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"Impact Factors have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years for their lack of transparency and for misleading attempts at research assessment. Last year the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) took a groundbreaking stance by explicitly disavowing the use of impact factors in assessment. This document has since drawn support worldwide and across the academic community. But what exactly are Journal Impact Factors and why are they cause for so much concern? Here is a reading list that highlights some helpful pieces we've been able to feature on the Impact blog over the last few years."

"The paper explains the effect of biased technological change (BTC) on total factor productivity (TFP) from the new perspective of appropriate technology. We have certified that the assumption of neutral technology progress of Solow is ostensible and also to get the general technological progress which can be divided into three parts: effect of knowledge progress, effect of capital intensity improvement and scale effect."

VERY interesting angle - thank you for sharing.

While we are at the discussion on copyrights, intellectual property and economics of open, I think the consideration of human factor in the pursuit of knowledge evens out the playing field. This is the link to the executive summary of The Global Innovation Index 2014, a report that takes into account the human factor in innovation.

"The trouble is that impact factor of journals where researchers publish their work is a poor surrogate to measure an individual researcher's accomplishments. "

Una mirada crítica al acceso abierto: Nature 495, 426-429 (28 March 2013) doi:10.1038/495426a http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 As that lack of enthusiasm demonstrates, the fundamental force driving the speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers - and research funders - want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story - publishing 26,000 papers last year - it didn't catalyse the industry to change in the way that he had hoped. "I didn't expect publishers to give up their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science community for not recognizing that open access is a perfectly viable way to do publishing," he says.

La cuestión es que no hay quien ofrezca una opción sólida que pueda remplazar al Factor de Impacto. La comunidad científica lo ha adoptado cómo "LA" manera en que se puede medir el desempeño de los investigadores en el mundo. Y ese supuesto es hegemónico en el mundo. Tan es así que Scielo, a pesar de ser un repositorio en acceso abierto que sigue la filosofía de dar a conocer la producción científica latinoamericana, se decanto por generar indicadores bibliométricos de la mano de Thomson-Reuters y entrar al Web of Science. Esto no es asunto menor, es un indicador definitivo de que el dominio del FI no decaerá. Esto repercute directamente con la política científica nacional de cada país. En México CONACYT evalúa a los miembros del SNI mediante sus publicaciones en SCOPUS -pidiendo como evidencia las citaciones en este sistema de información. En Colombia, PUBLINDEX colocá revistas en A1 por el hecho de ser JCR-WoS u SJR-SCOPUS. Esto es innegable y seguirá pasando. Es por ello que iniciativas regionales de Acceso Abierto en América Latina (ya sean repositorios, leyes, etc:) ofrecen una posibilidad diferente que debe ser explotada por los investigadores de la región para mejorar la visibilidad de su producción. Del mismo modo, es ahí donde espacios como este MOOC deben ser valorados por su capacidad para diseminar la cultura del conocimiento abierto.

"the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system."

Talk about an ambitious suggestion! As we've talked about this in class, I'm not surprised to find scientific research that impact factor is bad scientific (not to mention business) practice. I'm also very interested in this idea of alternative scholarly communication systems; and if libraries are to play a central role, I have to assume that projects like institutional repositories would play an enormous part in this new system. I wonder what this suggests about altmetrics, though? Are we just putting a band-aid on a deep wound, and treating the symptom instead of the disease?

OMICS Group international is an Open Access publisher that publishes about 400 journals in the fields of Clinical, Medical, Engineering, Life Sciences and Pharmaceuticals with a team of above 30000 editorial board members. It organizes over 300 International Conferences in a year worldwide and signed an agreement with more than 1000 International Societies to make the scientific and healthcare information Open Access.

In Spanish.

La realidad que se vive en México es muy distinta a países como EUA, Cánada,Alemania, etc., existe una gran desigualdad y no hay unión. Tal vez estas leyes no den resultados inmediatos, pero son importantes por que quienes las promovieron creyeron en ellas y las apoyaron, y en un país como México es de reconocerse que tuvieron iniciativa. Una ley no va cambiar la realidad de un país, eso depende de las personas y otros factores como la educación y los valores. ------------ The reality of life in Mexico is very different to countries like USA, Canada, Germany, etc., there is great inequality and no union. Perhaps these laws do not give immediate results, but are important because they promoted those who believed in them and supported them, and in a country like Mexico is recognized that took initiative. A law will not change the reality of a country that depends on people and other factors such as education and values.

