What faculty need to know about Open Access & increasing their publishing Impact

1. What faculty need to know about Open Access & increasing their publishingImpact A. Ben Wagner, Sciences Librarian University at Buffalo

2. The Message • Used to be Publish or Perish. • Now it’s increasingly Get Cited or Perish. • Open Access: more readers, more citations, more impact • It’s your work; retain a few rights, at least posting manuscript to repository. • Sure you publish for prestige, but you also publish to be read!

3. The Classic: Journal Impact Factors • The number everyone knows when they see it, but can’t really define it. • Reported in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database <http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/jcr.html> • Reports the number of times the average article is cited in a given journal by subsequent articles in the body of scholarly journal literature.

4. 2007 All scholarly articles in journals covered by SSCI 238 Cites 2007 Impact = 238 2007 cites =1.506 Factor 158 2005-06 articles 2005-2006 Child Abuse & Neglect (journal) 158 articles

5. Journal Impact Factor (JIF) Definition • The journal impact factor is the average number of times articles from a given journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year. • Calculated by dividing the number of citations from the entire body of scholarly articles in the JCR [current] year by the total number of articles published in a given journal in the two previous years.

6. So what? • JIF is a measure of extreme currency – 2 year window. • JIF is a GROSS average. Ave. article in Child Abuse & Neglect cited 1.506 times, but the citations RANGE from 0-25 times. • Never ever intended to measure quality of an individual article or author. • http://forums.thomsonscientific.com/t5/Citation-Impact-Center/Preserving-the-Integrity-of-The-Journal-Impact-Factor-Guidelines/ba-p/1218#M14

7. Dirty little secrets • Impact factors can be manipulated by journal editors by: • Publishing more review articles • Encouraging citations to one’s own journal • Only journal article-to-journal article citations are counted. Book, report, conference paper citations ignored. • The data is dirtier and less complete than generally believed.

8. Two Questions • Citation patterns and nature of research differ across disciplines. How can we compare JIF from different disciplines? • Is there a better citation metric than JIF that can be used as a component in evaluating a scholar’s work?

9. Comparing Journal Impact Factors • Normalize them within discipline (top journal=100%, bottom journal=0%) • Every discipline has top journal and a bottom journal. • Social Work – top journal – JIF 2.352 • Psychiatry – top journal – JIF 15.97 • Details in my article: http://www.istl.org/09-spring/refereed1.html

10. Top 5 Social Work Journals by NIF

11. Same journal in multiple JCR subject categories

12. A Better Citation Metric • H-Index (Hirsch Index) • An H-Index of 11 means a person (or dept.) has 11 articles cited at least 11 times. • Easily calculated from Web of Science http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/webofscience.html

13. Critique of H-Index • Rewards longevity, but not least-publishable-unit or sheer quantity. • Recent and old work rewarded equally • Does not reward highly cited papers • Many variants (g-index, m-index, etc. proposed to weight age, recent work, & highly cited papers) – see bibliography • Relatively insensitive to manipulation.

14. Other alternatives to JIF • Eigenfactors - http://www.eigenfactor.org/ • New, open access direct competitor to JIF • Reports to “rank journals much as Google ranks websites” by analyzing the vast network of citations in scholarly web documents. • Other JCR metrics including 3 new ones as of this year. http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/jcr.html

15. Citation Indexes – Many more players -1 • SciFinder • NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) • Amazon (Search inside this book) • Google Scholar/Harzing’s POP • Scitation/Spin Web/PROLA • Citation Bridge (US Patents) • USPTO • Optics InfoBase

16. Citation Indexes – Many more players -2 • CiteSeer (primarily computer & info sci) • ScienceDirect • PsycInfo • IEEE Xplore • Spires (High Energy Physics • IOP Journals • CrossRef

17. My Take • For an individual or department: • H-Index plus • Total cites to all published articles plus • Citation Report graphs from appropriate the citation databases (SCI, SSCI, AHCI,+?) Give a pretty good take on the impact of one’s journal articles within the limits of available citation data. • Demonstrably superior to JIF

18. A Free, New Citation Tool • Harzing’s Publish or Perish • Install from: http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm • Automatically analyzes citations from Google Scholar for any author. • Interesting to compare Web of Science citation report with Harzing’s report. • Warning: Dirty data, don’t take at face value.

