This post is a transcript of my opening remarks at the a Great Debate held earlier today at the European Geosciences Union 2019 meeting in Vienna. The debate asked us to consider the question: What value should we place on contributions that cannot be easily measured? Update (13/04/2019): A video of the whole debate is now available online.
The post below was written as a comment on Lizzie Gadd’s recent post explaining in some detail Loughborough University decision to base their approach to research assessment more on the Leiden Manifesto than DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment. So you should read that first! (The comment is currently ‘in moderation’ because, like myself, Lizzie is on holiday.
Though a long-time critic of journal impact factors (JIFs), I was delighted when the latest batch was released by Clarivate last week. It’s not the JIFs themselves that I was glad to see (still alas quoted to a ridiculous level of precision). Rather it was the fact that Clarivate is now also making available the journal citation distributions on which they are based.
For me the most memorable event at last week’s ASAPbio-HHMI-Wellcome meeting on Peer Review, which took place at HHMI’s beautifully appointed headquarters on the outskirts of Washington DC, was losing a $100 bet to Mike Eisen. Who would have guessed he’d know more than I did about the intergalactic space lord and UK parliamentary candidate, Lord Buckethead? Not me, it turned out.
Today sees the publication on bioRxiv of a revised version of our preprint outlining “A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions.” Our proposal, explained in more detail in this earlier post, encourages publishers to mitigate the distorting effects on research assessment of journal impact factors (JIFs) by providing a simple method for publishing the citation distributions that are so incompletely
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a researcher in possession of interesting experimental results, must be in want of a journal with a high impact factor. It is also true – and widely understood – that journal impact factors (JIFs) are unreliable indicators of the quality of individual research papers.
I have just posted a preprint of a book chapter on the interactions of open access and public engagement with science. It’s called “Open Access: the beast that no-one could – or should – control?” and is my contribution to an upcoming book – “‘Here be monsters’: Science, politics and the dilemmas of openness” which is being edited by Brigitte Nerlich, Alexander Smith, Sarah Hartley, and Sujatha Raman.
This is rather self-serving, even by my standards, but I made a plan with these “In Case You Missed It” posts and I’m sticking to it. I have been on the radio a couple of times in the past month talking about academic publishing. It’s not a topic that often gets aired so I was pleased to see two radio buses come along in quick succession, so to speak.
Today I had a short opinion piece in Chemical and Engineering News on publishing negative results, a topic that I covered about this time last year in the Guardian on the occasion of the publication my lab’s first paper on an experiment that didn’t work out. Basically, I think it’s a good idea.
Stimulated, I believe, by Ron Vale’s call to preprints last year, various luminaries from the world of science and science publishing will be gathering in Maryland at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) later this month to discuss the way forward.