Talks about reenclosure and other threats to open.

As Goodhart’s law states: ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’. Using bibliometrics to measure and assess researchers has become increasingly common, but does implement…

Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately measure local usage, there is a strong case for using them to compare the cost-effectiveness of journal subscriptions. We examine data for nearly 8,000 journals downloaded at the ten universities in the University of California system during a period of six years. We find that controlling for number of articles, publisher, and year of download, the ratio of downloads to citations differs substantially among academic disciplines. After adding academic disciplines to the control variables, there remain substantial “publisher effects”, with some publishers reporting significantly more downloads than would be predicted by the characteristics of their journals. These cross-publisher differences suggest that the currently available download statistics, which are supplied by publishers, are not sufficiently reliable to allow libraries to make subscription decisions based on price and reported downloads, at least without making an adjustment for publisher effects in download reports.

They managed to briefly hit the top of the rankings when they rejected everyone except one applicant, published 5 billion research papers that just said "Hi," and hired one of their graduates for $50 trillion/year (then fired them after 10 microseconds.)

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated.

Nature - The publisher is scrutinizing researchers who might be inappropriately using the review process to promote their own work.

One of the goals of OASPA is to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant mode of publication. As we have charted in the annual statistics on the growth of open content published using various Creative Commons licenses, steady progress is being made (see for example the most recent... Read full article >

AbstractBackground. The academic publishing world is changing significantly, with ever-growing numbers of publications each year and shifting publishing pattern

Every now and then, a moment or a sentence in a conversation sticks out at you, and lodges itself in the back of your brain for months or even years. In this case, the sentence is a tweet, and I fear

Coercive citation by peer reviewers.

Scientometrics - The surge in the number of authors per article in the biomedical field makes it difficult to quantify the contribution of individual authors. Conventional citation metrics are...

The academic publishing world is changing significantly, with ever-growing numbers of publications each year and shifting publishing patterns. However, the metrics used to measure academic...

Decent overview.

There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices…

Scholars love to hate the journal impact factor, but how flawed is it?

Excellent, historically-aware explainer. DOES NOT explain the Big Deal, however.

Coercive citation: really widespread.