One of the advantages to everyone of the 'author-side payment' model of OA publishing is that it will discourage 'salami-slicing' - getting more articles than necessary out of a single piece of research
Sally Sally Morris Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy) South House, The Street Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Tel: +44(0)1903 871286 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 09 November 2007 11:11 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: "Bibliometric Distortion": The Babblarazzi Are At It Again... Comment on: "Bibliometrics could distort research assessment" Guardian Education, Friday 9 November 2007 http://education.guardian.co.uk/RAE/story/0,,2207678,00.html Yes, any system (including democracy, health care, welfare, taxation, market economics, justice, education and the Internet) can be abused. But abuses can be detected, exposed and punished, and this is especially true in the case of scholarly/scientific research, where "peer review" does not stop with publication, but continues for as long as research findings are read and used. And it's truer still if it is all online and openly accessible. The researcher who thinks his research impact can be spuriously enhanced by producing many small, "salami-sliced" publications instead of fewer substantial ones will stand out against peers who publish fewer, more substantial papers. Paper lengths and numbers are metrics too, hence they too can be part of the metric equation. And if most or all peers do salami-slicing, then it becomes a scale factor that can be factored out (and the metric equation and its payoffs can be adjusted to discourage it). Citations inflated by self-citations or co-author group citations can also be detected and weighted accordingly. Robotically inflated download metrics are also detectable, nameable and shameable. Plagiarism is detectable too, when all full-text content is accessible online. The important thing is to get all these publications as well as their metrics out in the open for scrutiny by making them Open Access. Then peer and public scrutiny -- plus the analytic power of the algorithms and the Internet -- can collaborate to keep them honest. Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13804/ Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/