The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource. An agreement between the two organisations will allow Retraction Watch to keep the data populated on an ongoing basis and always open, alongside publishers registering their retraction notices directly with Crossref.
Category Archives: oa.analytics
Protecting user privacy on the COPIM project | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)
by Simon Bowie
Looking back at how the COPIM project protected the privacy of our website users and rethought the typical technical model for gathering web analytics
Introducing the Hybrid Open Access Dashboard (HOAD) | Plan S
We are pleased to introduce the Hybrid Open Access Dashboard (HOAD), an openly available data analytics tool designed for academic libraries and their consortia. Developed at the State and University Library Göttingen and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), HOAD combines open data from Crossref, OpenAlex, and the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool. By doing so, the dashboard illustrates the ongoing transition of hybrid journal portfolios included in transformative agreements to full open access.
How does it work?
HOAD provides interactive charts and tables for exploring the openness of over 12,500 hybrid journals included in 400+ transformative agreements. These are derived from curated and publicly available cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool data. HOAD allows users to gain a general overview and analyse hybrid journal portfolios of selected publishers. Throughout the dashboard, users can compare the global hybrid journal landscape with the situation in Germany since 2017.
As an important aspect, users can explore hybrid open access across Creative Commons licences over time and compare licence types offered by publishers. Notably, Springer Nature journals predominantly adopted the CC BY licence, aligned with the preferences of Plan S, whereas Elsevier and Wiley hybrid journals still use the more restrictive CC BY-NC-ND licence for a substantial share of articles (see Figure).
Users can also explore variations in open access adoption among different countries. The view on the top productive countries shows that lead authors from the United States, China, and India published open access in hybrid journals to a much lesser extent compared to their European counterparts. In contrast, countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Germany have achieved substantially larger open access shares, likely due to the wide implementation of transformative agreements.
Another important aspect assessed by HOAD is the availability of openly accessible metadata. Users can identify publishers that provide comprehensive metadata for their open access articles via Crossref. The metadata assessment includes open licences, abstracts, information about Text and Data Mining (TDM), authors’ ORCID, and funding. By highlighting gaps, HOAD supports library consortia in monitoring and negotiating improvements for open metadata in transformative agreements.
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the source / Introducing the All-New Journalytics Academic & Predatory Reports
“We have some exciting news to share – a new and improved Journalytics Academic & Predatory Reports platform will soon be here. Our team has been working on multiple updates and enhancements to our tried and true platform that will benefit users in multiple ways. Along with our ongoing addition of new verified and predatory journals, users will experience better search results, new data points and visualizations, increased stability and speed, and more secure logins.
In addition to the visual elements and expanded analytics of this redesign, a key component is the full integration of our Journalytics and Predatory Reports databases. This integration will allow for comprehensive searches that present the full range of publishing opportunities and threats in a given area. Our goal is to facilitate journal discovery and evaluation so our users know the journals and know the risks.
Last month we hosted a webinar to give users a sneak peek at the upcoming changes, which include a new guided search page to jumpstart journal discovery, updated platform and journal card designs, and new data points such as fees and article output. Check out the video below or visit our YouTube channel where you’ll find a time-stamped table of contents in the description for easy navigation to specific points in the video….”
An Index, A Publisher and An Unequal Global Research Economy | CGHE
“This is the story of how a publisher and a citation index turned the science communication system into a highly profitable global industry. Over the course of seventy years, academic journal articles have become commodities, and their meta-data a further source of revenue. It begins in Washington at the end of a second World War, when the US Government agrees a massive increase in funding for research, after Vannevar Bush champions basic research as the ‘pacemaker of technological progress’. The resulting post-war growth in scientific publishing creates opportunities for information scientists and publishers alike. During the 1950s, two men – Robert Maxwell and Eugene Garfield – begin to experiment with their blueprint for the research economy. Maxwell created an ‘international’ publisher – Pergamon Press – charming the editors of elite, not-for-profit society journals into signing commercial contracts. Garfield invented the science citation index to help librarians manage this growing flow of knowledge. Over time, the index gradually became commercially viable as universities and publishers used it to measure the ‘impact’ of their researchers and journals.
