Limited access is a symptom, not the disease

Björn BrembsFreie Universität Berlin Universität LeipzigUniversität Regensburg http://brembs.net

Dysfunctional scholarlyliterature

• Limited access

• Limited access• No global search

• Limited access• No global search• No hyperlinks

• Limited access• No global search• No hyperlinks• No data visualization

• Limited access• No global search• No hyperlinks• No data visualization• No submission standards

• Limited access• No global search• No hyperlinks• No data visualization• No submission standards• (Almost) no statistics

• Limited access• No global search• No hyperlinks• No data visualization• No submission standards• (Almost) no statistics• No text/data-mining

• Limited access• No global search• No hyperlinks• No data visualization• No submission standards• (Almost) no statistics• No text/data-mining• No effective way to sort, filter and discover

• Limited access • No global search • No hyperlinks • No data visualization • No submission standards • (Almost) no statistics • No text/data-mining • No effective way to sort, filter and discover…it’s like the • No scientific impact analysisweb in 1995! • No networking feature • etc.

Scientific data in peril

Non-existent softwarearchives

Technically feasible today (almost)• No more corporate publishers – libraries archive everything and make it publicly accessible according to a world-wide standard• Single semantic, decentralized database of literature, data and software

Source Normalized Impact per Paper • Thomson Reuters: Impact Factor • Eigenfactor (now Thomson Reuters) • ScImago JournalRank (SJR) • Scopus: SNIP, SJR

Only read publications from high-ranking journals

Publikationstätigkeit(vollständige Publikationsliste, darunter Originalarbeiten als Erstautor/in,Seniorautor/in, Impact-Punkte insgesamt und in den letzten 5 Jahren,darunter jeweils gesondert ausgewiesen als Erst- und Seniorautor/in,persönlicher Scientific Citations Index (SCI, h-Index nach Web ofScience) über alle Arbeiten)Publications:Complete list of publications, including original research papers as firstauthor, senior author, impact points total and in the last 5 years, withmarked first and last-authorships, personal Scientific Citations Index(SCI, h-Index according to Web of Science) for all publications.

Only read publications from high-ranking journals

Only publish in high-ranking journals

Lies, damn lies andbibliometrics

Introduced in 1950’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI citations C12 publishedarticles A1 timepublished A2 year 1 year 2 year 3

Introduced in 1950’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI citations 100 publishedarticles 40 timepublished 60 year 1 year 2 year 3

Journal X IF 2010= All citations from TR indexed journals in 2012 to papers in journal X Number of citable articles published in journal X in 20010/11 €30,000-130,000/year subscription rates Covers ~11,500 journals (Scopus covers ~16,500)

• Negotiable• Irreproducible• Mathematically unsound

• PLoS Medicine, IF 2-11 (8.4) (The PLoS Medicine Editors (2006) The Impact Factor Game. PLoS Med 3(6): e291. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030291)• Current Biology IF from 7 to 11 in 2003 – Bought by Cell Press (Elsevier) in 2001…

• Rockefeller University Press bought their data from Thomson Reuters • Up to 19% deviation from published records • Second dataset still not correctRossner M, van Epps H, Hill E (2007): Showme the data. The Journal of Cell Biology, Vol.179, No. 6, 1091-1092http://jcb.rupress.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091

• Left-skewed distributions • Weak correlation of individual article citation rate with journal IFSeglen PO (1997): Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ 1997;314(7079):497 (15 February)http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7079/497

Data from: Fang, F., & Casadevall, A. (2011). RETRACTED SCIENCE AND THE RETRACTION INDEX Infection and Immunity DOI: 10.1128/IAI.05661-11

"Not everything that can be countedcounts, and not everything thatcounts can be counted."

Corporate publishers‘ profitscan easily finance all reformsImage source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wakingtiger/3156791383/sizes/m/in/photostream/

4b € per year for 10,000 university libraries: 400,000 € per year per library

Limited access is a symptom, not the disease

by Björn Brembs on Sep 26, 2012

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