The Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports on the troubling revelation that impact factors, the calculations used to calculate the value of a scientific journal based on the frequency of citations to its content, may have been manipulated by some publishers by their pressuring of article authors to increase their citations of a particular publication....[The problems] presented are part of a broader picture of established publishers trying to shore up their value in an era in which competitive outlets challenge their supremacy....
In the process of moving from traditional review and ranking techniques with only the greatest of reluctance many scholarly publishers are missing enormous opportunities to redefine how scientific thought can be made available and useful in much more efficient, effective, reliable and valuable ways. It's not a matter of paid-versus-free, either: it's not clear that "open access" journals offer any significantly better review and impact measurement value, only a new way to subsidize existing review and ranking techniques....
[I]ntelligent publishers should be working now to develop more efficient ways to evaluate the ongoing value of scholarly content that take far more advantage of the online technologies that have made advances in much of today's scientific thought possible. There will be far more premium value to be obtained from a superior method of bringing good scholarly thought to market more quickly and effectively than from defending a system that is in danger of hurting the cause of progress as much as it helps it.
To those publishers who feel that markets have no alternative but to play by this game, I'd urge them to recognize that in an increasingly global publishing marketplace alternative systems are going to evolve more quickly than one may imagine - especially when emerging economies can provide themselves with more advantage when they do so. The Western style of scholarly publishing is likely to be challenged in the years ahead by Asian markets that want to accelerate their progress in bringing products and services to market based on advances in scientific thought....
PS: See my comments on the same WSJ story earlier today.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/06/2006 11:59:00 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.