Sixty years later, the global science system has become a citation economy, with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two dominant commercial citation indexes: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science. The reach of these citation indexes and their data analytics is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. Scholarly reputation is now increasingly measured by journal rankings, ‘impact factors’ and ‘h-indexes’. Non-Anglophone journals are disproportionately excluded from these indexes, reinforcing the stratification of academic credibility geographies and endangering long established knowledge ecosystems. Researchers in the majority world are left marginalised and have no choice but to go ever faster, resorting to research productivism to keep up. The result is an integrity-technology ‘arms race’. Responding to media stories about a crisis of scientific fraud, publishers and indexes turn to AI tools to deal with what is seen as an epidemic of academic ‘gaming’ and manipulation.
Does the unfettered growth in publishing ‘outputs’, moral panics over research integrity and widening global divides signal a science system in crisis? And is the ‘Open Science’ vision under threat, as the ‘author-pays’ publishing business model becomes dominant? With the scientific commons now largely reliant on citations as its currency, the future of science communication is far from certain.”
Velez-Estevez et. al. (2023) New trends in bibliometric APIs: A comparative analysis | Information Processing & Management
Velez-Estevez, A., I. J. Perez, P. García-Sánchez, J. A. Moral-Munoz, and M. J. Cobo. ‘New Trends in Bibliometric APIs: A Comparative Analysis’. Information Processing & Management 60, no. 4 (1 July 2023): 103385. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2023.103385.
Abstract:
The science of science practice requires the analysis of large and complex bibliometric data. Traditional data exporting from companies’ websites is not sufficient, so APIs are used to access a larger corpus. Therefore, this study aims not only to establish a taxonomy but also to offer a comparative analysis of 44 bibliographic APIs from various non-profit and commercial organizations, analyzing their characteristics and metadata with descriptive analysis, their possible bibliometric analyses, and the interoperability of the APIs across four different data categories: general, content, search, and query modes. The study found that Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier offer highly versatile APIs, while non-profit organizations, such as OpenCitations and OurResearch promote the Open Science philosophy. Most organizations offer free access to APIs for non-commercial purposes, but some have limitations on metadata retrieval. However, CrossRef, OpenCitations, or OpenAlex have no restrictions on the metadata retrieval. Co-author analysis using author names and bibliometric evaluation using citations are the types of analyses that can be done with the data provided by most APIs. DOI, PubMedID, and PMCID are the most versatile identifiers for extending metadata in the APIs. Semantic Scholar, Dimensions, ORCID, and Embase are the APIs that offer the most extensibility. Considering the obtained results, there is no single API that gathers all the information needed to perform any bibliometric analysis. Combining two or more APIs may be the most appropriate option to cover as much information as possible and enrich reports and analyses. This study contributes to advancing the understanding and use of APIs in research practice.
Geriatric and Gerontology Research: A Scientometric Investigation of Open Access Journal Articles Indexed in the Scopus Database
Abstract: Background
Scientometric analyses of specific topics in geriatrics and gerontology have grown robustly in scientific literature. However, analyses using holistic and interdisciplinary approaches are scarce in this field of research. Objective: This article aimed to demonstrate research trends and provide an overview of bibliometric information on publications related to geriatrics and gerontology.
Methods
We identified relevant articles on geriatrics and gerontology using the search terms “geriatrics,” “gerontology,” “older people,” and “elderly”. VOSviewer was used to perform bibliometric analysis.
Results
A total of 858 analyzed articles were published in 340 journals. Among the ten most contributory journals, five were in the United States (US), with the top journal being the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The US was the leading country in research, followed by Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A total of 5,278 keywords were analyzed. In the analysis of research hotspots, the main global research topics in geriatrics and gerontology were older adults (n=663), education and training (n=471), and adults aged 80 years (n= 461). These were gradually expanded to include areas related to caring for older adults, such as geriatric assessments (n=395).
Conclusion
These results provide direction for fellow researchers to conduct studies in geriatrics and gerontology. In addition, they provide government departments with guidance for formulating and implementing policies that affect older adults, not only in setting academic and professional priorities but also in understanding key topics related to them.
