Global Knowledge Exchange.Net (GKEN)

A model from the Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis, to aid in tracking and documenting biomedical research impact through a series of impacts not limited to publication, with additional resources including a glossary, strategies for improving impact and a reference library.

Written by Joanna Ball, academic Services Manager, University of Sussex Library

A review of a declaration signed by ACSB and other participants which urges consideration of research metrics beyond the journal impact factor.

call for sustaining funding models

Implications of new federal directives for data sharing, privacy, compliance, access and good practices for libraries collaborating with researchers

best papers from IPRES Lisbon 2013

Attempts at gaming Google Scholar's metrics with fake papers, but frustrations reported with Scholar's lack of transparency

A thoughtful and well-researched article that offers positive and negative quality indicators for evaluating open access journals for publishing considerations, while the authors caution against a "one-size fits all" approach and the importance of guiding faculty and researchers to make informed personal choices.

"The data underlying scientific papers should be accessible to researchers both now and in the future, but how best can we ensure that these data are available? Here we examine the effectiveness of four approaches to data archiving: no stated archiving policy, recommending (but not requiring) archiving, and two versions of mandating data deposition at acceptance. We control for differences between data types by trying to obtain data from papers that use a single, widespread population genetic analysis, STRUCTURE. At one extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data online almost a thousand-fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. At one extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data online almost a thousand fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. We also assessed the effectiveness of asking for data directly from authors and obtained over half of the requested datasets, albeit with about 8 days delay and some disagreement with authors. Given the long term benefits of data accessibility to the academic community, we believe that journal based mandatory data archiving policies and mandatory data availability statements should be more widely adopted."