Björn Brembs argues that the current system of scholarly publishing and metrics is dysfunctional. It limits access to literature, data, and software and does not allow for flexible data visualization, analysis, or discovery. Journal impact factors in particular are mathematically unsound and an unreliable measure of quality. Better alternatives are needed that provide open access to all scholarly outputs and allow literature, data, and software to be easily searched, accessed, analyzed, and built upon.

1. Björn Brembs
Universität Regensburg
http://brembs.net

2. Institutions produce
publications, data and software

3. • Institutional email • No archiving of
• Institutional publications
webspace • No archiving of
• Institutional blog software
• Library access card • No archiving of
• Open access data
repository

4. Dysfunctional scholarly
literature

5. • Limited access
• No global search
• No functional hyperlinks
• No flexible 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
web in 1995! analysis
• No networking feature
• etc.

6. Scientific data in peril

9. Non-existent software
archives

12. 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

18. Software to control the experiment and save the data

19. Software to analyze and visualize the data

25. However, a version is already available

27. Same type of experiments → same
script
Default: → same categories
→ same tags
→ same authors
→ same links
→ same description
→ One complete article, in one click.
Update the figure:
Higher sample size directly published
while analysed, your boss may see the
results before you do! (or you may see
the results of your student before they
do)
Possibility to make it public and citable
in one click or directly in the R code.

28. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.97792

31. One person is not an
institutional infrastructure!

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

34. 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 of Science) über alle Arbeiten)
Publications:
Complete list of publications, including original research papers as first
author, senior author, impact points total and in the last 5 years, with
marked first and last-authorships, personal Scientific Citations Index
(SCI, h-Index according to Web of Science) for all publications.

35. Lies, damn lies and
bibliometrics

36. Introduced in 1960’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI
citations articles
2010 2008 and 2009
IF=5
Articles published in 08/09
were cited an average of 5 times in 10.

37. Journal X IF 2010=
All citations from TR indexed journals in 2010 to papers in journal X
Number of citable articles published in journal X in 2008/9
€30,000-130,000/year subscription rates
Covers ~11,500 journals (Scopus covers ~16,500)

38. • Negotiable
• Irreproducible
• Mathematically
unsound

39. • 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…

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

43. • Left-skewed distributions
• Weak correlation of individual article citation
rate with journal IF
Seglen 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

45. Relation of journal-impact factor to retractions for fraud or suspected fraud, error, and
plagiarism, or duplicate publication.
Fang F C et al. PNAS 2012;109:17028-17033
©2012 by National Academy of Sciences

46. (A) Number of retracted articles for specific causes by year of retraction.
Fang F C et al. PNAS 2012;109:17028-17033
©2012 by National Academy of Sciences