[GOAL] Re: Number of Open Access journals

Wed Apr 29 17:54:17 BST 2015

May I ask a  couple of naïve questions?

Why do we count journals? If we are all looking forward to a global,
hopefully distributed archive of knowledge, shouldn't we counting papers or
some other way of displaying solutions?
 El 29/4/2015 11:13, "Bosman, J.M. (Jeroen)" <j.bosman at uu.nl> escribió:

>  I’ve always been amazed how Thomson/ISI  categorized English language
> journals (mostly published in de US/UK) as “international journals” and all
> other journals as “regional journals”. Should ask them.
>
>
>
> BTW Eric could you elaborate on what you say in your last sentence?  Will
> Science Metrix launch a bibliometrics service based on GS data or do I have
> to interpret your words in another way?
>
>
>
> Jeroen
>
>
>
> [image: 101-innovations-icon-very-small]  101 innovations in scholarly
> communication <http://innoscholcomm.silk.co/>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> *------------------------------*
>
> Jeroen Bosman, faculty liaison for the Faculty of Geosciences
>
> Utrecht University Library <http://www.uu.nl/library>
>
> email: j.bosman at uu.nl
>
> telephone: +31.30.2536613
>
> mail: Postbus 80124, 3508 TC, Utrecht, The Netherlands
>
> visiting address: room 2.50, Heidelberglaan 3, Utrecht
>
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>
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>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *Trees say printing is a thing of the past*
>
>
>
> *From:* goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Éric Archambault
> *Sent:* woensdag 29 april 2015 0:08
> *To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> *Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Number of Open Access journals
>
>
>
> Jean-Claude has an excellent point.
>
>
>
> Our current outlook is extremely Western-centric. When I was in SPRU,
> professors (can’t remember if it was Pavitt or Ben Martin) used to joke
> that bibliometric measurement was highly influenced by the linguistic
> capacity of housewives in Philadelphia. Though today there might have been
> a shift towards Manila for data entry, it remains that bibliographic
> databases present a truncated view of the world, and bibliometrics a
> distorted, pro-Western/Northern Hemisphere biased view of science. If one
> can potentially advance the idea that all ground breaking science
> eventually makes it to Western journals, and that this is what current
> databases are reflecting, it would still remain that normal science follows
> similar rules in Russia, Japan, and China and yet a huge part of that
> content still goes unaccounted for. A normal US or UK paper is not any
> better than a normal Brazilian, Chinese, or Russian paper yet the former
> are frequently counted, the latter more frequently not. The low impact of
> non-Western countries is in part a reflection of the exclusion of journals
> published in non-English speaking countries, and Jean-Claude is right to
> say there are thousands of them.
>
>
>
> The effect on measurement is poisonous because national level
> self-citations are frequently excluded when journals are not published in
> English-language journal. If one wants to see the effect of removing
> national self-citation, try removing them altogether and you’ll see how
> badly clobbered the US ends-up in terms of relate impact. Don’t get me
> wrong, I’m not suggesting to measure that way as it would be unwise (I
> always advocate the inclusion of self-citations at all levels even though
> everyone knows some authors and journals are narcissistic and playing the
> number game – self citations are an essential part of the
> knowledge-building edifice and excluding them potentially create more
> problems than it solves), but it is a valid experiment to show how bad the
> situation currently is because we count only publications from half of the
> journals published, and that half is anything but randomly selected. For
> those who want to see the effect, I can send you a table – among countries
> with 45,000 papers or more, and adjusted for scale, the US ranked 22nd
> (after Japan, the Czech Republic and Mexico) if only citations from other
> countries were included. We never published that paper as we thought it was
> brain damaged to exclude national self-citation. Yet, by excluding many
> many locally published journals from citation counts, this is what the
> advanced analytics that come out of dominant bibliographic databases do,
> and this is a sin that we, bibliometricians, commit every day.
>
>
>
> Hopefully open access will play a huge role in reducing the distortion
> field. I can confirm there is more than 50,000 scholarly and scientific
> journals the world over, not by any measure all open access, but all peer
> or quality reviewed according to the norms of scholarly and scientific
> communication in all fields of academia. Stay tuned, more neutral metrics
> are going to be available in the near future.
>
>
>
> Eric Archambault
>
>
>
> *From:* goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org
> <goal-bounces at eprints.org>] *On Behalf Of *Jean-Claude Guédon
> *Sent:* April-28-15 9:07 AM
> *To:* goal at eprints.org
> *Subject:* [GOAL] Number of Open Access journals
>
>
>
> I have repeatedly criticized the numbers of journals used to describe
> scientific and scholarly publishing in the world. I have also regularly
> criticized the use of lists such as the Web of Science, Scopus and Ulrich's
> as being largely centred on the North Atlantic and/or OECD countries.As a
> counter to such numbers, I have pointed out that Latin America alone, as
> indicated by the Latindex vetted list, can sport over 6,000 titles.
> Presumably, if Asia and Africa did the same kind of work, numbers of
> 25-27,000 titles for the whole world would look funny.
>
> Another way to look at this is through disciplines or study areas. No one,
> I suspect, would argue that Classics (Latin and Greek) is a large
> speciality in the world of learning. Typically, classics departments are
> small and tend to disappear. Nonetheless, one can find a list of 1498
> journal in this field, *and that list is limited to open access journals*.
>
>
> http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.ca/2012/07/alphabetical-list-of-open-access.html
>
> The list dates from the summer of 2012. There may be a few more or a few
> less since, but the least one may add is that such a number reveals a
> publishing activity that reaches well beyond expectations (at least mine).
>
> Conclusion: scholarly journal publishing is a lot more complex than what
> is provided by most scientometric studies.
>
> And a final question: who is advantaged by the illusory simplicity of the
> publishing landscape?
>
> --
>
>
>
> Jean-Claude Guédon
>
> Professeur titulaire
>
> Littérature comparée
>
> Université de Montréal
>
>
>
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