Research Trends in the Field of Emergency Remote Teaching: A Bibliometric Analysis of Open Access Literature | Online Learning
Abstract: Throughout the period of pandemic, many studies have been conducted on emergency remote teaching (ERT) in different fields and from different perspectives, which reveal that there has been a lack of a comprehensive map showing the rapid and continuous responses of these studies to the process. The purpose of this research is to analyze open access research on ERT using bibliometric method, and to reveal current trends in this field. VOSviewer software was used for data analysis; the data collection process was shaped using the PRISMA framework. 238 studies were included in the analysis. The distribution of the open access studies analyzed in the field of emergency remote teaching by year, type of publication, subject, country, and sources was examined; citation analysis (by journal and publication), authorship patterns and collaboration, common word analyses are included. It was found out that these open access publications mainly consisted of journal articles and were dated 2020 and 2021; most of the publications were in the field of educational sciences. Based on common word analysis, the most important topics that are addressed in studies on the ERT process are the process of pandemic, distance education and higher education, while the challenges experienced regarding teachers and pedagogic issues during the process, teacher education, student-related characteristics (such as self-regulated learning-motivation-academic success) and participation are found to be frequently studied topics. The concepts of instructional design, collaborative learning, social presence, and assessment are also among the topics covered. It is anticipated that the implications for policy and practice based on the examination of research trends will have a significant effect on the structuring of future online learning environments, as well as the ERT designed for emergencies.
NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Recommended Practice for Operationalizing Open Access Business Processes | NISO website
“Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working Group to develop a Recommended Practice for operationalizing open access (OA) business processes. NISO is seeking members from across the information community to join the Working Group, which will address the lack of infrastructure supporting OA content by helping stakeholders in scholarly communications to track, assess, and report on OA publications, authors, and funding more easily.
The volume of OA content has proliferated in recent years, but the systems and workflows currently used by publishers and librarians were designed for traditional, pay-to-read models. Business processes are currently inadequate to address the requirements of—for example—transformative agreements, which require complex financial management and the tracking of authors and publishing outputs across large institutions. Libraries face challenges in managing micropayments and assessing the financial impact of such agreements, and authors often have difficulty determining whether their manuscript is eligible for OA publication under agreement terms. These complexities also impact publisher editorial and financial systems. As a result, organizations often adopt manual processes for managing these agreements, giving rise to inefficiencies across the ecosystem.
NISO’s Working Group will address the problem by identifying gaps in the infrastructure for OA publications and agreements, developing terminology to describe the surrounding processes, and outlining best practices for exchanging data and analytics and metrics. The work will focus first on the metadata required for exchange prior to publication as well as for article-level financial transactions, and then address reporting following publication. As the new Recommended Practice will be of interest to publishers, libraries, authors, funders, and OA advocates and community initiatives, the group is seeking volunteers representing a range of stakeholder groups from across the scholarly communications industry….”
AGRICULTURE JOURNALS IN DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS: AN ANALYTICAL STUDY (2003-2021)
Abstract: In this paper, 791 agriculture journals covering various fields of agriculture from 2003-2021 by the directory of open access journals have been analyzed. It has been observed that maximum numbers of 107 journals were published during the year 2017. The journals published in English language got the top place and Indonesia has the highest number of publications. The paper also analyzed various parameters like Country-wise, Particular Year-wise, and Language-wise, etc.
Bibliometrics Methods in Detecting Citations to Questionable Journals – ScienceDirect
Abstract: In recent times, there has been a proliferation of questionable practices in research publishing, for example, via predatory journals, hijacked journals, plagiarism, tortured phrases and paper mills. This paper intends to analyse whether journals that had been removed from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2018 due to suspected misconduct were cited within journals indexed in the Scopus database. Our analysis showed that Scopus contained over 15 thousand references to the removed journals identified. The majority of the publications citing these journals came from the area of Engineering. It is important to note that although we cannot assume that all the journals removed followed unethical practices, it is still essential that researchers are aware of the issues around citing journals that have been suspected of misconduct. We suggest that research libraries play a crucial role in training, advising and providing information to researchers about these ethical issues of publication malpractice and misconduct.
The Book Analytics Dashboard project: reflections on coordination, collaboration, and community consultation | COKI
by Kathryn Napier, BAD project Technical Lead, Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), Curtin University
The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project (2022-2025) is a 3-year, Mellon Foundation funded project that is creating a sustainable analytics service to support diverse Open Access (OA) book publishers. Affectionately referred to as the BAD project, our goal is to provide publishers with user-friendly tools to navigate complex data about how their books are being used. The project is grounded in the premise that efficient, user-friendly usage analytics services are needed to safeguard and support diversity in the voices, perspectives, geographies, topics, and languages made visible through OA books.
