Science Intelligence and InfoPros

An interesting note from a finish researcher:

“As an author I am in favour of open access (OA) as a concept for medical publishing. When drafting manuscripts, accessing articles freely from any computer without any passwords is very convenient. However, I have never submitted to an OA journal – partly because of more cautious views of other research group members. (…)

However, many researchers collect their meagre funding from small supporters, and the costs of OA publishing may be intolerable to them. (…)

The increase of OA publishing is supposed to lower the subscription  expenses of institutional libraries. Therefore, the universities and other research institutions should use the saved money to support their researchers to submit in OA journals.

Saloheimo, Pertti. Switching to open access publishing is challenging. International Journal of Clinical Practice. May 2012, Vol. 66, N°5, pp. 515-517. Available from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1742-1241.2012.02913.x/pdf [Accessed 24th May 2012]

“Patents do not stifle innovation any more than copyright laws stifle creativity. (…)

Patents ensure the people who put in the time and effort to achieve success are rewarded for that effort, and thereby encourage them to go back to the chalkboard to develop the next big thing. But just as importantly, patents prevent others from reaping all of the benefits of someone else’s endeavors without doing any of the hard/expensive groundwork. “

Willis, Randall C. Out of order: patently absurd. Drug Discovery News, May 2012. Available from: http://drugdiscoverynews.com/index.php?newsarticle=6127 [Accessed 24th of May 2012]

A nice piece by editors of Reproductive Biomedicine Online:

” (…) with this easy access to databases and papers come problems: notably the increased risk of deliberate or accidental plagiarism (…) and the fact of information overload. This latter problem has resulted in what can be seen as an abreaction: the entrenchment of the ‘prestige journal’ into which a young scientist must get their paper come what may – much of the data incomprehensibly compacted, and figures often too small or cropped to be of evidential value. These ‘prestige’ journals build and thrive financially through the increased significance of a development complementary to bibliographic databases: the bibliometric analysis.

 Bibliometric analyses attempt to measure the impact of a journal’s published material that can then reinforce its prestige – or its incentive to play the ‘bibliometric boosting game’. Several such metrics are around, each with their own characteristic strengths and weaknesses. And, like the journals that these metrics claim to rank, the various metrics have acquired their own ‘prestige’ value: although on what basis, other than historical longevity, is unclear. Thus, the most sought (and feared) metric is the Impact Factor or IF (…)

A fundamental issue is that citation indices assume that if a paper is cited it is because it is useful. In reality, papers are cited for many reasons. For example, negative citations dispute results or theories by citing a paper critically. Other papers appear in citation lists simply because they have been cited previously rather than actually read – a practice facilitated by the very electronic publication that boosts the rise of metrics. This practice will tend to be self-reinforcing – squeezing out more pertinent or ‘better’ papers, and even propagating ‘myths’. Self-citation can boost one’s own IF as well as one’s own ego. We suspect that it is a rare author who could honestly claim to have generated anew each reference list – and indeed have read every paper afresh each time it is cited. (…)

All of this might not matter were it not for the recent bureaucratic obsession of institutions, funding bodies and government bodies with ‘objective metrics’for ranking ‘performance’. This obsession has led to the increasing abuse of metrics as a surrogate for the scholarly value of work. Individual students, researchers and journal editors then are pressured to collude with this value system to make metrics in general, and the IF in particular, tyrannical despots that do few of us much good and distort publishing and citation practices. (…)

The IF, despite its flaws, seems here to stay for the foreseeable future, but the range of alternative metrics described above is available to us as editors. For this reason, we have decided with our publisher that henceforth from the July issue the journal will publish our data for the following metrics: the Impact Factor, the Scimago Journal Rank, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper, the Eigenfactor and the H-index (…). We are implementing this policy to encourage critical thought and discussion about metrics and to discourage the slavish adoption of IF as the only valid way in which to assess ‘quality’.

