Benchmarks and peer comparison are handy motivators. So I’m interested in the new tool released by open access journal publisher Hindawi as part of its new institutional membership program. The new tool allows anyone to see at a glance the entirety of an institution’s affiliates’ participation with Hindawi journals.
See, e.g., the page for the University of Florida. We see that 73 articles in Hindawi journals were authored by UF researchers, by 91 individual authors; that 21 UF researchers are editors of a Hindawi journal, and that 59 UF researchers have reviewed articles for a Hindawi journal.
That’s neat to know — but how does it compare to peer institutions?
Currently, the information only appears to be available through the page for each institution (in the format http://www.hindawi.com/institutions/institution’s domain/). I hope Hindawi will provide an open API for this data to facilitate tools for making comparisons, finding connections, etc. And I hope other OA publishers will follow Hindawi’s lead by providing a similar service — along with OA archives and services such as the DOAJ....
Who knows what we might reveal about the anthropology of participation in OA, if only we had the data in a malleable format?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/26/2008 09:48:00 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.