Me encontré con esta interesante reseña acerca de las políticas de acceso abierto en México.

"[W]e use open source software in our solutions and will use open source software in the future. From time to time, we may face claims against companies that incorporate open source software into their products, claiming ownership of, or demanding release of, the source code, the open source software and/or derivative works that were developed using such software, or otherwise seeking to enforce the terms of the applicable open source license."

Una de las características fundamentales, que ha permitido el crecimiento exponencial de la red mundial de información, es que ha sido una plataforma abierta, lo que ha dependido de tres factores esenciales: "1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications, and; 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications" (Berners Lee, 2007).

YouTube's page on what is considered fair use on their website. They talk about the four factors that are used to determine whether or not content constitutes fair use. I really like how they also have a section about "myths" of fair use - very useful for those posting videos.

This paper draws general insights into the public reception of scientific knowledge from a case study of Cumbrian sheep farmers' responses to scientific advice about the restrictions introduced after the Chernobyl radioactive fallout. The analysis identifies several substantive factors which influence the credibility of scientific communication. Publicuptake of science might be improved if scientific institutions expressed an equivalent reflexive discourse in the public domain

Qué opináis vosotros de este articulo?

Estoy de acuerdo en que el 'periodismo ciudadano' no va desplazar al periodismo profesional, por que carece de un "agente regulador" que revise/edite/controle el contenido 'investigado' y compartido.

Yo creo que el periodismo profesional debería hacer un giro hacia el análisis en profundidad de lo que está ocurriendo; hacer previsiones, estudios de factores que nos han traído hasta la situación actual, qué opciones hay, quién participa en la toma de decisiones... El periodismo ciudadano cubre los sucesos de manera puntual, el aquí y ahora, de una forma eficiente e inmediata. Es tarea de los periodistas analizar toda esa información y obtener conclusiones de la marcha de los acontecimientos. Si se limitan a seguir informando de sucesos puntuales, ¿quién querrá financiar una actividad que ya hace el ciudadano por propia iniciativa?

I say it's about time. A family member of mine studied on the East Coast USA and tuition was impossible. While I can't speak extensively for American schools, I can say that post-secondary education at established universities in Canada is expensive and the financial burden becomes a stressor, often effecting academic performance. It is accessible, yes. National and provincial student loans make it possible for almost anyone to obtain a post-secondary education. But does it make sense? Definitely not. The debt incurred by students is mortifying. What about a European model? Many schools around the globe offer free post-secondary educations. I recently visited New Mexico, where if you stay within the state after high school graduation you enter a lottery to go to university for free. Every entree into the lottery is awarded sufficient funds to make a post-secondary career in the state of New Mexico feasible. My question about this article is about how "low income" is determined. There are a lot of factors that can play into one's financial needs that sometimes aren't on paper.

This is an interesting article about the cost of formal publishing verses open access publishing. Although there seems to be a lot of secrecy around the issue, the research shows that the total cost for open access publishing is a lot less than formal publishing. That appears to bring the perception that the open access works are not as good as those published in formal journals. Despite this factor there is growing encouragement to authors to publish their work in open access sources, but traditional models remain very popular. A large percentage of these journals actually allow people to publish online, although some do ask for a time delay. Despite that, many authors do not proceed to publish online after they have gone through the formal process although some authors are obliged to do so by their institution. It could be a good test to see why these authors do not take the step to publish online. Reasons could range from apathy, to not enough knowledge of the process, to a need not to share the information with everyone. Economically, there is also a concern that open access sources will become more expensive as more authors begin publishing in this way.

Aim. To determine the characteristics of megajournal authors, the nature of the manuscripts they are submitting to these journals, factors influencing their decision to publish in a megajournal, sources of funding for article processing charges (APCs) or other fees and their likelihood of submitting to a megajournal in the future.Methods.

"The paper reveals the historical process of the emergence of the phenomenon of Open Access."

This article highlights the battle of convenience vs security when it comes to personal data sharing. The Cloud's security has been called into question after nude photos of a number of celebrities leaked on the web a few days ago. With the allure of taking data and information with you everywhere, on any device, comes the sacrifice of security and often privacy, as cloud systems make data more vulnerable to the outside world. But the author of this article argues that, interestingly enough, it is not the Cloud that is too open, but hardware and devices themselves, as Cloud operators have imposed "two-factor authentication" to provide better security for their users.