The BAD project is building on the earlier (2020-2022) Mellon-funded Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage project, affectionately referred to as the OAeBU project. The BAD project is scaling workflows, infrastructure and customer support processes originally developed during the earlier project. In addition to technical refinement and scaling, BAD is developing a long-term plan for housing, maintenance, and funding of the analytics service as a sustainable community infrastructure.
The team working on BAD is truly international. The Principal Investigator (PI) team comprises: Lucy Montgomery from Curtin University (Australia); Cameron Neylon (Curtin University); Niels Stern and Ronald Snijder (OAPEN Foundation, the Netherlands), as well as community cultivation expert Katherine Skinner (Research Lead at IOI, based in the United States).
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[2006.14830] Metrics and peer review agreement at the institutional level
Abstract: In the past decades, many countries have started to fund academic institutions based on the evaluation of their scientific performance. In this context, post-publication peer review is often used to assess scientific performance. Bibliometric indicators have been suggested as an alternative to peer review. A recurrent question in this context is whether peer review and metrics tend to yield similar outcomes. In this paper, we study the agreement between bibliometric indicators and peer review based on a sample of publications submitted for evaluation to the national Italian research assessment exercise (2011–2014). In particular, we study the agreement between bibliometric indicators and peer review at a higher aggregation level, namely the institutional level. Additionally, we also quantify the internal agreement of peer review at the institutional level. We base our analysis on a hierarchical Bayesian model using cross-validation. We find that the level of agreement is generally higher at the institutional level than at the publication level. Overall, the agreement between metrics and peer review is on par with the internal agreement among two reviewers for certain fields of science in this particular context. This suggests that for some fields, bibliometric indicators may possibly be considered as an alternative to peer review for the Italian national research assessment exercise. Although results do not necessarily generalise to other contexts, it does raise the question whether similar findings would obtain for other research assessment exercises, such as in the United Kingdom.
Twenty years of Wikipedia in scholarly publications: a bibliometric network analysis of the thematic and citation landscape | SpringerLink
Abstract: Wikipedia has grown to be the biggest online encyclopedia in terms of comprehensiveness, reach and coverage. However, although different websites and social network platforms have received considerable academic attention, Wikipedia has largely gone unnoticed. In this study, we fill this research gap by investigating how Wikipedia is used in scholarly publications since its launch in 2001. More specifically, we review and analyze the intellectual structure of Wikipedia’s scholarly publications based on 3790 Web of Science core collection documents written by 10,636 authors from 100 countries over two decades (2001–2021). Results show that the most influential outlets publishing Wikipedia research include journals such as Plos one, Nucleic Acids Research, the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, IEEE Access, and Information Processing and Management. Results also show that the author collaboration network is very sparsely connected, indicating the absence of close collaboration among the authors in the field. Furthermore, results reveal that the Wikipedia research institutions’ collaboration network reflects a North–South divide as very limited cooperation occurs between developed and developing countries’ institutions. Finally, the multiple correspondence analysis applied to obtain the Wikipedia research conceptual map reveals the breadth, diversity, and intellectual thrust of the Wikipedia’s scholarly publications. Our analysis has far-reaching implications for aspiring researchers interested in Wikipedia research as we retrospectively trace the evolution in research output over the last two decades, establish linkages between the authors and articles, and reveal trending topics/hotspots within the broad theme of Wikipedia research.
An Exploration of Mendeley Reader and Google Scholar Citation for Analysing Indexed Article
Abstract— This paper aims to analyze the number of readers from the published articles of 100 Indonesian researchers in Mendeley reference management software. The list of Indonesian scientists is obtained from the webometrics ranking of scientists. We used the Application Programming Interface (API) of Mendeley to count the number of readers for each article in Mendeley and combine it with Google Scholar citation using the scrap method. We processed ten mostly cited articles that are indexed in the first page of the Google Scholar for each designated scientist. Furthermore, we used the Pearson method to analyze the correlation of the Mendeley readers count and the Google Scholar citation. The results show that they are correlated with a value of 0.266 according to the method of Pearson with N = 1000. Furthermore we found that many online Indonesian journals have no Digital Object Identifier (DOI) yet. Our evaluation of the publication results of 100 Indonesian researchers shows that authors who upload their scientific work on Mendeley, have higher citation number in Google Scholar, because their papers are widely available on the Internet.