The Impact Factor as a measure of research quality is no longer appropriate - OA has the answer

Leslie Chan, Director of Bioline International and EPT Trustee, argues that the continuing use of the Impact Factor as a measurement of research quality is no longer appropriate and excludes much valuable research carried out in the developing world. Researchers from developing countries feel the need to publish in journals with high impact levels as measured by the Thomon Reuter's IF and their research agenda is consequently often dictated by this, rather than by  national and regional needs for research effort. Other metrics are more inclusive and should replace the IF in this open networked climate. Click on SciDevNet to read his opinion piece.

JISC offer to promote OA activities - forwarded

From: Internal announcement list for JISC Advance [JISC-ADVANCE-STAFF@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Daniel McCaffrey [danmccaffrey@RSC-SOUTH-WEST.AC.UK]
Sent: 16 November 2011 15:16
To: JISC-ADVANCE-STAFF@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: JISC Open Campaign Steering Group-Request

Dear Colleagues,

I'm one of the JISC Advance representatives on the steering group orchestrating JISC's national "Open" campaign.

The group are engaged in planning promotional activities for JISC to push the "open" agenda to supported Institutions.  Can any RSC/JISC Advance colleagues avail me of any Open-related comms activity coming up in the new year that would benefit from being promoted on a corporate level, as JISC aim to  create a calendar of relevant activities to push throughout the campaign.

If you have anything of interest, please let me know.

Best Wishes, Dan McCaffrey

Beyond Open Access - new technology provides appropriate methodologies for sharing research knowledge in the developing world

Beyond Open Access

– new opportunities for scholarly communication in developing countries

Leslie Chan, Trustee of EPT and Director of Bioline International, presented the following video at the recent BioMedCentral Open Access Africa Conference held at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJXcm-xTfU&feature=youtu.be. As well as outlining the aims and the resources available from Bioline International and the usage that is made globally of developing country research from this platform, he discussed the need for a rethink on the evaluation of research articles and journals, based on their relevance to development in emerging countries of the world. He emphasised that the goal of Bioline International is not solely a means of increasing the Impact Factor of journals based on Northern values and suggested that the future of sharing research globally will be met in additional ways than by traditional journals. He introduced the concepts of networked knowledge, open science and a new invisible college, and explains how these new technologies are more appropriate for the advancement of research in the developing world.

Just 19 days left to send nominations for the EPT OA Award

Colleagues, this is a reminder that if you wish to make a nomination for the EPT open access award for individuals in developing countries that have made a significant contribution to the progress of Open Access, there are only 21 days left before nominations close. Click here to get all details. We look forward to hearing from you.

Two studies of the use of OA journals in India

Two publications on the use of OA journals by researchers in India have been published recently in Current Science. Below are the conclusions and a link to the full texts. Between them they provide a comprehensive picture of the status of OA in India.

  

[1]  Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam: Use of open access journals by Indian researchers: CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 101, NO. 10,  25 NOVEMBER  2011, Page 1287-1295. For the full text (which includes many tables and graphs) see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/forthcoming/GA2282.pdf

Conclusion:

OA to research findings can be provided by two ways: by publishing the papers in OA journals (the gold route) and or by placing the full text of the papers along with metadata in interoperable OA archives (the green route). At least three leading publishers of S&T journals in India have opted to go the OA way. MedKnow publishes more than 150 OA journals. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, adopted OA for all its journals more than ten years ago. Indeed, Pramana, its physics journal, was made open access in July 1998. More recently, CSIR made all 16 research journals published by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources OA. A few years ago the Indian Council of Medical Research made the Indian Journal of Medical Research OA. While these moves are certainly welcome, we believe that the OA archives route is the ideal solution, especially for developing countries. No matter whether they publish their papers in OA or toll-access journals, Indian researchers will do well to place the full text of their papers in institutional repositories. Stevan Harnad, founder of Psycoloquy stopped publishing the journal in 2001, as it became clear to him by then that author self-archiving in interoperable institutional repositories was the best route to ensure 100% OA to the world’s scholarly literature.

In November 2009, 41 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the US Congress expressing their support to OA to research. They believed that the open availability of research ‘will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation’. P. Balaram told SciDev.Net; ‘I think every institution should be encouraged to set up a repository. This is a problem-free model I want to promote. There may be a few glitches at the start, but the next generation of scientists will be comfortable with it’. In a recent blog posting, Giridhar said, ‘The best way to make the work open access in India is not necessarily by publishing it in open access journals but by depositing the article in an institutional repository’. The Indian Academy of Sciences has recently set up a repository for papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. As of 7 October 2011, more than 60,500 paper/documents were deposited, but a vast majority of them do not provide access to the full text. One has to be content with metadata and abstracts. CSIR has decided to set up repositories in each one of its more than 35 laboratories.

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[2] Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan, Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 100, NO. 9, 10  MAY 2011, Page 1297-1306. For the full text, see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/10may2011/1297.pdf

Conclusion

Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting. Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad1,18 and Balaram. One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi, starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.

Open scholarship in the developing world, a video presented by Leslie Chan, 24.10.11

Leslie Chan, EPT Trustee and Director of Bioline International at the University of Toronto, gave the following video presentation at the Open Access Conference at the Kwama Nkrumah University in Kumsai. Ghana, see: http://vimeo.com/30922669. Titled, 'Opportunities for open scholarship in Africa', Leslie Chan first described the structure and use of the Bioline project, which aims to provide visibility for local research, and then went on to discuss the importance of relevant research and the need to consider new ways to distribute research findings in areas with limited infrastructure. He discussed the need for new and relevant standards, the need for widening the development of open scholarship to include new value metrics, new standards and new technologies that address local conditions. His presentation included two clips from videos of two African Professors from Kenya and Botswana who support the value of Open Access for research in their countries and have personal experience of its impact on development.

This presentation introduced new concepts that may provide better, more appropriate means for the exchange of essential research findings from the developing world.

     

Open Access week is here, and one of the major events taking place is the important Berlin 9 conference, to be held this year in Washington DC. See http://www.berlin9.org/program/index.shtml for the programme.

Of particular interest is a pre-conference workshop on OA policy on the afternoon of Tuesday 8 November, from 2-4 pm.

The purpose of the session is to describe the different policy approaches that have been taken and how effectively they can be made to work in practice.

There are four speakers, as below, and the session has been organised by the OA expert, Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd.:

1. Welcome and introduction (10 minutes):  Alma Swan
2. Mandatory policy with rights retention [Harvard, Kansas SU]: Stuart Shieber, Jeff Vitter]
3. Mandatory policy without rights retention (but inked to assessment processes [Liege]: Bernard Rentier
4. Mandatory policy with intense library advocacy [Glasgow]: William Nixon
5. Q and A / discussion