Open Access News

Palaeontologia Electronica has taken two major steps this past year: contributors have been actively probing the potential of the World Wide Web to further paleontology, and ISI began indexing the journal in its Science Citation Index and Web of Science.

In our editorial pages, Warren Allmon (2004) recently reported that he located research information with Google that he could not have found by any other means: he learned about seven fossil localities yielding turritelline-dominated assemblages that had not been reported in standard research literature. The clues came from pictures on museum websites, from fossils-for-sale sites, from the site of a public park in Germany, and from geological field trip guides....In a subsequent editorial, Johnson, Filkorn and Stecheson (2005) described how to harness the power of search engines to make institutional information, such as collections catalog data, accessible through the same searches. By engineering web-based links, they made the catalog of paleontological collections in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County accessible to search-engines....These are insightful developments, harnessing the expertise of specialist users and adding to the value of the output of inevitably limited curatorial staff.

Since its inception, Palaeontologia Electronica has tried to position itself within the world of Internet searching. PE is an academic research journal, but one whose pages are all freely accessible to academics, the public, and search engines. If we repeat Allmon’s experiment today, Googling Turritella brings up Allmon’s own editorial as the fourth hit. Putting quality research information into the public domain is increasingly important as politically motivated attacks on science, especially evolution and historical geology, mount (the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the US National Science Foundation were recently named in a lawsuit aimed at their evolution website, for example). Misinformation on these subjects dominates the Internet, a situation that could easily lead astray those people who try to use the web to come to their own informed opinions....

[Y]oung researchers are increasingly conscious of impact factors when choosing where to submit their papers. This is bad news for the field of paleontology. In order to have an impact factor, much less a high one, a journal must first be indexed by ISI. In 2004, only thirty-two paleontology journals, in the broadest sense, were indexed by ISI....In 1992, vertebrate paleontology papers were published in 244 journals, of which only 37, or 15% are now indexed by ISI....85% of paleontology journals are not indexed and do not have impact factors, forcing them into second-tier status as venues for publishing new work. Irregularly appearing publications, such as monograph series, also have no official impact factor, although monographs would frequently count as citation classics had they been indexed. The many publication series that do not have ISI impact factors are having increasing difficulty getting quality submissions, while the manuscript backlog in journals with impact factors has been growing phenomenally. This situation has at least three negative effects on the field: it is more difficult to get work published in “quality” journals (i.e., those with impact factors), thus decreasing the apparent productivity of individual paleontologists; it causes non-indexed journals to fail because of lack of submissions or subscriptions, thus further reducing the number of possible venues for publishing paleontology and potentially concentrating those that remain in the hands of commercial publishers rather than professional academic societies; and it decreases the total volume of paleontology papers published and the length of time between submission and publication, which has a negative effect on the impact factors of those paleontology journals that are indexed....[T]he vast majority of citations to paleontological work are not considered by ISI in their calculation of impact factors for paleo journals. All things being equal, we can expect from these statistics that paleo impact factors would increase dramatically if all of our journals were considered.