Rewards of scholarshipScholarship is driven not just by intellectual curiosity and funding availability. It is also about the rewards that come to scholars for their work. Promotion and tenure opportunities are an important part of this equation. Performance metrics
Research is assessed on a number of criteria already and with the Web the list of possible assessment criteria is growing. Assessment of an individual's performance for, say, tenure will take into account things such as grants awarded, prizes and medals, patents, student mentoring, teaching duties, offices held, and other measures of contribution towards institutional life. Qualitative measures may include collaborations, some form of peer review, responsibilities and nowadays some of the so-called Web 2.0-enabled activities (social network indicators). Some Open Access journals are adopting what they believe are improved quality control processes: - Biology Direct is making the peer review process open rather than anonymous and the reviewers’ reports public. In doing so, it aims to increase the responsibility of the referees and to eliminate sources of abuse in the refereeing process.
- Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics puts papers through a rapid review process to assure basic scientific and technical quality then makes them available immediately on their Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions (ACPD) website. There papers are subject to interactive public discussion, during which the referees’ comments (anonymous or attributed), additional short comments by other members of the scientific community (attributed), and the authors’ replies are also published. After the discussion is closed, feedback is used to shape the final version of the paper.
Journal Impact factor
Traditionally scholars in the exact sciences and in a lesser degree in the social sciences have looked to the journal impact factor (JIF) as a signal, not just of the importance of the journal, but also of the research reported there and ultimately the researcher him/herself. Many believe this is an overly crude system and a barrier to both fairness and change in scholarly publishing. New bibliometrics
If all research outputs are open to analysis, useful new measures can be developed encompassing not only research papers, but also datasets and other types of output from research activity. But even with a focus just on research articles there are many things that can be done to assess impact now that the Open Access literature is growing. There are two main bases for developing measures for the research literature: - usage-based metrics (data generated through measuring user activity)
- citation-based metrics (data generated by measuring author activity: JIF is one such metric)
Some examples of usage metrics are: - Usage-based measures developed by the MESUR Project. MESUR has defined and validated a range of usage metrics and produced guidelines and recommendations for their application
- Repository usage measures such as LogEc and Interoperable Repository Statistics. These systems record usage of materials in Open Access repositories so that authors can see how much (and in some cases where) their articles are being downloaded.
Some examples of citation-analysis systems are: - h-index: developed by Hirsch, this is a simple measure that relates an individual's published outputs to the number of citations they gather and computes them into a single metric
- Eigenfactor.org offers methods for ranking and mapping the influence of scientific journals and provides information about price and value for these journals
- Harzing's Publish-or-Perish service for measuring an individual's citation impact
- CiteSeer, a program analysing citations to the Open Access computer and information science literature
- CitEc, a program analysing citations to the Open Access economic literature
- UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to test and validate old and new scientometric predictors, through multiple regression analysis. Read more.
New research indicators
A number of large-scale projects are underway to study the potential for the development of new indicators in different areas of research. Some examples include: (back to top) Increase in citation impactThe impact and visibility of scientific and scholarly publications plays a crucial role in enhancing the reputation and, thus, the career prospects of authors.
A number of studies have now been carried out on the effect of Open Access on citations to articles, showing the increased citation impact that Open Access can bring. Steve Lawrence's was the earliest study, finding in 2001 that free online access tripled citations of computer science papers. Michael Kurtz's early study on the astronomy literature (2004) demonstrated that Open Access can double the readership of articles. A study published in the same year by Brody & Harnad showed an increase in citations to articles in several disciplines as a result of their being Open Access. And Kristin Antelman (2004)corroborated these findings in the fields of philosophy, political science, electrical & electronic engineering and mathematics. More recently (2008), Michael Norris has published his doctoral thesis that reports similar impact advantage in the form of increased citations for articles in four other disciplines - economics, applied mathematics, sociology and ecology.
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