Category Archives: oa.bibliometrics

Job: Project officer indi:oa – Responsible evaluation and quality assurance of Open Access publications using bibliometric indicators (w/m/d), E 13 TV-L, part-time, fixed-term. Application deadline: July 19, 2021 | Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB Göttingen)

Posted on by
Reply

Die Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB Göttingen) engagiert sich seit Jahren in nationalen und internationalen Projekten für die Schaffung von Infrastrukturen und Services in den Bereichen wissenschaftliches Publizieren und Umsetzung von Open Access.

In diesem Kontext ist für das BMBF-Projekt „indi:oa – Verantwortungsbewusste Bewertung und Qualitätssicherung von Open-Access-Publikationen mittels bibliometrischer Indikatoren“ die Stelle als

Mitarbeiter*in (w/m/d)
Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L, Teilzeit, befristet

zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt an der SUB Göttingen in Teilzeit (75%, zurzeit 29,85 Wochenstunden) zu besetzen. Die Stelle ist befristet bis zum Projektende Ende Juli 2023.

Das BMBF-Verbundprojekt „indi:oa – Verantwortungsbewusste Bewertung und Qualitätssicherung von Open-Access-Publikationen mittels bibliometrischer Indikatoren“ möchte einer uninformierten Verwendung bibliometrischer Kennzahlen im Kontext der Open-Access-Transformation an wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen in Deutschland entgegenwirken. Gemeinsam mit dem Deutschen Zentrum für Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung (DZHW) kombiniert das Projekt bibliometrische Studien mit Awareness-Aktivitäten. Dadurch soll die Bereitschaft an wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen gestärkt werden, innovative und qualitätsgesicherte Open-Access-Publikationsangebote als Alternative zu klassischen Journalen der großen Verlage wahrzunehmen.

Ihre Aufgaben:

Erhebung der Informationsbedürfnisse von Open-Access-Beauftragten und Forschungsreferaten in Bezug auf Open Access und Bibliometrie
Erstellung von zielgruppenspezifischen Handlungsempfehlungen und Trainingsmaterialien auf Grundlage empirischer Evidenz
Aufbau und Begleitung eines informellen Mentoringnetzwerkes
Koordinierung des Projektverbundes einschließlich Öffentlichkeitsarbeit

Erforderlich:

Wissenschaftlicher Hochschulabschluss (Master oder äquivalent) in einem sozial- oder bibliotheks- und informationswissenschaftlichen Fach (oder vergleichbar)
Interesse an Fragestellungen der quantitativen Wissenschaftsforschung und/oder Erfahrungen im Bereich des Wissenschaftsmanagements einschließlich Publikationsberatung
Hohe Problemlösungskompetenz, Eigenständigkeit und Teamfähigkeit
Gute Deutsch- und Englischkenntnisse in Wort und Schrift

Wünschenswert:

Kenntnisse über das wissenschaftliche Publikationswesen mit Schwerpunkt auf Open Access und Open Science
Erfahrung mit qualitativen oder quantitativen Erhebungen
Erfahrungen in der Datenanalyse und -visualisierung unter Einsatz einer statistischen Programmierumgebung (zum Beispiel R oder Python)
Gesellschaftliches Engagement, zum Beispiel in Open-Science-Communities

Wir bieten Ihnen eine bereichsübergreifende und spannende Projektarbeit in einem engagierten internationalen Team in einer kooperativen Arbeitsatmosphäre. Zudem unterstützen wir flexible Arbeitsformen wie Telearbeit und innovative Trainings zur professionellen Weiterentwicklung. Teilzeit ist möglich. Aufstockung auf Vollzeit ist gegebenenfalls möglich durch Mitarbeit in verwandten Projekten der SUB Göttingen.

Für eventuelle Rückfragen stehen Ihnen Herr Najko Jahn (E-Mail) und Frau Dr. Birgit Schmidt (E-Mail), +49 551 39-33181 (Tel.) zur Verfügung.

