Vincent Kiernan, New Database to Track Citations of Online Scholarship, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "Colleges frequently evaluate scholars in terms of how often their work is cited and whether they have published it in journals that are highly cited in general. Some departments have gone as far as to tout the collective 'impact factors' of their faculty members, and college libraries have used the citation statistics in deciding on whether to subscribe to expensive scholarly journals. However, scholars have complained that the lack of similar information about citations of online papers has discouraged them and their colleagues from disseminating their papers online, whether on Web sites and preprint servers or in repositories of papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed. The new database may encourage the use of preprint servers, which are databases containing the full texts of papers that have not yet passed formal peer review, and other online venues for scholarly research because scholars will be able to document the impact their work has had on others, said Mary Case, director of the scholarly-communication office at the Association of Research Libraries."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/12/2004 11:42:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
