Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed. There are indications that the scientific community seeks and needs better certification of journal procedures to improve the quality of published science. Comprehensive certification of editorial and review procedures could help ensure adequate procedures to detect duplicate and fraudulent submissions.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 6 table

Economies of signs in writing for academic publication: the case of English Medium “National” Journals

The centrality of publishing in academic journals to academic knowledge work globally is largely taken as a given. Publishing is a defining aspect of scholars’ labour in the academic world, tied to both current and possible future material conditions in which they/we work. The aim of this paper is to focus on one part of this knowledge work, the production of English medium “national” journals in local contexts where English is not the official or widely used medium of communication yet where English, in a global context, is increasingly viewed as the “academic lingua franca.” The paper begins by outlining the longitudinal study from which this focus emerged, followed by a discussion of case studies of four English medium “national” journals in the field of psychology located in four southern and central European national contexts: Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal. I argue that a focus on the specific phenomenon of EMN journals brings into sharp relief the nature and workings of the dominant knowledge economy and also illustrates the ways in which some of the key ideological values, including a market model of academic knowledge production, are to some extent being challenged. A goal of this paper is to explore this particular fragment of the academic knowledge making world—what scholars are doing, why and under what conditions —to illustrate the need for closer scrutiny of the practices surrounding academic production and to open up debate about what kind of practices we want to be involved in and why

Editors’ JIF-boosting stratagems – which are appropriate and which not?

This extended editorial explores the growing range of stratagems devised by journal editors to boost their Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the consequences for the credibility of this indicator as well as for the academic community more broadly. Over recent years, JIF has become the most prominent indicator of a journal’s standing, bringing intense pressure on journal editors to do what they can to increase it. After explaining the curious way in which JIF is calculated and the technical limitations that beset it, we examine the approaches employed by journal editors to maximise it. Some approaches would seem completely acceptable, others (such as coercive citations and cross-citing journal cartels) are in clear breach of the conventions on academic behaviour, but a number fall somewhere in between. Over time, editors have devised ingenious ways of enhancing their JIF without apparently breaching any rules. In particular, the editorial describes the ‘online queue’ stratagem and asks whether this constitutes appropriate behaviour or not. The editorial draws three conclusions. First, in the light of ever more devious ruses of editors, the JIF indicator has now lost most of its credibility. Secondly, where the rules are unclear or absent, the only way of determining whether particular editorial behaviour is appropriate or not is to expose it to public scrutiny. Thirdly, editors who engage in dubious behaviour thereby risk forfeiting their authority to police misconduct among authors

The first three years of the Journal of Global Health:Assessing the impact

The Journal of Global Health (JoGH) is three years old. To assess its impact, we analysed online access to JoGH’s articles using PubMed Central and Google Analytics tools. Moreover, we tracked citations that JoGH received in 2013 using ISI Web of KnowledgeSM and Google Scholar® tools. The 66 items (articles, viewpoints and editorials) published between June 2011 and December 2013 were accessed more than 50 000 times during 2013, from more than 160 countries of the world. Seven among the 13 most accessed papers were focused on global, regional and national epidemiological estimates of important infectious diseases. JoGH articles published in 2011 and 2012 received 77 citations in Journal Citation Reports® (JCR)–indexed journals in 2013 to 24 original research articles, setting our first, unofficial impact factor at 3.208. In addition, JoGH received 11 citations during 2013 to its 12 original research papers published during 2013, resulting in an immediacy index of 0.917. The number of external, non–commissioned submissions that we consider to be of high quality is continuously increasing, leading to current JoGH’s rejection rate of about 80%. The current citation analysis raises favourable expectations for the JoGH’s overall impact on the global health community in future years

Pros and Cons of the Impact Factor in a Rapidly Changing Digital World

The purpose and novlty of the paper is to present arguments for and against the use of the Impact Factor (IF) in a rapidly changing digital world. The paper discusses the calculation of IF, as well as the pros and cons of IF. Editorial policies that affect IF are examined, and the merits of open access online publishing are presented. Scientific quality and the IF dilemma are analysed, and alternative measures of impact and quality are evaluated. The San Francisco declaration on research assessment is also discussed

The diamond model of open access publishing: Why policy makers, scholars, universities, libraries, labour unions and the publishing world need to take non-commercial, non-profit open access serious

This reflection introduces a new term to the debate on open access publishing: diamond open access (DOA) publishing. The debate on open access is a debate about the future of academia. We discuss the problems of for-profit academic publishing, such as monopoly prices and access inequalities and point at the limits of contemporary perspectives on open access as they are frequently advanced by the publishing industry, policy makers and labour unions. The article introduces a public service and commons perspective that stresses the importance of fostering and publicly supporting what we term the model of diamond open access. It is a non-profit academic publishing model that makes academic knowledge a common good, reclaims the common character of the academic system and entails the possibility for fostering job security by creating public service publishing jobs. Existing concepts such as “gold open access” have serious conceptual limits that can be overcome by introducing the new term of diamond open access. The debate on open access lacks visions and requires social innovations. This article is a policy intervention and reflection on current issues related to open access (OA) publishing. It reflects on the following questions: What should the role of open access be in the future of academic publishing and academia? How should the future of academic publishing and academia look like? Which reforms of academic policy making are needed in relation to open access publishing? We want to trigger a new level of the open access debate. We invite further reflections on these questions by academics, policy makers, publishers, publishing workers, labour unions, open access publishing associations, editors and librarians

Patent Fairness and International Justice

In 2002, Hugh Laddie lamented the “blind adherence to dogma” that had led to an apparent impasse in philosophical and practical discussions of intellectual property (IP): “On the one side, the developed world side, there exists a lobby of those who believe that all IPRs [intellectual property rights] are good for business, benefit the public at large, and act as catalysts for technical progress. They believe and argue that, if IPRs are good, more IPRs must be better.”1 But “on the other side”, he continued: “there exists a vociferous lobby of those who believe that IPRs are likely to cripple the development of local industry and technology, will harm the local population, and benefit none but the developed world. They believe and argue that, if IPRs are bad, the fewer the better.” Laddie recommended reforms designed to ensure that IPR development and enforcement would better serve the interests of developing countries. He hoped these reforms would provide an effective response to those who regard IPRs as “food for the rich countries and poison for the poor”.