Die Universität Göttingen strebt in den Bereichen, in denen Frauen unterrepräsentiert sind, eine Erhöhung des Frauenanteils an und fordert daher qualifizierte Frauen nachdrücklich zur Bewerbung auf. Sie versteht sich zudem als familienfreundliche Hochschule und fördert die Vereinbarkeit von Wissenschaft, Beruf und Familie. Die Universität hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, mehr schwerbehinderte Menschen zu beschäftigen. Bewerbungen Schwerbehinderter erhalten bei gleicher Qualifikation den Vorzug.

Bitte reichen Sie Ihre Bewerbung mit allen wichtigen Unterlagen in einem Dokument zusammengefasst bis zum 19.07.2021 ausschließlich über das Bewerbungsportal ein.

Public draft: OA eBook Usage Data Analytics and Reporting Use-cases by Stakeholder. Feedback invited through July 10, 2021

Posted on by

Publishers, libraries, and a diverse array of scholarly communications platforms and services generate information about how OA books are accessed online. Since its launch in 2015, the OA eBook Usage Data Trust (@OAEBU_project) effort has brought together these thought leaders to document the barriers facing OA eBook usage analytics. To start addressing these challenges and to understand the role of a usage data trust, the effort has spent the last year studying and documenting the usage data ecosystem. Interview-based research led to the documentation of the OA book data supply chain, which maps related metadata and usage data standards and workflows. Dozens worldwide have engaged in human-centered design workshops and communities of practice that went virtual during 2020. Together these communities revealed how OA book publishers, platforms, and libraries are looking beyond their need to provide usage and impact reports. Workshop findings are now documented within use-cases that list the queries and activities where usage data analytics can help scholars and organizations to be more effective and strategic. Public comment is invited for the OA eBook Usage Data Analytics and Reporting Use Cases Report through July 10, 2021.

Meet the new Faculty Opinions Score – Faculty Opinions Blog

Posted on by

“Traditional citation metrics, such as the journal impact factor, can frequently act as biased measurements of research quality and contribute to the broken system of research evaluation. Academic institutions and funding bodies are increasingly moving away from relying on citation metrics towards greater use of transparent expert opinion. 

Faculty Opinions has championed this cause for two decades, with over 230k recommendations made by our 8000+ Faculty Members, and we are excited to introduce the next step in our evolution – a formidable mark of research quality – the new Faculty Opinions Score….

The Faculty Opinions Score assigns a numerical value of research publications in Biology and Medicine, to quantify their impact and quality compared to other publications in their field. 

The Faculty Opinions Score is derived by combining our unique star-rated Recommendations on individual publications, made by world-class experts, with bibliometrics to produce a radically new metric in the research evaluation landscape. 

 

 

 

Key properties of the Faculty Opinions Score: 

A score of zero is assigned to articles with no citations and no recommendations. 
The average score of a set of recommended articles has an expected value of 10. However, articles with many recommendations or highly cited articles may have a much higher score. There is no upper bound. 
Non-recommended articles generally score lower than recommended articles. 
Recommendations contribute more to the score than bibliometric performance. In other words, expert recommendations increase an article’s score (much) more than citations do….”

Morrison et al. (2021) Open access article processing charges 2011 – 2021 | uOttawa Research

Posted on by

by: Heather Morrison, Luan Borges, Xuan Zhao, Tanoh Laurent Kakou & Amit Nataraj Shanbhoug

Abstract

This study examines trends in open access article processing charges (APCs) from 2011 – 2021, building on a 2011 study by Solomon & Björk (2012). Two methods are employed, a modified replica and a status update of the 2011 journals. Data is drawn from multiple sources and datasets are available as open data (Morrison et al, 2021). Most journals do not charge APCs; this has not changed. The global average per-journal APC increased slightly, from 906 USD to 958 USD, while the per-article average increased from 904 USD to 1,626 USD, indicating that authors choose to publish in more expensive journals. Publisher size, type, impact metrics and subject affect charging tendencies, average APC and pricing trends. About half the journals from the 2011 sample are no longer listed in DOAJ in 2021, due to ceased publication or publisher de-listing. Conclusions include a caution about the potential of the APC model to increase costs beyond inflation, and a suggestion that support for the university sector, responsible for the majority of journals, nearly half the articles, with a tendency not to charge and very low average APCs, may be the most promising approach to achieve economically sustainable no-fee OA journal publishing.

