Goodreads Reviews to Assess the Wider Impacts of Books

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by John Wiley & Sons in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 17/07/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23805 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Although peer-review and citation counts are commonly used to help assess the scholarly impact of published research, informal reader feedback might also be exploited to help assess the wider impacts of books, such as their educational or cultural value. The social website Goodreads seems to be a reasonable source for this purpose because it includes a large number of book reviews and ratings by many users inside and outside of academia. To check this, Goodreads book metrics were compared with different book-based impact indicators for 15,928 academic books across broad fields. Goodreads engagements were numerous enough in the Arts (85% of books had at least one), Humanities (80%) and Social Sciences (67%) for use as a source of impact evidence. Low and moderate correlations between Goodreads book metrics and scholarly or non-scholarly indicators suggest that reader feedback in Goodreads reflects the many purposes of books rather than a single type of impact. Although Goodreads book metrics can be manipulated they could be used guardedly by academics, authors, and publishers in evaluations

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute

Predatory Publishing

The ‘predatory publishing’ label is often linked to open access in order to discredit it, evoking as this concept does both vanity and self-publishing. Today, however, more and more critical attention is being paid to how this label has been and is still being constructed. On the one hand, the rise of unscrupulous OA publishers who charge author-facing fees and provide little to no editorial oversight is indicative of the increasing pressure placed on scholars to produce more and more research “outputs” and to increase the citability and indexing of such. Fuelled by various national incentive systems, it is a pressure that can lead to serious violations of traditional publishing ethics: by authors who self-publish or self-plagiarise in order to meet their targets, and by a certain breed of journals that seem more concerned with making a pro t than with disseminating academic knowledge, as shown in the essays in this pamphlet by Vaclav Stetka and by Luděk Brož, Tereza Stöckelová, and Filip Vostal, especially relative to the notorious case of Czech scholar Wadim Stielkowski, who at one point boasted of having published 17 monographs and 60 articles in just 3 years and who, even after departing Charles University, Prague under a hail of scandal, continues to teach and publish. Stielkowski’s “case,” as it were, for which one of the contributors to this volume, Vaclav Stetka, served as chief whistleblower, serves as a somewhat spectacular exemplum of what can happen when two malevolent forces converge: a dishonest scholar hellbent on maximizing their publications and citations and fraudulent, for-profit “fake journals.” On the other hand, do we need to be careful when it comes to accusing all those labelled as predatory publishers as being driven exclusively by profit? After all, much the same can be said about commercial publishers such as Elsevier who are perceived to be legitimate if not, indeed, prestigious

Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication

Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published "The need for a theory of citing" —a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call. This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact

The differences in information seeking behavior between distance and residential doctoral students

Librarians have historically been responsible for the organization and management of the stores of human knowledge, and for ensuring information literacy among researchers. In recent years, however, librarians have become disintermediated (Boyd-Byrnes & Rosenthal, 2005) or, removed from, researchers and the research process for a variety of reasons. The problem that was addressed in this study is that librarians do not have sufficient information about the research practices and preferences of doctoral students enrolled in distance programs. The purpose of this study was to gain information about the differences in research behaviors and preferences among doctoral students in distance and residential programs. The researcher conducted a qualitative case study using a grounded theory approach. This investigation employed non-probability sampling strategies, convenience and purposive, to identify participants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty doctoral students; 10 enrolled in a distance program, and 10 enrolled in a residential program. All participants were either actively engaged in gathering material for, or had recently completed, their dissertation literature reviews. In order to arrange equal interview format options for all student-participants, they were allowed to choose whether to be interviewed via phone, via a communications software package called Skype, or utilizing an Internet chat facility called TappedIn. Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using HyperResearch software. The current research showed that distance continues to distinguish the research experience for doctoral distance students despite the ease of access to electronic research resources. The simple fact of their separation from the physical campus, from colleagues and faculty while conducting literature reviews causes distance students to feel isolated and to long for academic amenities unavailable to them. While residential students eschew the campus library, preferring to conduct research from the convenience of their homes, distance students express longing for the traditional brick and mortar facility. Findings also revealed that distance students communicate a lower level of self-confidence about their research skills than residential students, despite the fact that their interviews communicated no differences in familiarity with the various available research tools between the two groups

Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community

The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In this collection, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond traditional classrooms and scholarly journals to share their work with the public. Here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and to archive some of the important public-facing work feminists are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable. “In Public Feminisms, Baker and Dove-Viebahn have curated a vibrantly intersectional collection of essays that speak both to the longstanding commitment of feminisms to education and activism and the urgent need for this work in the contemporary moment. This book shows how scholar-activists are bringing together knowledge production and the sharing of that knowledge and community engagement through a series of compelling case studies. I can’t wait to teach it.” —Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Baumann professor in American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Aviva Dove-Viebahn is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/textbooks/1004/thumbnail.jp

Open Access

In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber’s influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers

OPERAS SIG on Tools for Open Scholarly Communication : White Paper 2021

This white paper is the output of the OPERAS Special Interest Group (SIG) Tools and R&D for scholarly communication; it is an updated version of a previous 2018 white paper1. With a focus on scholarly publishing tools, the objectives of the SIG Tools are to: provide a landscape analysis, identify emerging trends, and list the areas of potential improvements, developments, and collaborations. Since 2018, various studies and initiatives confirmed the necessity to both coordinate the developments of tools and provide guidance to the users. Similarly, OPERAS emphasizes the importance of building the open science scholarly communication infrastructure in Social Sciences and Humanities on community driven tools. The white paper brings information on the existing tools for scholarly publishing, as well as recommendations that will support the building of such an open scholarly communication infrastructure. The paper first examines tools types, definitions, and criteria that are able to facilitate their description and selection. The tools are then analyzed according to publishing main functions. For authoring, the development of online and collaborative tools represents an interesting perspective, especially when relying on structured formats, but also increases the risk of lock-in within multi-functional proprietary services. In peer reviewing, alongside widely used commercial tools, open peer review represents an innovative area, both in terms of usage and tools. Open source tools for publishing already offer a high level of service, but face interoperability challenges with the integration of an increasing variety of third-party services. A specific section is dedicated to communicating tools allowing for comments and annotations, as such function is transversal to the others. To complement this description, the SIG tools also identified major trends that should impact the future of scholarly communication, namely: preprint servers, artificial intelligence, data papers, and user-centric developments. In conclusion, the white paper provides a list of recommendations able to address the challenges identified and to provide building blocks for the envisioned open scholarly infrastructure. The recommendations suggest: to establish user-centric criteria for tools, a tools’ observatory, a set of training materials, guidelines about publishing workflows, and collaborations with other community initiatives

Predatory Publishing

This pamphlet was published in a series of 7 pamphlets as part of the Radical Open Access II conference, which took place June 26-27 at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, UK. More information about this conference and about the contributors to this pamphlet can be found at: http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/ ROA2. This pamphlet was made possible due to generous funding from The Post Office, a project of Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures and the combined efforts of authors, editors, designers & printers. The pamphlet features 4 essays: "Battling Predators in Prague," by Vaclac Stetka; "Vampires in Academic Publishing: On the Case of Wadim Strielkowski" by Ludek Brosz, Tereza Stockelova, and Filip Vostal; "Predatory Publishing from a Global South Perspective," by Reggie Raju, Lena Nyahodza, and Jill Claassen; and "Misleading Metrics and the Ecology of Scholarly Publishing" by Kirsten Bell