Recently in Scholarly publishing Category

I've argued before that impact factors are useless or worse and that altmetrics or, even better, textual analysis of articles is a much better way to judge the impact of a scientific work.

Impact factors provide one crude metric by which the "quality" of journals can be compared. When libraries are forced to make decisions about what journals they subscribe to, an impact factor is one way of judging how useful the content of a journal might be. Of course, if the library already subscribes to a journal, local usage statistics are vastly superior. So knowing a journal's impact factor is one datum a librarian might use in deciding whether to subscribe to a new journal. Of course, interest from library patrons is likely to be the overriding factor. So again, the usefulness of impact factors is limited. And they will become ever more limited as more and more of the scholarly literature becomes available under an open access license.

Related articles

• Just say no to impact factors (guardian.co.uk)
• Scientists join journal editors to fight Impact Factor abuse (blogs.nature.com)
• Journal impact factor 'distorts science' (abc.net.au)
• In 'Insurrection,' Scientists, Editors Call for Abandoning Journal Impact Factors (news.sciencemag.org)

Elementa is now accepting submissions. In case you don't remember, Elementa is a fully open access journal led by BioOne and Dartmouth in collaboration with the University of Colorado, the University of Michigan, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Washington.

Elementa publishes in six knowledge domains relevant to the science of the anthropocene: atmospheric science, ecology, sustainable engineering, earth and environmental science, ocean science, and sustainability transitions. If you work in one of those areas, I encourage you to become one of Elementa's first authors.

Head over to http://elementascience.org/submission/ and get started.

Jason Hoyt (@jasonHoyt) is recognized as one of "Ten Tech Innovators 2013" in The Chronicle Review.Ironically, the article is probably behind a paywall.¹ Here's an excerpt.

A basic individual membership begins at $99 and entitles a researcher to publish one article a year in PeerJ. (The base price goes up a little if you wait to pay until you have an article accepted.) Membership doesn't guarantee publication; articles must make it through peer review, handled by a board of almost 800 academic editors who are established researchers in science and medicine.

THE INNOVATOR: Jason Hoyt, PeerJ

THE BIG IDEA: An open-access, peer-reviewed publishing platform offers a cheaper and faster alternative.

The advisory board includes five Nobel laureates, as Mr. Hoyt and PeerJ's co-founder and publisher, Peter Binfield, will happily tell you. As a start-up without the name recognition of, say, Nature, PeerJ counts on the reputations of its editors and reviewers to help persuade other scientists to give it a try. PeerJ authors and reviewers frustrated by the traditional closed-review approach can opt for open peer review, a feature that Mr. Binfield says has already proved popular.

If you can read the whole thing, please do. It's well worth your time.

Related articles

• Who Killed the PrePrint, and Could It Make a Return? (blogs.scientificamerican.com)

From the FOAS website:

The mission of the Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS) is to promote free software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics.

FOAS works to ensure the continued success of the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS), one of the few major open access journals that is free for both readers and authors. We also promote the use and development of free software for statistics, such as the R language and environment for computational statistics. We encourage members and the academic community at large to publish reproducible research that is publicly available online, e.g., in an open access journal or on an open access pre-print server.

You can join FOAS to show your support for free statistical software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics. Membership is free and open to all.

Consider making a donation to FOAS. All donations are currently being used to support the operation of the JSS.

Hat tip: Bob Carpenter

John Whitehead complains about the difficulty of finding peer reviewers for a paper.

This is not an atypical paper. I try potential referees who are experts in the area (searching for keywords in Google Scholar and Scopus), authors of papers in the reference section, referees suggested by the authors, referees suggested by the Elsevier Electronic System, colleagues, friends and neighbors. Potential referees are often too busy (with a stack of other reviews), not in the correct field to review the paper, or much, much worse, ignore the request ("un-invited before agreeing to review"). I understand all this but when I go oh for ten I begin to wonder what the point of it is.

Later on he notes:

I don't have this problem for MRE where I typically ask two people to referee and they are both happy to do it.

The first journal (unnamed) is published by Elsevier. MRE is published by Marine Resource Economics and Allen Press. A coincidence? You decide.

In October, I linked to the announcement from BioOne¹ and Dartmouth that Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene was being launched. Elementa is a fully open access journal led by BioOne and Dartmouth in collaboration with the University of Colorado, the University of Michigan, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Washington.

Open Science for Public Good

Publishing original research reporting on new knowledge of the Earth's physical, chemical, and biological systems; interactions between human and natural systems; and steps that can be taken to mitigate and adapt to global change, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene will report on fundamental advancements in research organized initially into six knowledge domains, embracing the concept that basic knowledge can foster sustainable solutions for society. Elementa is published on an open-access, public-good basis--available freely and immediately to the world. (from elementascience.org).

Please head over to elementascience.org to read the Aims and Scope of the journal, and if you work in one of the six knowledge domains initially covered by Elementa (atmospheric science, ecology, sustainable engineering, earth and environmental science, ocean science, sustainability science), please consider submitting your best work there. I hope that Elementa not only makes a lot of superb, interdisciplinary environmental sciences freely available, but that the deep collaboration with universities provides one model by which universities can reclaim their fundamental role in the world of scholarly communication.

The good folks at PubMed Central have introduced a new tool that you may find very useful, PubReader.

That's a screen shot on the left. Click on the image for a full-size popup. As you'll see, I captured it on my iPad. But it's not an iPad app. It's an HTML 5 rendering of articles in PubMedCentral that should display nicely in any modern browser. Now if you're led to PubMedCentral for an article, you can browse it easily an quickly through a very nice interface whether you're sitting at your computer, working on your tablet, or browsing with your smartphone.

Only a few combinations of browsers and operating sytems haven't been tested: Safari and IE 10 under Windoze; Firefox under Android. Less used browsers, e.g., Camino and Opera, aren't listed on the supported browsers page, but I suspect they'll work, too.

I hope other publishers adopt a similar approach to making content available. The CSS and JavaScript code that NCBI developed is available in a GitHub repository, so there's little excuse for any publisher that can produce HTML not to provide a similar interface for their content.

HT: Francis Collins

But you knew that already.¹ Now I'm unique in a new way. I have an ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4312-3804. What's an ORCID ID you ask?

ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. ORCID is unique in its ability to reach across disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries and in its cooperation with other identifier systems. ORCID works with the research community to identify opportunities for integrating ORCID identifiers in key workflows, such as research profile maintenance, manuscript submissions, grant applications, and patent applications.

If you go to the ORCID site (http://about.orcid.org/), and search on "Holsinger", you'll see that there's only one Holsinger currently listed in the ORCID database - that's me. Click on the link and you'll come to a page that lists all of the publications ORCID was able to find for me on the web, including links.²

Related articles

• Metadata: ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) Registry Officially Launches, Register For ID Online (infodocket.com)
• Elsevier Joins ORCID in Launch of ORCID Registry (semanticweb.com)
• ORCID: "Reliably Connecting Research With Researchers" (digitalmediaandscience.wordpress.com)
• ORCID launches to give researchers unique identity codes (blogs.nature.com)

Over a month ago, Stephen Curry (@Stephen_Curry) pointed to an article by Debby Shorley, director of library services at Imperial College London, on the role that universities should play in open-access publishing. The article is short, and the whole thing is worth reading. Here's the nugget of her argument: