Scientific insurgents say impact factors distort science; Wiley begins six month trial of altmetric service; Elsevier collaborates with the Geological Society of America; W&M alumni gain free access to JSTOR; University librarian position removed from tenure structure; Serials Solutions and SA ePublications to index The African Electronic Journals; and D&B introduces Hoover’s Analytics for small business customers.
Scientific Insurgents Say Journal Impact Factors Distort Science
ASCB Urges All Researchers to Sign the DORA Pledge – An ad hoc coalition of unlikely insurgents—scientists, journal editors and publishers, scholarly societies, and research funders across many scientific disciplines—today (May 16th) posted an international declaration calling on the world scientific community to eliminate the role of the journal impact factor (JIF) in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness.
Citing a Wiley press release, InfoDOCKET reports that “John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has launched a trial of Altmetric, a service that tracks and measures the impact of scholarly articles and datasets on both traditional and social media. The six month trial will run on a number of subscription and open access journals published by Wiley including Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, BJU International, Brain and Behavior, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and EMBO Molecular Medicine.
According to their press release Elsevier is collaborating “with The Geological Society of America (GSA), one of the largest and most prestigious societies serving geosciences professionals worldwide. The collaboration will formally launch in September through the integration of more than 60,000 geological maps from GSA’s flagship journals, book series and the comprehensive Decade of North American Geology compendium into Geofacets, Elsevier’s premier research tool for geoscientists working in exploration for the oil and gas and metals and mining industries…”
“At a Friday morning faculty meeting, the assembled members voted by a wide margin to remove the position of University librarian from the tenure structure. This change will allow for more flexibility in future hiring, according to officials. Endowed chairs will also be filled as a result of the move.
“We wanted future Brandeis searches for [University librarian] to have the flexibility to choose the best person for the position, even if that person would not be a candidate for tenure, or even interested in tenure given their professional profile,” wrote Prof. Eric Chasalow (MUS), chair of the faculty senate…”
“William & Mary’s more than 90,000 alumni now have access to JSTOR thanks to the College library’s participation in JSTOR’s Alumni Access program.
Alumni can freely use all JSTOR collections licensed by W&M’s Swem Library…”
KnowledgeSpeak reports that “Serials Solutions is working with SA ePublications, a service of Sabinet Online, to index The African Electronic Journals in the Summon service. Aggregating the works of multiple publishers, this collection of nearly 400 journals represents the most comprehensive, searchable collection of South- and Southern-African journals in the world…”
Information Today reports that “D&B, a source of commercial information and insight on businesses, introduced Hoover’s Analytics, a new product to help small businesses segment and evaluate their customers and prospects to identify new growth opportunities. In addition to the D&B predictive analytics solutions launched earlier, this new product gives small businesses the edge to anticipate tomorrow’s opportunities today…”
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