15.1 Open access journal literature is an open educational resource  (Page 11/16)

Please note that I am not suggesting that OA journals and journal articles are of lower quality than other publication types, or that there is anything inherent in the OA model that dictates that this must be the case. I am simply suggesting that the academic culture as reflected in its reward system could perpetuate this perception.

Is what I described above a common experience? And, if so, does anybody know of a department or institution that has activity promoted publication in OA journals? Perhaps there are examples of academic units that put some sort of additional weight on use of low barrier publication vehicles?

This is really an area that I have very little experience, but would like to learn more. Just a little desktop research indicates that Thompson Scientific’s ISI (External Link) uses citation in other journals as the primary indicator of impact, which strikes me as a bit self-referential. I also came across the Eigenfactor method (External Link) for journal ranking, which seems a bit more sophisticated that ISI. For example, it take into account a value factor, described as follows:

In collaboration with journalprices.com, Eigenfactor provides information about price and value for thousands of scholarly periodicals. While the Eigenfactor and Article Influence scores do not incorporate price information directly, the Cost-Effectiveness Search orders journals by a measure of the value per dollar that they provide.

Although this would factor in some access issues, the service (External Link) used for “Cost-Effectiveness” does not seem to include the few OA journals that I search for. Perhaps this is just a feature of how recent the OA phenomena is.

Any thoughts, stories, insights??

9. redsevenone - september 7th, 2007 at 11:24 am

Ken and All - We have integrated Eigenfactor with a data mining Beta we have acquire from the folks at FAST [ (External Link) ] who were the originators to the AllTheWeb Search Engine [ (External Link) ] service now owned by Yahoo. We rarely used Google and never since it became a verb.

Our agreement is that once the testing is complete, it will be freely available both as a frestanding service and as an adjunct to Eigenfactor.

10. ken udas - september 7th, 2007 at 11:58 am

Hello,

I just wanted to mention that Martin’s last post got caught by the Spam filter. The comments for this blog are not moderated so we have to have a reasonably strong filter. I am not sure why it caught Martin’s but it did. This is the first comment posting that was filtered. I will keep an eye on this, so if your post does not show up immediately, it might have been caught, but I will stay on top of it.

Thanks!

Ken

11. redsevenone - september 7th, 2007 at 12:10 pm

Ken – I suspect my last post may have been caught because of the the brackets I used around the web references, I will refrain from doing that, at least that is what my hackers think. I appreciate your diligence, this is a very important subject around here and as we explore the capabilities that U-Penn has brought on line, this is a very exciting resource.