This document discusses issues with the current scholarly publishing system and proposes alternatives. It notes that journal impact factors are flawed and do not accurately measure scientific quality. It also outlines problems with limited access to publications and data, a lack of integration and searchability across literature and repositories, and high subscription costs. The document advocates for creating an open access system that harvests all openly available publications and data into a single, integrated database with advanced search and discovery tools to improve access, collaboration and the overall scientific process.

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

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

4. Only read publications from high-ranking journals

6. 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.

7. Only read publications from high-ranking journals

8. Only publish in high-ranking journals

9. Is journal rank like astrology?

10. • Who knows what the IF is?
• Who uses the IF to pick a journal
(rate a candidate, etc.)?
• Who knows how the IF is calculated
and from what data?

11. A1 A2
C12
time
citations
published
articles
published
year 1 year 2 year 3
Introduced in 1950’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI

12. 40 60
100
time
citations
published
articles
published
year 1 year 2 year 3
Introduced in 1950’s by Eugene Garfield: ISI

13. 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)

14. • Negotiable
• Irreproducible
• Mathematically
unsound

15. • 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…

21. • 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

22. • 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

23. The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers' citations in the digital age (2012): George A.
Lozano, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras arXiv:1205.4328

24. Brown, E. N., & Ramaswamy, S. (2007). Quality of protein crystal structures. Acta Crystallographica
Section D Biological Crystallography, 63(9), 941–950. doi:10.1107/S0907444907033847

25. Munafò, M., Stothart, G., & Flint, J. (2009). Bias in genetic association studies and impact factor Molecular
Psychiatry, 14 (2), 119-120 DOI: 10.1038/mp.2008.77

26. Brembs, B., Button, K., & Munafò, M. (2013). Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal
rank. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291

27. Journal rank is a figment of
our imagination.

28. Fang et al. (2012): Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications. PNAS 109 no. 42 17028-17033

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

30. The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers' citations in the digital age (2012): George A.
Lozano, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras arXiv:1205.4328

31. “High-Impact” journals attract
the most unreliable research

33. “Do you trust scientists?”

34. “Who can you trust these days?”

35. “Politicians? Financial experts? Realtors?“

36. The disaster of our digital
infrastructure

37. Journal rank is a relic of the
print era

40. Modified from ARL: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstats06.pdf, http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstat08.pdf
%Change
-50
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008
Subscription prices
CPI/inflation
Journals purchased

43. Institutions produce
publications, data and software

44. Dysfunctional scholarly
literature

45. • No scientific impact
analysis
• 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
• No networking feature
• etc.
…it’s like the
web in 1995!

46. Scientific data in peril

49. Non-existent software
archives

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

53. Science, tear down this
paywall!

57. • Harvest all Open Access Publications
– Accessible via single interface
– Not just from green repositories
– Everything not obviously illegal
• Integrate resulting database
– PubMed
– Google Scholar
• Plug the gaps:

59. • Global search and access for all
literature, software and data
• Intelligent sort, filter and discover
functionalities
• Scientific, evidence-based reputation system
• Authoring tool for collaborative writing ans
single-click submission
• Orders of magnitude cheaper: US$90/paper
(e.g. SciELO) vs. US$4,800/paper (subscription)