19. Harzing’s POP Statistics • Total number of papers & citations • Ave. number of citations per paper & per author • Ave. number of papers per author & per year • Hirsch's h-index and related parameters • Egghe's g-index • Other variations on the h-index • Age-weighted citation rate • Number of authors per paper

20. Primer on Open Access (OA) • OA simply means free-to-read. • OA is fully compatible with rigorous peer review. • OA does not necessarily mean author-pay (there are many models being tested). • OA journals can be low or high quality, just like subscription journals.

21. Can OA have Prestige? • PLOS Biology • JIF=13.5 (7th out of 263 biochem journals) • Started in October 2003 • Future of Children (Princeton Univ.) • JIF=4.76 (Top Family Studies Journal) • PLOS One (in 2010 will be the largest science journal in the world) – est. 8,000 articles

22. OA – a flash in the pan? • More than 4,000 fully OA, peer reviewed journals • 2 new titles per day • 1,500 OA repositories, new repository every day. • Scientific Commons – 30 million OA items. http://www.scientificcommons.org/ • 20% medical lit avail. Free within 2 years • Over 100 OA publication mandates

23. SO WHAT! • We publish for prestige, but we also publish to be read & cited. • What if I point you to actual research that shows OA articles are cited 25-250% more than toll access (TA) articles? • http://www.buffalo.edu/~abwagner/OACiteImpactBibliography.doc

24. Some OA Cite Advantage Studies (OA-CA) • 88% OA-CA in Sociology • (Norris & Rowland, 2008) The citation advantage of open-access articles. JASIST, 59(12), 1963-1972. • OA-CA: Math (91%), PolSci (86%); Philosophy (45%) • (Antelman 2004) Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries. 65(5): p. 372-382.

25. And what you’ve been waiting for • OA Citation Advantage for Social Work • 64% OA vs. non-OA • Hajjem, C., et al. Open access to research increases citation impact. 2005. Available from: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11687/

26. What you should know about OA • Know what your OA options are. • www.doaj.org • OA journal not the whole story • Institutional and discipline repositories (IR/DR) • UB institutional repository – any day now • Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their articles in an IR/DR. • See http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

27. More on Institutional Repositories • You have rights! Retain right to mount your hard work to an IR/DR. • Done right it will be visible to Google Scholar, OAIster, & other OAI harvestors. • www.oaister.org • Wide variety of formats & document types

28. The OA Advantage • As scholar, enlarge your audience/impact. • As reader, enjoy free online access to the literature. • As teacher, your students have free, liability-free access (fair use, course pack). • Moving away from an unsustainable journal publishing system.

29. 6 Things Researchers Need to Know about OA – P. Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm • What OA journals exist in your field? • OA more than journals. Also OA archives/repositories. • OA archiving only takes a few minutes. • Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in an OA repository. • Journals w/Ingelfinger Rule - shrinking minority. (7%) • OA enlarges your audience and citation impact.

30. Check out: • Open the channels of communication in your field. http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/OpenAccess.pdf • Create Change (SPARC)http://www.createchange.org/ • Making Change Work for You • Practical steps as faculty, researcher, reviewer, editor, society member, teacher. • http://www.createchange.org/change/index.shtml

31. From Opportunity Assessment Instrument • ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit: http://www.acrl.ala.org/scholcomm/ • “10 Things You Should Know About Scholarly Communication” http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/scholcomm/docs/SC%20101%2010%20Things%20You.pdf. • “Open Access Overview” (Peter Suber): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm • Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook: Practical Steps for Implementing Open Access: http://www.openoasis.org/ • “Transforming Scholarly Communication and Publishing” (UB Libraries – for faculty and students): http://library.buffalo.edu/scholarly/index.php. • ScholCom Staff Wiki (UB Libraries – internal): http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu/aslstaff/sc/

32. Personal Story • Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling Article