Peer review and in-depth interviews with publishers as a means of assessing quality of research monographs

It has often been observed that evaluating scientific activity in the Humanities and in some of the Social Sciences needs to involve a study of monographs, as they are often the preferred mean of publication by scientists in these fields. As well as being the most frequently cited publication type, monographs are also the mean most often used to publish research findings. Thus, if they are not included in the evaluation process, a significant part of the scientific output is excluded, and the scientific activity undervalued. The purpose of this work in progress is to push forward the study of monographs to provide evaluators of research activities with a number of consistent scholar books quality indicators, through two different approaches: a survey of more than 200 researchers working in various fields and in-depth interviews with the editors responsible for selecting manuscripts at each of the best-regarded publishers

Peer review and in-depth interviews with publishers as a means of assessing quality of research monographs

It has often been observed that evaluating scientific activity in the Humanities and in some of the Social Sciences needs to involve a study of monographs, as they are often the preferred mean of publication by scientists in these fields. As well as being the most frequently cited publication type, monographs are also the mean most often used to publish research findings. Thus, if they are not included in the evaluation process, a significant part of the scientific output is excluded, and the scientific activity undervalued. The purpose of this work in progress is to push forward the study of monographs to provide evaluators of research activities with a number of consistent scholar books quality indicators, through two different approaches: a survey of more than 200 researchers working in various fields and in-depth interviews with the editors responsible for selecting manuscripts at each of the best-regarded publishers

Role of publishing services in the improvement of university scientific journals

This article shows the role that universities’ Publishing Services, as publishers of journals, can fill in quality improvement and rationalization of scientific publishing

Knowledge Unlatched: ¿quién asume el coste de las publicaciones científicas en abierto?

Con el expresivo título Knowledge Unlatched el proyecto que se analiza en este informe propone una respuesta a una de las preguntas más frecuentes sobre el open access (OA): ¿quién asume el coste de las publicaciones científicas en abierto (en este caso, de las monografías)? Montgomery, Lucy (2014). “Knowledge Unlatched: A global library consortium model for funding open access scholarly books”. Cultural science, v. 7, n. 2, pp. 1-66. http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/ culturalscience/article/view/9

The researcher and publisher in the evaluation of scientific journals

Evaluation of scientific journals in Spain and abroad is at the peak of attention. There are several journal evaluation systems but there are few relations among them. They cover quality indicators interesting for editors, researchers and evaluators but, how are these groups really affected? On the one hand, researchers from other areas are obliged to know some concepts and terms from Bibliometrics or Information Science. That makes it possible to develop a certain “users training” as well as releasing one of the aspects of Documentation. On the other hand, some researchers engaged with scientific journals as editors or members of the editorial or advisory board express their critical opinion related to some systems or indicators and from their discussions we obtain ideas to improve the evaluation systems. Finally, editors visit these information systems to see how they have been evaluated but are not sure to which system to pay attention. A general conclusion could be obtained: research about journal quality has impact: a social impact

Reflections on Spanish scholarly journals

The current ease of online publishing has led to an excess of e-journals, all struggling to attract manuscripts and to survive, and most often without success. This fragile situation for journals means that when one of them does climb up in the quality rankings it is likely to be absorbed by a large foreign publisher. The article reflects on the academic world's dependence on international commercial databases, and questions the Spanish government's expenditure on subscriptions to them. Finally, a recent campaign conducted against Elsevier is described

Reflexiones a partir de la jornada de FECYT sobre las medidas de apoyo a las revistas científicas españolas

El pasado miércoles 9 de mayo, FECYT convocó a un gran número de editores científicos españoles en una jornada de difusión sobre las medidas que tomará para apoyar a algunas revistas; en concreto, para las revistas que ya estén en el camino de la excelencia. El programa estuvo cargado de contenidos interesantes para un público –en su mayoría editores– cada vez más sensibilizado con la necesidad de producir revistas de calidad y muy visibles en la escena internacional. José Manuel Báez (FECYT) presentó la jornada y esbozó las líneas maestras de apoyo a las revistas que, más tarde, serían presentadas con más detalles por el resto de participantes de la mesa.Peer reviewe

¿Por qué nadie habla ya de las bases de datos bibliográficas “clásicas”?

The role of specialized bibliographic databases in the current environment of online information search dominated by search engines and large multidisciplinary databases is described. The databases usefulness for searching specialized information and the need for intermediation of the resource centres for research are discussed

Indexed University presses: overlap and geographical distribution in five book assessment databases

[EN] Scholarly books have been a periphery among the objects of study of bibliometrics until recent developments provided tools for assessment purposes. Among scholarly book publishers, University Presses (UPs hereinafter), subject to specific ends and constrains in their publishing activity, might also remain on a second-level periphery despite their relevance as scholarly book publishers. In this study the authors analyze the absolute and relative presence, overlap and uniquely-indexed cases of 503 UPs by country, among five assessment-oriented databases containing data on scholarly book publishers: Book Citation Index, Scopus, Scholarly Publishers Indicators (Spain), the lists of publishers from the Norwegian System (CRISTIN) and the lists of publishers from the Finnish System (JUFO). The comparison between commercial databases and public, national databases points towards a differential pattern: prestigious UPs in the English Speaking world represent larger shares and there is a higher overall percentage of UPs in the commercial databases, while the richness and diversity is higher in the case of national databases. Explicit or de facto biases towards production in English by commercial databases, as well as diverse indexation criteria might explain the differences observed. The analysis of the presence of UPs in different numbers of databases by country also provides a general picture of the average degree of diffusion of UPs among information systems. The analysis of ‘endemic’ UPs, those indexed only in one of the five databases points out to strongly different compositions of UPs in commercial and non-commercial databases. A combination of commercial and non commercial databases seems to be the optimal option for assessment purposes while the validity and desirability of the ongoing debate on the role of UPs can be also concluded.This research has been carried out in the framework of the Project CSO2015-63693, ‘Las prensas universitarias iberoamericanas y el libro científico en español: calidad, modelos de negocio y política institucional’ funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and CompetitivenessPeer reviewe