- Nov 2018
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osiglobal.org osiglobal.org
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Estimates of the output of these journals have ranged from a high of 450,000 articles as of 2015 (as per the BMC Medicine study) to a low of 135,000 articles (as per research by Walt Crawford).
Is it important to give an assessment of the quality of these estimates? Giving a range leads to 'on one hand maybe its not so big...on the other' and different camps will gravitate to the numbers which serve their purpose. Even giving some description of how the numbers were arrived at might help drive consensus to a narrower range which could be productive?
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This suggests that the first very important thing that needs to be done about deceptive publishing is to achieve more widespread recognition of the problem, and something closer to consensus as to its significance.
One step further might be an agreement on what the actual problem is. We can't determine scale of the problem until we know whether eg problematic journals on homeopathy or non-reviewed journals are in scope, particularly in the subscription space.
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First, we need to be very careful not to assume fraud where the problem might be inexperience or a lack of resources.
There's a conflation here that essentially reads 'an informed [western] observer sees a problem, the best intepretation we can place on this is lack of knowledge of resources'. That's shading towards imperialist. I would explicitly allow space for the idea that some of these things that we in the North Atlantic think are important may simply not be for other communities (including cultural assumptions about what 'good appearance' is and whether OED spelling is important, or even correct)
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One key to avoiding this is to avoid conflating issues of deception and fraud with issues of journal appearance
This is true. But also we need to consider the conflation of 'good practice' with 'traditional practice' and its consequent that all innovation is labelled as bad practice. That strikes me as the really hard part of the conversation. It might be best left out of this piece but the question of how we negotiate space for innovation while retaining standards of quality assurance is really the key.
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Complicating factors
This section is good and nuanced. I'd almost be inclined to move some of this stuff up because it will defuse many of the criticisms that I raised above and allow the specific focus of this article to be clearer?
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typically misrepresent themselves according to markers of prestige
Quite frequently lie or mislead about fees as well. I wonder whether this focus on deception is entirely helpful.
If a journal is completely straightforward about all of these things and charges an author fee or subscription is it still 'deceptive'? Or are we focussed here on a subset of problematic journals?
I wonder whether the deliberate shift from 'predatory' to 'deceptive' in the framing is actually pushing the narrative down a specific line that might not cover enough?
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Deceptive journals are almost invariably funded by author-side article processing charges (APCs),
I think this is an unhelpful focus if the object is to provide a widely usable resource. Better would be to acknowledge the political issues around the term and provide some background to that. It would be appropriate to note that while the issue was raised due to the ease of market entry with the WWW and author-side business models that this is a) an old problem...vanity journals and book imprints have existed for a long time and b) that there are journals with dodgy practices running a range of business models.
For this piece to be widely useful it needs to acknowledge at least that there is some controversy about whether the practices of some subscription publishers parallel this for some of their journals (including the practice of manufacturing journals to justify subscription increases).
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osiglobal.org osiglobal.org
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Creative Commons CC-BY license
Maybe a table would be a better way to manage this section? It's trying to do a lot of work and is quite hard to unpack.
The focus on licensing as a definitional quality of OA is an important controversy separate from its connection to the BOAI.
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Budapest Open Access Initiative (see BOAI website)
Seems important to also note the Berlin, Bethesda, Salvador and other declarations that also make definitional claims.
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Open access (OA) is generally understood to apply primarily to peer reviewed journal literature:
This section could benefit from a clearer description of what it is and what it is doing. Currently it is only about half-way through that it becomes clear that it is a listing of various relevant terminological distinctions, but that they have different intents (the BOAI defines OA, Gratis and Libre make a distinction, green and gold similarly, public access is an additional complication).
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- Oct 2016
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research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk
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men not
missing "could"?
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In his anniversary address as President, in November 1832, the Duke of Sussex announced in his presidential address
redundant
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- Sep 2016
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download.springer.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au download.springer.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au
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The main reason that sociologists of science feel that this perspective has not produced the needed encompassing citation theory, is the variety of behavioural characteristics underlying the citation patterns found in the literature. This is, however, the consequence of the semiotic inversion of the reference into the citation. This inversion is asymmetrical: whereas the references have very different characteristics (both textually and behaviourally), citations are all the same. The citation no longer betrays from what type of reference it was produced. This is why one should expect it to be difficult or even impossible to recreate this variety by citation analysis, unless one re-translates the citation to the reference, that is, as is done in reference analysis. This is also why it is impossible to exclusively link the sign citation to a specific behavioural characteristic with respect to citing.
Key point with some useful pull quotes. It is the assymetry of the reference and citation and the decontextualisation that is at the core of mainly failures to develop useful theory. See also Leydesdorff on explanans vs explanadum
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garfield.library.upenn.edu garfield.library.upenn.edu
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In some respects this appears to be the conclusion reached by Ravetz (1971), who was forced to view citation as an instance of tacit knowledge - a craft skill osmotically acquired.
...or in #culturascience terms culture
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At the heart of the interpretative rift is the question of unknown motivations. Citation is not a transparent activity: the process is not amenable to scrutiny.
