Recently in Scholarly communication Category

But I guess I have. I just discovered that E-Books Directory lists me as the author of Population Genetics (published by the University of Connecticut in 2008). The "book" in question is a set of course notes for my graduate course in population genetics. I released the notes under a Creative Commons license precisely to allow others to re-use them, and I'm delighted to find a link to them from an e-book directory. That may help more people to find them.

First El Naschie, then an undisclosed relationship with Merck to publish what were essentially product advertisements masquerading as a scholarly journal. Here's what Richard Gallagher writing at The Scientist has to say:

Kudos to Elsevier [for admitting their mistake]. But they need to go further.

They need to provide the names of the sponsors of the six faux journals. Who besides Merck colluded in "unacceptable practice"?

They should also release financial information. I'd like to know the price that bought the integrity of one of the leading science publishers.

At that point, I'll be happy to accept that "the integrity of Elsevier's publications and business practices remains intact," as the Elsevier spokesperson maintains. I know Elsevier from the inside--they gave me my first job in publishing.

Yet another reason not to like Elsevier. This is from The Scientist (free registration required):

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

The Special Libraries Association is celebrating its centennial this year. As part of that celebratio, its Division of Biomedical and Life Sciences has released its list of "the 100 most influential journals of Biology & Medicine over the last 100 years." The usual suspects are there:
BMJ: The British Medical Journal, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Science.

I'd like to point out that several BioOne titles are also on the list:¹ Annals of the Entomological Society of America, The Auk, Evolution, Journal of Herpetology, Journal of Mammalogy, Journal of Paleontology, Journal of Shellfish Research, Systematic Botany.

Peter Suber linked to a report for the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishing several months ago. I wrote at the time that

[I]t's still not clear that an "author pays" model of immediate open access is sustainable. That doesn't mean open access is a bad idea, and it doesn't mean that we should dampen efforts to make access to scholarly research as broadly available as possible. It does mean that "author pays" may not be the way to do it. Open archiving is much more promising.

I learned today (thanks to BioMed Central) that there's a new report from UK Universities/Research Information Network on paying for open access (PDF). In its guidelines for higher education and research institutions, the report notes that

[I]n most cases it will not be possible to treat publication fees as a directly-incurred cost, but only as an indirect cost.

 Translated from grantspeak, that means

Publication fees can't usually paid for from grants. Institutions will have to pay them.

The report also notes that a commitment to open access can't be something that libraries make alone. It argues that institutions should establish "dedicated budgets to which researchers can apply for funds to meet the cost of publication fees."

Which begs the question: why are publication fees necessary?

I grit my teeth every time I visit Web of Science, because I don't like the stranglehold that Thomson-Reuters has onthe world of bibliographic databases, at least in the fields I'm familiar with. I did finally break down and buy a copy of Endnote X2  when I got a new MacBook Pro a couple of months ago,¹ but I did it while holding my nose.

I'm holding my nose again this morning.

See that badge to the left? I just joined ResearcherID.com. It's a new service from our "friends" at Thomson-Reuters. Click on it, and you'll get taken to a page with some more information about me and my published research. ResearcherID.com unfortunately looks as if it might be rather useful, so the beast may be getting even fatter.

Citation statistics are widely used to assess the impact of scholarly work. The simplest statistic is the number of times that a particular article, a particular author, or a particular journal has been cited. Thomson Scientific's impact factor¹ is probably the oldest and best known, but there are a variety of alternatives. One feature all citations statistics share is that they are derived from the list of citations found in the literature cited section of published articles. Clearly cited works have had some impact on the authors of the paper, but some of those works are likely to have been more influential than others, so other ways of assessing that influence are needed.

Johan Bollen and his colleagues present such an assessment in PLoS One. Instead of compiling statistics from works that are cited, they compile statistics from works that are used. Specifically, they use log data from scholarly web portals to determine which journals are being used and to visualize the connections among them. The first thing that caught my eye was the table to the left. The usage data on which Bollen and his colleagues based their analysis shows a much closer match to the number of degrees awarded in a large, diverse university system than the number of citations in Thomson's Journal Citation Reports. Those data in and of themselves should give pause to any administrators who think that citation statistics alone provide a good measure of scholary impact and influence.

What's really cool, though, is the image to the left (click on the image for a full-size version). It one way of visualizing the connections among the 2,307 journals with at least 170 connections to other journals. Again, the pattern is very striking. The authors caution that the exact geometric positions of the various clusters depends on the visualization algorithm used, but even so, there appear to be some patterns likely to be preserved in any visualization. First, there are three relatively large clusters (physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences and humanities) and a couple of smaller ones (nursing, clinical pharmacology). Second, the humanities and social sciences are at least as connected to other clusters as any of the others. If anything,² it's the physical sciences that are the most isolated from other areas of scholarly work. They are mostly connected indirectly through connections in the life sciences. That's not too surprising, since quarks and molecules are a long way from law and archaeology, but it's interesting to see the patterns displayed visually. Third, and most important it illustrates for those who might need convincing that the social sciences and humanities are large, active fields of scholarly work, fields that are intimately connected to many others.

Here's hoping that as leaders at the University of Connecticut seek ways to bridge the large gap in its budget, they will remember that the social sciences and humanities are as central its future as the life sciences and the physical sciences.³

And now from our shameless plug department...

BioOne is a non-profit corporation whose mission is to provide affordable access to top-quality research literature in biology. Librarians have long recognized that scholarly societies and other non-profit publishers provide excellent value to their users and that the health of these organizations and their journals is vital to the long-term health of scholary communication.

BioOne is a collaborative effort among libraries and non-profit publishers to serve these goals by providing publishers with revenues that support a significant part of their activities at prices libraries can afford.

We¹ were founded in 1999, incorporated in 2000, and went live in 2001. Last night we went live with our new site. Here's what it looks like. Click on the image to have a look for yourself.

I was trying to get ready for this morning's lecture on statistical phylogeography, and I was planning to use this paper as part of my lecture.

The last time I taught this course (in 2006), I had a link to the paper that worked like a charm using a digital object identifier (DOI). DOIs are supposed to provide a stable link to electronic objects, like published journal articles. Well, when I clicked on the link this morning it didn't work. That's bad. It should still be working, even two years later, and even though Blackwell (the original publisher) has been acquired by Wiley. This is also probably the second or third time this semester I've had this problem.

But it gets worse.

Nature reports that Mohamed El Naschie will step down as Editor-in-Chief of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. Why do I care? Because El Naschie is an example of

a failure by a publisher to ensure that peer review happens. [He]'s an example of what happens when peer review is avoided, and the results aren't pretty.

A spokesman for Elsevier quoted in the article doesn't admit to any failure in editorial oversight. But when Zoran Škoda, a theoretical physicist at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb, Croatia sent letters to editorial board members in May asking if they approved of El Naschie's editorial practices, he "received a letter, signed by a P. Green who identified himself or herself as a legal adviser to the editorial board, threatening legal action should Škoda continue sending 'defamatory' letters."

Maybe Škoda's letters were defamatory. I haven't seen them. But on the face of it, the reaction sounds like one you might expect from a journal led by an editor-in-chief who claims false affiliations and who publishes five of his own papers in a single issue of the journal he edits. It's the reaction of a fraud who's been found out, not the reaction of an honest scientist.

Whether Elsevier admits it or not, their oversight of this journal appears to have been non-existent. It appears they were more interested in the $4250 in annual subscription fees El Naschie's journal garners than in ensuring "that all published reports of research have been reviewed by suitably qualified reviewers", as required by the Committee on Publication Ethics.