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

Introducing New Editorial Roles and Measures: Making the Journal of Research Practice Relevant to Researchers

Following a detailed review of the accomplishments and aspirations of the Journal of Research Practice, we have undertaken a restructuring of the editorial board, with inputs from people associated with this journal. In designing the new structure, we have taken into account the need for building the journal’s profile in the six focus areas recently clarified: (1) Research Applications, (2) Research Spaces, (3) Research Education, (4) Research Experiences, (5) Research Philosophy, and (6) Research on Research. Focus Editors will ensure that the journal remains well engaged with the developments in these focus areas. The new structure allows us to involve all contributors to the journal in playing a role to enhance the journal’s relevance to researchers and reflective professionals. This restructuring exercise has presented us with an opportunity to build on the strengths of the journal and address areas of concern so as to strengthen the journal’s quality, relevance, and impact. A review of different notions of impact has led us to a set of proposed measures for enhancing the relevance and utilisation of the journal in future

In Territorio Veritas? Bringing Geographical Coherence into the Ambiguous Definition of Geographical Indications of Origin

In this article, I touch upon a topic that remains highly controversial in international intellectual property law—the legal protection of geographical indications of origin (GIs): Chianti wine, Champagne sparkling wine, Gorgonzola cheese, Parma ham, Darjeeling tea, Colombian coffee, and other terms that indicate (or are supposed to indicate, as I will develop in this article) the geographical origin of the products they identify. In line with the theme of this special issue of the WIPO Journal, I focus on the requirement of “geographical origin” upon which the protection of GIs has been historically built and is generally justified. In particular, I question the ambiguity that characterises the current definition of GIs under art.22(1) of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), which does not require that products originate entirely from their GI-denominated regions to enjoy GI protection as long as the quality, characteristic or reputation of the products at issue can be “essentially” attributed to those regions. In my previous scholarship, I have recognised that GIs add value to the products that they identify and this may offer a competitive advantage to their producers, but I have nonetheless concluded that a system of GI protection is more beneficial for economic development than a system in which competitors can freely use geographical terms without a direct connection to the GI-denominated region. In particular, I have highlighted that GIs can benefit local economies, the environment, and the conservation of local culture. Moreover, I have underlined that GIs do not grant an exclusive right over a type of product. Cheese makers in Wisconsin, for example, would remain free to produce and market “mozzarella” and “mozzarella di bufala” even if the UnitedStates concedes to the long-held pressure of the European Union (EU) to “claw-back” several geographical names of cheese (currently held to be generic in the United States). Equally asrelevant, TRIPs permits competitorsto use GIsin descriptive contexts(e.g. comparative advertising) and to name their products as a “style”, “like” or “type” of GI-related product in several circumstances—the only exception to this general rule are GIs identifying wines and spirits. Still, in my writing I have expressed scepticism over GI protection when the products at issue are not grown or manufactured entirely or nearly entirely in the GI-denominated territory. In these cases, I have argued that GI protection indeed may transform into an unjustified anticompetitive subsidy as well as a tool for potential consumer confusion, or even deception. In this article, I further bring my scepticism to what I call “ambiguous geographical origin” of GIs and advocated against the misuse, or misinterpretation, of the terms “geographical origin” in art.22(1) of TRIPs. More specifically, I expose the partial inconsistency between the legal definition under TRIPs and the dictionary definition of the terms “geographical” and “origin”. In this respect, I point out that, from a strictly linguistic standpoint, the term “geographical”, in its variation as “geographic”, is defined as “of or relating to geography” and as “belonging to or characteristic of a particular region”. Likewise, the word “origin” is defined as “the point at which something begins or rises or from which it derives”. Based on these definitions, I note that art.22(1) of TRIPs essentially misuses, or at least misinterprets, the notion of the terms “geographical” and “origin” and expandsthe scope of GI protection beyond the meaning of these terms. This departure from a literal interpretation contributes to granting exclusive rights to GIs beyond the original rationale for protection, which remains protecting GIsfor the information they convey to the public about products’ geographical origin and as incentives for investment in local economies. In this article, I argue that this should not be permitted and that the definition and protection of GIs should return to coherently identifying products’ “geographical origin”. My argument in favour of this narrower approach is threefold. First, as noted by GI critics, GIs become an unjustified barrier to entry in the market, and a disguised subsidy, when they do not fully reflect the geographical origin of the products that they identify. Secondly, the use of GIs on products not fully locally grown or made becomes a source of misinformation for the consumers that rely on the GI as a source of geographical information, and a potential source of negative reputation for producers that operate within the GI-denominated region when the former products are of lesser or different quality, or pose a safety or health-related issue. Finally, adopting a stricter territorial approach could be the much-needed solution for bringing back legitimacy to the international debate over GIs. As I note in this article, GIs are and remain an important tool for economic and cultural development—finding a compromise like the one advocated in this article could perhaps move forward the gridlocked international agenda on GI protection