The central problem from Cronin's perspective in 1984
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A proper (pluralistic) explanation of what citation entails may mean that we accept aspects of both (or all) perspectives. It may, therefore, be counterproductive to think in terms of ‘competing’ theories or perspectives.
The need for a pluralistic approach, not "either-or" thinking when it comes to a theory.
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the micro- sociological view is that citations do not exist in uacuo, and that a proper comprehension of the citation phenom- enon and its surface manifestations will only be achieved by moving the critical gaze from the formal communi- cation mechanisms (the superstructure) to the social reality (the infrastructure) which supports the primary communications system.
Social context of citations. Need to understand the social system
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Edge (1977) has argued that citation analyses of communication patterns in science have to take as their starting point the ‘participants’ perspective’, because every decision (how and what to cite) is particular, and because citation and co-citation analysis, in striving to accumulate and average, destroy the evidence we need to account for individual variation.
Edge on context and loss through indexing cf Wouters
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Reasons for citing: Weinstock’s list (1971)
Reasons for citing. Note also distinction between reason for citing and why we think the author cited. Also between the reason and what the authors think...
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The need for more secure epistemological foundations has been touched on by a large number of writers
Previous arguments for a need for theory
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Support for these findings came from Hagstrom (1971), who correlated citation counts with such variables as quality of graduate faculty and grants awarded to departments.
Interesting that this later inverts. Goodheart's law in action?
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Metaphorically speaking, citations are frozen footprints on the landscape of scholarly achievement; footprints which bear witness to the passage of ideas. From footprints it is possible to deduce direction; from the configuration and depth of the imprints it should be possible to construct a picture of those who have passed by, whilst the distribution and variety furnish clues as to whether the advance was orderly and purposive.
Footprints in the snow metaphor
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it is mildly ironic that science, founded on traditions of quanti- fication and verification, should be content with an explanation of citation, an activity central to the scientific process, which emits a whiff of the meta- physical.
Lack of science of science. "whiff of the metaphysical" is rather good.
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Science, as is the case with the profcssions in gcneral, includes disintcrcstcdncss as a Iwsic institutional clcmcnt. Disintcrcsted- ncss if not to be cquatcd \\.it11 ai1i.uisin ;11~l intercstcd aciioii \\it11 cgoism. Such equiva1riicc.s ronfusc institutional and moiiviitioiiiil levels of analysis . . . For once the institution enjoins disin- terested activity, it is to thc interest of scientists to conform on pain of sanctions and, in so far as the norm has been internalized, on pain of psychological conflict.
Merton on the issue of institution level vs individual
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In Ravetz’s opinion, scientific knowledge is the product of an historical process, and is shaped by the ‘peculiar circumstances’ of its achievement. The aim of this essay is to explore the ‘peculiar circumstances’ of the citation process.
Cronin's motivations are to examine context and history (both social and individual) for tackling citation
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It is quite conceivable that citation would not have emerged as a serious ‘academic’ issue for sociologists and historians of science had not the commercial develop- ment of citation indexing proved so successful (Garfield, 1979; Hall, 1970; Narin, 1976)*
Historical contingency of citation as relevant measure
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Anecdotal evidence seems to favour the idea that many authors cite in reflexive fashion, without necess- arily dwelling on the implications of the practice.
Authors don't think about why they cite
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More specifically, Lcopold ( 1973) identified tlw ‘Citation Index game’ as onc of thc stratagems employcd by scientists to incrcasc thcir visibility among thcir pccrs. The ‘Game’ metaphor has usually been invoked to counter the ‘storybook’ idca of science as an idealised, dispassionate and selfless quest after truth and know- ledge, in which personal feelings and motivations are held in check by institutional imperatives.
Citation "game" as contrasted with "storybook"
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- Jan 2016
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www.force11.org www.force11.org
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Advocacy, which implies
There was a point where we explicitly decided not to do this (at least in the sense of endorsing particular view points/documents). To Ivan's and other's points do we need to revisit this?
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new business models
These days I prefer "sustainability models" to business models as a term. There's a lot of baggage tied up with "business" which I think is problematic.
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Strategies for Change
Fascinating that there is basically nothing here on incentives or communities. Even with people like Laura C, Eve Gray etc there we somehow lost both the strands of appropriate technology and of the social challenges of change.
Elements there in the "measure quality and impact different" piece but that's a very instrumental approach.
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Don’t Measure Merit
Interesting this is such a small piece. We didn't really hit the incentives piece strongly in this part (maybe it comes later) because we were very focussed on technology.
Today I'd raise questions about what "merit" even means in any measurable sense.
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Information Overload
I'd add something here on discovery as the massive gap. Shirky's original talk on "filter failure" really captures this concept well. I tried to later say it's not filter failure but a discovery deficit in schol comms because people always equate "filter" with review and reject pre-pub
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I'd add something here on discovery tools. Discovery is the big gap to overcome overload. Shirky's original "filter failure" talk really captures this well.
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reusable scholarly artifacts.
This might even be "usable scholarly artifacts". Things are re-usable until they are usable...
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