Abstract: The growth and increasing complexity of global science poses a grand challenge to scientists: How to organise the worldwide evaluation of research programmes and peers? For the 21st century we need not just information on science, but also meta-level scientific information that is delivered to the digital workbench of every researcher. Access, usage and citation metrics will be one major information service that researchers will need on an everyday basis to handle the complexity of science.
Scientometrics has been built on centralised commercial databases of high functionality but restricted scope, mainly providing information that may be used for research assessment. Enter digital libraries and repositories: Can they collect reliable metadata at source, ensure universal metric coverage and defray costs?
This systematic appraisal of the future role of digital libraries and repositories for metric research evaluation proceeds by investigating the practical inadequacies of current metric evaluation before defining the scope for libraries and repositories as new players. Subsequently the notion of metrics as research information services is developed. Finally, the future relationship between a) libraries and repositories and b) metrics databases, commercial or non-commercial, is addressed.
Service reviewed include: Leiden Ranking, Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, COUNTER, MESUR, Harzing POP, CiteSeer, Citebase, RePEc LogEc and CitEc, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/06/2008 11:57:00 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.