A preprint of the full article is available here: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/42327

The two base datasets and their documentation are available as open data: Morrison, Heather et al., 2021, “2011 – 2021 OA APCs”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/84PNSG, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1

 

via https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2021/06/24/open-access-article-processing-charges-2011-2021/

Manipulation of bibliometric data by editors of scientific journals

Posted on by

“Such misuse of terms not only justifies the erroneous practice of research bureaucracy of evaluating research performance on those terms but also encourages editors of scientific journals and reviewers of research papers to ‘game’ the bibliometric indicators. For instance, if a journal seems to lack adequate number of citations, the editor of that journal might decide to make it obligatory for its authors to cite papers from journal in question. I know an Indian journal of fairly reasonable quality in terms of several other criteria but can no longer consider it so because it forces authors to include unnecessary (that is plain false) citations to papers in that journal. Any further assessment of this journal that includes self-citations will lead to a distorted measure of its real status….

An average paper in the natural or applied sciences lists at least 10 references.1 Some enterprising editors have taken this number to be the minimum for papers submitted to their journals. Such a norm is enforced in many journals from Belarus, and we, authors, are now so used to that norm that we do not even realize the distortions it creates in bibliometric data. Indeed, I often notice that some authors – merely to meet the norm of at least 10 references – cite very old textbooks and Internet resources with URLs that are no longer valid. The average for a good paper may be more than 10 references, and a paper with fewer than 10 references may yet be a good paper (The first paper by Einstein did not have even one reference in its original version!). I believe that it is up to a peer reviewer to judge whether the author has given enough references and whether they are suitable, and it is not for a journal’s editor to set any mandatory quota for the number of references….

Some international journals intervene arbitrarily to revise the citations in articles they receive: I submitted a paper with my colleagues to an American journal in 2017, and one of the reviewers demanded that we replace references in Russian language with references in English. Two of us responded with a correspondence note titled ‘Don’t dismiss non-English citations’ that we had then submitted to Nature: in publishing that note, the editors of Nature removed some references – from the paper2 that condemned the practice of replacing an author’s references with those more to the editor’s liking – and replaced them with, maybe more relevant, reference to a paper that we had never read by that moment! … 

Editors of many international journals are now looking not for quality papers but for papers that will not lower the impact factor of their journals….”

Release of the new CORE Repository Dashboard | Jisc scholarly communications

Posted on by

Release of the new CORE Repository Dashboard (also containing tools to support REF2021 Open Access Compliance)

We are extremely pleased to announce today the roll out of a major upgrade release of the CORE Repository Dashboard.

The service has been developed to support the 10,000+ CORE data providers. The upgraded CORE Repository Dashboard enables repository managers and research office management staff to:

Detect and monitor technical issues with data harvesting / aggregation related to their repository system
Obtain statistics
Manage and control aggregated repository content
Obtain identifier enrichments detected by CORE for their content, such as for DOIs missing in the repository
See RIOXX compliance
Check compliance of content with REF2021 Open Access policy (UK only)
Manage and view content downloads for their content in CORE

[…]

The DataCite MDC Stack

Posted on by

“In May, the Make Data Count team announced that we have received additional funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for work on the Make Data Count (MDC) initiative. This will enable DataCite to do additional work in two important areas:

Implement a bibliometrics dashboard that enables bibliometricians – funded by a separate Sloan grant – to do quantitative studies around data usage and citation behaviors.

Increase adoption of standardized data usage across repositories by developing a log processing service that offloads much of the hard work from repositories.

In this blog post, we want to provide more technical details about the upcoming work on the bibliometrics dashboard; the log processing service will be the topic of a future blog post. The bibliometrics dashboard will be based on several important infrastructure pieces that DataCite has built over the past few years, and that are again briefly described below….”

