Tim Brody, Les Carr, Alma Swan, and Stevan Harnad, Time to Convert to Metrics, Research Fortnight, July 18, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers, at least so far). Excerpt:
…But, in the online age, citation links are just a special form of web link between a citing article and one or more cited articles. If he had been starting now, [Eugene] Garfield would not have been working on a proprietary database descended from the cut-and-paste paper era; he would have been developing open access scientometrics….
Two very important online developments are currently converging in the UK. First, authors are making their research free for all online (“open access”, OA), to maximise its use and impact. And second, research funders are using metrics to rank and reward research contributions on the basis of online measures of their usefulness and impact….
Citation metrics today are based largely on journal articles citing journal articles —and mostly just those 8,000 journals that are indexed by ISI’s Web of Science. That represents only a third (although probably the top third) of the total number of peer-reviewed journals published today, across all disciplines and all languages. Open access self-archiving can make the other two-thirds of journal articles linkable and countable too….
At Southampton, the world’s first departmental self-archiving mandate helped to demonstrate that OA enhances research impact. We also contributed to the movement to convert the RAE from panels to metrics. If Eugene Garfield had come of age in the online era, he would be at Southampton designing the Open Access Scientometric Web.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/19/2007 03:25:00 PM.
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.
