legal scholarship and oa publishing: developing radical pathways to free, open models
TRANSCRIPT
Legal scholarship and OA publishing: developing radical pathways to free, open models
Catherine EastonPaul Maharg
Abhilash Nairpaulmaharg.com/slides
preview1. Scholarship in the digital era: some pertinent research
2. REF and OA
3. The experience of editing an OA journal
4. Some editorial conclusions
2
why should we care about this?
What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated
after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and specialists. The book had taken over as the transmitter of European written culture, before scholars and educators had had time to come to terms with its power and influence.
(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)
3
transforming features of digital…
• Replicability• Mutability• Connectivity• Instantaneity (& the ‘nearly now’)• Portability• Identity
(Jones 2013, 162-65)
4
How does digital alter scholarship?1. What’s digital?
Specific devices, networks, assemblages? Technical, educational, research affordances, modes of text and search, specific skills, competences, practices, environments?
2. How does digital alter social?Eg distributed communities, socio-material understandings, means of production & modes of use
3. How does digital (+ social) alter scholarship and literacies?Eg artefacts and practices, formal and informal contexts of research, visual artefacts, digital curation.
4. How does digital + social + scholarship encourage metricization of our working lives, and what can we do about it?
5
existing impact: how we are judged
Existing filters:•Peer-review•Citation countingeg h-index•Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
6
existing impact: how we are judged
• … of a journal: A measure of the average number of citations to articles published in science & social science journals in a 3-year period (Eugene Garfield, ISI). Calculated annually for the journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports.
• Calculation: number of times articles were cited in indexed journals divided by number of items published in journals.
• Pressure on authors to enter high-ranked journals• Pressure on journals to stay high-ranked
7
existing impact: how we are judged
BUT… •JIF is easily gamed:http://bit.ly/1uYDPgE•And gives inaccurate views ofjournal quality: http://bit.ly/1Ddo8Be
8
… hence altmetrics
See altmetrics.org:
‘the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship’
9
altmetrics manifesto‘With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research Notes or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from altmetrics.
Unlike the JIF, altmetrics reflect the impact of the article itself, not its venue. Unlike citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of influential but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed. Some have suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite.’
altmetrics: a manifesto -- http://bit.ly/1tldeJA
10
what might altmetrics look like?
11
Altmetrics: a manifesto – http://bit.ly/1tldeJA
Citation analysis – differences between tools?• Web of Science should not be used alone for locating citations to an author or
title. • Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of
valuable citations not found in Web of Science; • Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of
citations in document types not covered by ISI citation databases; • Scopus and Google Scholar may assist in providing a more comprehensive
picture of the extent of international and interdisciplinary nature of scholarly communication of and among researchers; and
• Google Scholar has several technical problems that users should be aware of in order to accurately and effectively locate citations.
• The selection of the database(s) for locating citation is field-dependent. 12
Yan
g,
Kid
uk a
nd M
eho,
Lok
man
I.
Cita
tion
Ana
lysi
s: A
Com
paris
on o
f G
oogl
e S
cho
lar,
Sco
pus,
and
Web
of
Sci
ence
., 2
006
. I
n 69
th A
nnu
al M
eet
ing
of
the
Am
eric
an S
ocie
ty f
or I
nfor
mat
ion
Sci
ence
and
Tec
hnol
ogy
(AS
IST
), A
ustin
(U
S),
3-8
Nov
emb
er 2
006
. [C
onfe
renc
e pa
per
],
http
://e
prin
ts.r
clis
.org
/860
5/
…which is also related to the Open movement, in data & scholarship
Eg •Datacite•DASH (Harvard)•Caselaw•Ravel Law
Further reading:http://bit.ly/1LgPtbo
13
OA vs commercial access
• OA that isn’t really OA, eg Nature/Macmillan’s SciShare:• https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/12/03/natures-
fauxpen-access-leaves-me-very-sad-and-very-angry/#comment-473695
• Commercial take-over of OA resources, eg Elsevier > SSRN. See Maharg’s blog @ http://paulmaharg.com/2016/05/19/ssrn-sells-out-to-elsevier/
14
• ‘Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project on peer-reviewed publications between 1980 and 2006, we show that women are systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation.’
• ‘Articles authored by women are systematically less central than articles authored by men, all else equal. This is likely because (1) women tend to cite themselves less than men, and (2) men (who make up a disproportionate share of IR scholars) tend to cite men more than women. This is the first study in political science to reveal significant gender differences in citation patterns and is especially meaningful because citation counts are increasingly used as a key measure of research's quality and impact.’ Maliniak et al 2013
15
results from analytical literature?
what can legal education researchers do?
• Acknowledge the ceaseless emergence of technology, and engage with it as widely as our time & energy allows
• Base our practices on community and collaboration• Be open to diverse, global voices• Be Open in teaching and research
16
Finch Report & REF
• The Finch Report – transition to open access• Rationale – ‘publicly funded’ research should be
accessible to the public• Stern Report agrees, as do almost all scholarly
reports on the subject
17
challenges
• Percentage of OA journals; slight uptake, but long way to go (for e.g., over 1/3rd of Springer OA journals listed in 2015 Journal Citation Reports)
• Non-UK journals• ‘Gold OA’ – stealing from Peter to pay Paul? • Fees – $8-$3,900 in some ‘top ranking’ journals Solomon & Bjork
(2012) (NB: these are mostly science journals)• ‘Capping’ fee? Regulation? Non-UK journals?
18
‘burdens’ of OA?
• The true spirit of OA – open access!• True costs of OA publishing: exemplar of cost
efficient true OA publishing – EJLT, EJOCLI• BUT, staff time…
19
what can institutions do?• Workload considerations • More recognition for OA journals
– Aiming for ‘higher-impact’ selective journals means only 5% of articles of UK researchers are in Gold OA Van Noorden (2012)
– (Distorted) notions of ‘quality’?
• Further incentivise publishing in OA journals • Clearer guidelines for internal REF audits/selection• Role of BILETA and other scholarly bodies?
20
references
Cheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E., Chisholm, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: A systematic review, Academic Medicine. 88, 6, 893-901.
Holmes, K. (2014). Going beyond bibliometric and altmetric counts to understand impact. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/2014-05/going-beyond-bibliometric-and-altmetric-counts-understand-impact#sthash.4stanFFN.dpuf
Jones, C. (2013). The digital university: a concept in need of definition. In R. Goodfellow, M.R.Lea, eds, Literacy in the Digital University. Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. SRHE, Routledge, London, 162-172.
Jardine, L. (1996). Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, London.
Konkiel, S. (2014) Playing with altmetrics. http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/altmetrics-services/#more-3175
Maliniak, D., Powers, R., Walter, B.F. (2013). The gender citation gap in International Relations. International Organization, 67, 4, 889-922. http://bit.ly/1yYFxym
21
