Archive for the ‘Journals’ Category
Open Access and pseudo-science journals
Unfortunately, there is a negative effect of the widely success of the Open Access movement, the emergence of pseudo journals.
Jeffrey Beall maintains a list of these predatory publishers that “ exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts“…
This list is available on:
http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/
Open access could prevent rejection of good science
Steve Miron, from Wiley, interviewed by Sian Harris:
What role does open access play in research publishing?
It’s clear that open access (OA) is becoming a big trend. However, I see that for the foreseeable future we’ll live in a mixed economy with green OA, gold OA, subscription and approaches that have not been invented yet. It is fun and exciting, with many experiments by publishers. (…)
There has been some great communication between the research community, publishers and policy makers in developing OA policy. It has been done in an enlightened, positive way but I think there’ll be some serious issues that still need to be considered. (…)
How might relationships between researchers and publishers be improved?
We work hard to nurture and maintain a positive relationship with researchers and libraries. No relationship is without some tension or disagreement but we do actively listen to authors, whether what they say is positive or negative.
(…)
We get around 450,000 article submissions a year and publish about a third of them. Some good science is not being published because the materials budgets do not keep pace with R&D spend. I hope as funded OA becomes more part of the scholarly landscape these tensions are addressed and that budgets for publications will be more aligned with the R&D spend.
http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=393
PLOS: ten years and a new look
Announcement from the reputed PLOS:
On the eve of our tenth anniversary, we’re pleased to announce that the redesign of all PLOS journals is now live. The three goals of this initiative were to:
- Ensure that readers can quickly assess the relevance and importance of an article through a figure browser and highly visible Article-Level Metrics
- Improve site navigation to help users discover content more easily
- Launch a flexible platform from which to build out future innovations
This refresh offers users more effective ways to access and read content, updates the overall appearance of the sites and harmonizes them with our new PLOS look announced earlier this year.
Read further on:
The new Sciverse ScienceDirect: a good marketing by Elsevier
A nice presentation including disruptive features such as applications, etc.
If you cannot show the video above, go to:
Altmetrics: a new impact factor for new publishings
In the latest issue of Research Information, David Stuart is wondering how researchers now can evaluate the impact of these new ways of publishing, including social channels.
One of the answer is Altmetrics, the growing application that you will find now in every science journals and databases (like Scopus for e.g.) and which measures popularity of an article on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Use of this way to measure the research performance is still controversial (but still is Impact Factor 50 years after its beginning!) and “there is a long way to go before altmetrics fully answer any of the questions that are being raised by the new research environment“, says David.
However, altmetrics fast adoption shows that “research landscape is much more than journal articles, and there is a lot of value to be created by measuring the connections between the new types of publication“.
Stuart, David. Making metrics more relevant. Research Information, Dec. 2012/ Jan 2013. pp.13-16. available from: http://content.yudu.com/A1zwzg/RIDEC12JAN13/resources/13.htm
Doctors still prefer print journals Vs digital!!!
“Physicians are more likely to read the print version of new medical journals versus any type of digital version, including full digital reproductions, the publication’s website as well as tablet and smart phone applications, according to the Kantar Media Sources & Interactions Study, September 2012 – Medical/Surgical Edition.
The study reveals that 90% of doctors read the print version of current issues of medical journals, far more than the 48% reading journals digitally. Of all doctors surveyed, 98% read current issues of journals and 44% utilize two or more platforms for reading. (…)
Unsurprisingly, younger doctors are more inclined to be digital readers than their older colleagues. However, even among the youngest demographic, print is still the most-used platform for reading current issues of journals”.
Publishers and Advertisers Can’t Go 100% Digital If They Want to Reach Majority of Doctors. PharmaLive, November 2012, Available from: http://pharmalive.com/news/index.cfm?articleid=867937&categoryid=43
Don’t know where to publish?! Click on “Journal Advisor” and type your abstract!