Martin H. Johnson, Jacques Cohen , Gedis Grudzinskas. The uses and abuses of bibliometrics.  Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2011, Vol. 24, pp. 485-486. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rbmo.2012.03.007

A commercial announcement by Swets:

“

Empowering libraries and delivering new tools to researchers:

Mendeley Institutional Edition Powered by Swets goes live

 Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) is for academic institutions and research groups, who want to provide improved services to researchers.  The MIE is a research service provided by libraries that improves the productivity of researchers, and gives the library the real-time visibility they need to continuously improve their services.  Unlike alternative products that only provide pieces of the solution, our service delivers clear value to both libraries and their customers.

The Mendeley Institutional Edition combines a premium version of the leading Mendeley research worktool, that gives the most productive integrated combination of reference management, research content discovery and collaboration; and give libraries the unique analytics that lets them connect content use with consequent research publications and the readership of these publications.  These analytics also help the library identify how to continuously improve their services. This is a cloud based real time platform.

“The success and continued rapid growth of Mendeley to date has already delivered a fantastic new tool for researchers” said David Main, CEO at Swets, “This new service delivered by libraries gives an premium service to researchers and gives libraries the conection to researchers and their activities that they need in this digital world”. 

Speaking of the launch, Victor Henning, Managing Director of Mendeley said, “With our cloud based tool, librarians will have a deeper visibility and understanding of their own content use and the impact of their research output. Mendeley Institutional Edition helps provide this and we’re delighted to be working with Swets to open up and increase the visibility of this data.  In addition, it will help them build private collaborative groups for their students, researchers and professors to network and share their knowledge.”

To learn more about Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets visit http://www.swets.com/mendeley-institutional-edition-features.”

Source: http://www.swets.com/empowering-libraries-and-delivering-new-tools-to-researchers-mendeley-institutional-edition-powered

By the Guardian: simplistic but radical

“For Elsevier, the biggest of the barrier-based publishers, we can calculate the total cost per article as £1,605m subscription revenue divided by 240,000 articles per year = £6,689 per article.

By contrast, the cost of publishing an article with a flagship open access journal such as PLoS ONE is $1,350 (£850), about one eighth as much.

No one expects open access to eliminate costs. But we can expect it to dramatically reduce them, as well as making research universally and freely available”

Taylor, Mike. Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing. The Guardian, 17th of April 2012. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/apr/17/persistent-myths-open-access-scientific-publishing [Accessed 24th April 2012]

See also:

Taylor, Michael P. Opinion: Academic Publishing Is Broken. The Scientist, 19th of March 2012. Available from:

http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/19/opinion-academic-publishing-is-broken/ [Accessed 24th April 2012]

“Since its launch in 2001 Wikipedia has seen incredible growth worldwide, counting more than 21 million articles published in around 280 languages (including nearly 4 million articles in English) in 2012 (1).

Wikipedia has grown in size (number of Wikipedia entries/articles have been increasing over time) and is showing high reliability: a recent study (2) of historical entries found 80% accuracy for Wikipedia, compared to 95-96% for other sources. This means that for the entries checked in the study, Wikipedia contain on average only about 15% more errors than other sources including traditionally perceived authoritative sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica. The research found that this difference was negligible. Adding to this Wikipedia’s ease of access and wide coverage of topics explains why for many people it has become the first port of call for instant general knowledge on a variety of subjects. (…)

What is perhaps surprising is that Wikipedia appears to be increasingly used by scholars for their research. (…)

More interestingly, there has also been a dramatic increase in the number of publications referring to Wikipedia as a source. The aforementioned recently published study  limited the search results to mentions of Wikipedia as a reference title, but extending the search to all reference fields reveals much wider use even with restrictions to scholarly content published in journals . CAGR was an unbelievable 88% per annum since the first paper in 2002 to the 4006 papers published in 2011. Focusing on the past 5 years (2007-2011) CAGR was still impressive at more than 31% per annum.

