...The father-son team advances the open sharing of scholarly information through original research and the creation of innovative tools that are used widely by the academic community to assess the value of research.
Ted and Carl are best known for their collaborations on Ted's journal pricing web pages and, more recently, on the Eigenfactor.org Web site produced by Carl's research lab. Ted's journal pricing page, which offers data reporting price per article and price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals, has centralized pricing information so it can be explored and compared in ways that were previously impossible. The site has become a vital resource for researchers and librarians alike. Carl's Eigenfactor.org site offers a completely new and innovative approach to assessing the value of journals; it provides researchers, librarians and others a new mechanism to evaluate based on a diverse array of criteria.
Ted, an economist, holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the Economics Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. Carl, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington....
"It's clear that father and son place a high value on the open sharing of information, and they have devoted their careers to probing the notion of defining value in scholarship," said SPARC Director Heather Joseph. "Although they work in different fields, they come at the basic questions of fairness and access in ways that will impact scholarly communication for generations. It's entirely reasonable to believe that, together, they have the ability to change the way journals are measured and purchased." ...
The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication realized by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators are featured on the SPARC Web site semi-annually and have included Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute; the University of California; and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. SPARC Innovators are named by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.
...Ted has long felt that defining the notion of value in scholarship is directly linked to the wide dissemination of that scholarship. As with many scientists, he became aware of the problems plaguing the scientific journal marketplace when he was refereeing journal articles in the late 1990s. He got started “quite by accident,” as he remembers. “I was doing more refereeing than I could possibly do and I needed a way to sort out which journals I’d work for, so I decided on a whim to list them by price per article and work down the list as far as I could go.”
What he found “surprised and infuriated” him.
“The numbers showed that we scholars were being cheated,” he said. The large commercial publishers “were getting free work from us and looting our university budgets.” He says he knew immediately that he had to do something, and as an economist, he felt he could provide useful information if he compiled numbers that would make a compelling case to others....
Ted visualizes creating a tool that would maximize spending based on weighted citations. Once completed, it will allow libraries to type in their budget and receive recommendations on what to buy and what to drop, based on the Eigenfactor citation index or other criteria, such as value per dollar or needs of the discipline....
“I have always had a strong feeling, from my experience with open source software, that material that’s made publicly available will have more impact,” said Carl. “A strong theme in my early work with my father was that not only is open access in the best interest of science as a whole, it’s in the individual’s best interest to favor nonprofit journals; individuals have their work seen and recognized there. The more I looked at the issue the more it became obvious that there were not high career costs to doing this.” ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/05/2007 11:11:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