Why we need a public infrastructure for data on open access

Posted on by

“[O]btaining a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of journal publishing often relies on using the data and services of commercial bibliographic database providers. This not only risks vested commercial interests informing science policy (Tennant 2018), but also maintains the underlying data infrastructure as proprietary and closed. With only limited information on the research landscape – and thereby limited information on the effects of policy interventions – as factors influencing and steering policy is, to put it mildly, not optimal….

Improved precision and coverage of bibliometric data would allow us to begin answering the following questions: ? How is open access publishing growing in comparison to the overall growth of science, in terms of number of journals and number of articles? ? How many journals publishing open access started as open access journals? ? How many journals publishing open access have flipped to open access from first being subscription-based? ? How many open access journals have become subscription-based? ? How have article processing charges developed over time? Is this development uniform across research disciplines/publishers/countries? ? How many journals (open access or not) have became inactive? ? How many articles have been published as hybrid open access in subscription-journals? ? How many articles were published as delayed open access in subscription-journals last year? ? How has the market for open access publishing changed since the introduction of a specific policy intervention (e.g. Plan S)? ? How has the development and adoption of public open access infrastructures progressed? …

This post is intended to raise awareness about the current drawbacks of the information landscape around journals, and particularly how it relates to our limited knowledge about the history, current status, and trajectory of open access journal publishing. Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions but the next step would be to initiate a wider discussion about potential ways to provide access to journal metadata as well as web services to aggregate and present the data in an usable way….”

Exploring possibilities to use bibliometric data to monitor Gold open access publishing at the national level – van Leeuwen – – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

Posted on by

Abstract:  This article1 describes the possibilities to analyze open access (OA) publishing in the Netherlands in an international comparative way. OA publishing is now actively stimulated by Dutch science policy, similar to the United Kingdom. We conducted a bibliometric baseline measurement to assess the current situation, to be able to measure developments over time. We collected data from various sources, and for three different smaller European countries (the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland). Not all of the analyses for this baseline measurement are included here. The analysis presented in this article focuses on the various ways OA can be defined using the Web of Science, limiting the analysis mainly to Gold OA. From the data we collected we can conclude that the way OA is currently registered in various electronic bibliographic databases is quite unclear, and various methods applied deliver results that are different, although the impact scores derived from the data point in the same direction.

Exploring possibilities to use bibliometric data to monitor Gold open access publishing at the national level – van Leeuwen – – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

Posted on by

Abstract:  This article1 describes the possibilities to analyze open access (OA) publishing in the Netherlands in an international comparative way. OA publishing is now actively stimulated by Dutch science policy, similar to the United Kingdom. We conducted a bibliometric baseline measurement to assess the current situation, to be able to measure developments over time. We collected data from various sources, and for three different smaller European countries (the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland). Not all of the analyses for this baseline measurement are included here. The analysis presented in this article focuses on the various ways OA can be defined using the Web of Science, limiting the analysis mainly to Gold OA. From the data we collected we can conclude that the way OA is currently registered in various electronic bibliographic databases is quite unclear, and various methods applied deliver results that are different, although the impact scores derived from the data point in the same direction.

Scientific Production on Open Access: A Worldwide Bibliometric Analysis in the Academic and Scientific Context – E-LIS repository

Posted on by

[Abstract] This research aims to diachronically analyze the worldwide scientific production on open access, in the academic and scientific context, in order to contribute to knowledge and visualization of its main actors. As a method, bibliographical, descriptive and analytical research was used, with the contribution of bibliometric studies, especially the production indicators, scientific collaboration and indicators of thematic co-occurrence. The Scopus database was used as a source to retrieve the articles on the subject, with a resulting corpus of 1179 articles. Using Bibexcel software, frequency tables were constructed for the variables, and Pajek software was used to visualize the collaboration network and VoSViewer for the construction of the keywords’ network. As for the results, the most productive researchers come from countries such as the United States, Canada, France and Spain. Journals with higher impact in the academic community have disseminated the new constructed knowledge. A collaborative network with a few subnets where co-authors are from different countries has been observed. As conclusions, this study allows identifying the themes of debates that mark the development of open access at the international level, and it is possible to state that open access is one of the new emerging and frontier fields of library and information science.