Huggett, Sarah. The influence of free encyclopedias on science. Research Trends, March 2012. Available from: http://www.researchtrends.com/issue-27-march-2012/the-influence-of-free-encyclopedias-on-science/ [Accessed 23rd April 2012]

Aaron Tay gives here an interesting vision of this still-promising tool:

“while looking at the features I finally grasped how powerful and disruptive a real and dominant “Facebook for researchers” is going to be. (…)

Of course, the road to such a goal has being strewn with many failures, including Elsevier’s 2collab , Labmeeting etc (check a report in 2008 of such tools and check how many still stands) and attempts have being or could be made from social bookmarking/reference management angle (e.g citeulike/Connotea/Mendeley),  Discovery/Search angle (potentially webscale discovery/next generation catalogues with social features) or  even more directly straight forward Identity management (e.g. ResearcherID).

But no matter who wins how would a dominant “Facebook for researchers” platform affect academic research and hence academic libraries? What areas would they disrupt? (..)

Disrupt search including webscale discovery tools

Mendeley , Citeulike etc are already starting to show hints of this, when you search you can see how many people put a certain article in their reference libraries, that itself could be a strong signal of quality. (…)

Currently Mendeley claims to have 150 million unique items (Jan 2012) when you search Mendeley , ”This makes it, according to Victor Henning, the company’s CEO and co-founder, the world’s largest research database.” (…)

Read more at:

Tay, Aaron. How a “Facebook for researchers” platform will disrupt almost everything. Musing about librarianship, April 18, 2012. Available at: http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-facebook-for-researchers-will.html [Accessed 18th April 2012]

There has been plenty of excitement about publishers opening up their data to be used in new applications. The vision is that new tools will emerge that help researchers in ways that may not have been thought of by publishers and could not easily be provided by publishers themselves.

A Dublin-based startup has developed a way of extracting insight into laboratory instruments and materials from the experimental sections of journal articles (from Elsevier SciVerse).

“I was at a meeting and met a product manager at Elsevier just as they were starting to open up their APIs and we realised that the methods section of papers mentions equipment all the time,’ explained David Kavanagh, the founder. ‘Scientists could benefit from applications using this, but we could also make money from it. It makes sense for scientists and for the companies that supply materials and equipment and it is also scaleable and a value-add for publishers.’

The Scrazzl application pulls all the product information out of a journal paper and organises that information by company. This is supplemented with links to product descriptions and user-generated content such as product reviews. It can also link with inventory control so that a researcher can see that their lab does have a sample of, for example, a particular antibody and in which freezer it is stored.

Read the full article at:

http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=365

Aguillo, I.F.
Is Google Scholar useful for bibliometrics? A webometric analysis
(2012) Scientometrics, 91 (2), pp. 343-351.

Abstract

Google Scholar, the academic bibliographic database provided free-of-charge by the search engine giant Google, has been suggested as an alternative or complementary resource to the commercial citation databases like Web of Knowledge (ISI/Thomson) or Scopus (Elsevier). In order to check the usefulness of this database for bibliometric analysis, and especially research evaluation, a novel approach is introduced. Instead of names of authors or institutions, a webometric analysis of academic web domains is performed. The bibliographic records for 225 top level web domains (TLD), 19,240 university and 6,380 research centres institutional web domains have been collected from the Google Scholar database. About 63. 8% of the records are hosted in generic domains like. com or. org, confirming that most of the Scholar data come from large commercial or non-profit sources. Considering only institutions with at least one record, one-third of the other items (10. 6% from the global) are hosted by the 10,442 universities, while 3,901 research centres amount for an additional 7. 9% from the total. The individual analysis show that universities from China, Brazil, Spain, Taiwan or Indonesia are far better ranked than expected. In some cases, large international or national databases, or repositories are responsible for the high numbers found. However, in many others, the local contents, including papers in low impact journals, popular scientific literature, and unpublished reports or teaching supporting materials are clearly overrepresented. Google Scholar lacks the quality control needed for its use as a bibliometric tool; the larger coverage it provides consists in some cases of items not comparable with those provided by other similar databases.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/lrug235244u112rg/?MUD=MP