(A very nice initiative using the Springer’s JournalSuggest and reported by Research Information, October/November 2012 )
Journal Advisor: http://www.edanzediting.com/journal_advisor
Edanz’ free-to-use Journal Selector indexes over 18,000 journals and uses Parity Computing’s Semantic Profiling Engine to match an author’s research to journals that publish articles on similar topics using natural language processing.
Authors enter an abstract (if they have already written one), some keywords or some text from a similar paper into the tool and it comes up with a list of suggestions that can be narrowed by, for example, impact factor or publishing frequency. There are visualisation tools so that authors can see similar articles and when they were published. This helps them to know, for example, if similar papers have been published in the journal but not for several years, said Shaw.
Currently, the tool, which is available as a beta version, uses as its sources PubMed and Springer’s API. Edanz hopes that more publishers’ APIs will be added now that the beta version is available.
Open Access: still in progress (Research Information)
2 articles in the latest issue of Research Information show that OA is still growing but also needs to improve some processes.
Some findings from a survey made by Wiley:
- 79 % of surveyed authors see open access as more prevalent in their discipline than it was three years ago
- Reasons that authors gave for not yet having published under an open-access model included a lack of high profile open-access journals (48 per cent), lack of funding (44 per cent) and concerns about quality (34 per cent). Authors said they would publish in an open-access journal if it had a high impact factor, if it were well regarded and if it had a rigorous peer-review process.
- The highest proportion of open-access authors came from a medical background (28 per cent), closely followed by biological sciences (24 per cent)
and a discussion around the new model of publication, the CC-BY license:
The CC-BY licence condition, defined by Creative Commons, allows modification and reuse of content, including commercially, provided that the original author is properly attributed. (…) However, there are concerns with the implications of the licence. Because CC-BY allows for commercial reuse of content it could theoretically be published again, behind a paywall, which might seem to contradict some of the aims of open access. And there may be some uses that researchers are uncomfortable with. For example, medical researchers might be unhappy with parts of their papers being used to promote a particular drug…
OA gains ground with authors, says study. Research Information, 30 october 2012. Available from: http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=1041
More publishers move towards CC-BY licence for OA articles. Research Information, 15 november 2012. Available from: http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=1047
Bibliographical databases are the main source to discover content from journals (InfoTodayEurope)
How do journal readers discover content in scholarly journals? In their latest report on user search behaviour, Simon Inger and Tracy Gardner (of Renew Training) explore user search patterns and draw conclusions (based on previous research undertaken in 2005 and 2008) about how search is changing. (…)
The report explores three types of reader behaviour.
Citation searching
Which starting points are the most important to researchers? Increasing in their importance to readers are specialist bibliographic databases (e.g. PubMed) and web pages managed by specific subject area research groups. New starting points have appeared since the last survey (2008) and these include academic search engines such as Google Scholar. After bibliographic databases, these are the second most popular source for looking up citations.
Core journal browsing
How do readers begin their browsing of their core journal content? The research shows that abstracting and indexing databases are increasing in importance as are publishers’ websites, journal home pages and web pages managed by key research groups. Journal alerts are decreasing in importance but are still the second most popular resource for discovering the latest articles.
Subject searching
How do readers discover content on a specific subject? Readers continue to favour specialist bibliographic databases. Library websites have increased in importance, due, the authors suggest, to the introduction of web scale discovery services. General search engines have declined in importance.
Read the full article at:
Skelton, Val. Discovering content in scholarly journals. Information Today Europe, November 12, 2012. Available from:
Open Access: latest figures
According a white paper published by Springer (the owner of BioMedCentral):
- Only 12% of OA articles are paid directly by Authors
- In 2010, 1.4 millions scholarly journals were published under OA
- In July 2012, DOAJ has reached 8,000 titles
- The BASE source indexes 36 million open access documents
Open access – broad readership, high impact. White paper, Springer, 2012. 6 p. Available online from: http://springer.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.Ee.2Tp.1jgMgt.C4E8ug..N.Y18y.3yN4.bW89MQ%5f%5fDCXcFQL0
