http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu	62
http://library.buffalo.edu	31
http://www.edmodo.com	1
http://www.facebook.com	1
http://web.archive.org	1

What Faculty Need to Know About Open Access & Increasing Their Publishing Impact by Ben Wagner

by Charles Lyons

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

5 Embeds 96

Statistics

What Faculty Need to Know About Open Access & Increasing Their Publishing Impact by Ben Wagner Presentation Transcript