Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?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

Wasathiyah Al-Islamiyah

126 ha

GreyGuide - Guide to Good Practice in Grey Literature: A Community Driven Open Resource Project

The goal of this project is to develop an open source repository of good practices in the field of grey literature. That which originated in monographic form will now open and expand to include content from the global grey literature community. Such practices will range from the production and processing of grey literature through to its distribution, uses, and preservation. The repository will contain guidelines such as those in handling theses and dissertations, how to write research reports, metadata required for working papers as well as good practices in the subject areas of agriculture, health, education, energy, environment, et cetera. The purpose of an online repository of good practice in grey literature will provide the many stakeholders in government, academics, business and industry with the benefits of experience, sustained management, and proven results. The procedure initially applied in this project deals with the design and development of a template that will capture data and information about published as well as proposed good practices within a standard format. While the metadata captured in the template are indeed standardized, their accompanying full-text documents need not be. Furthermore, the template seeks to identify intended users of a good practice, as well as metadata that will facilitate the search and retrieval of records in the repository. Technical developments related to the design and construction of the repository, its eventual platform as well as its maintenance are other related issues addressed in the project. While there are no direct costs associated with the project, each partner is committed to allocate human and material resources needed to carry out their related tasks. It is expected that the initial phase in acquiring records for the repository will rely on channels available through the Grey Literature Network Service. Populating the repository will be somewhat time-consuming and the first harvest will not produce an abundance of records. The project is long term; however it is all the more worthwhile. The GreyGuide will provide a unique resource in the field of grey literature that is long awaited and which responds to the information needs of a diverse, international grey literature community.Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notesXAInternationa

Efforts towards openness and transparency of data: A focus on open science platforms

Although Open Science currently enjoys widespread support across scientific and technological communities, institutional and cultural barriers remain, as does the lack of investment in knowledge to foster Open Science. Generally, open research processes are based on information system infrastructure, such as informatics platforms where efficient web interfaces should be developed to easily record and share open data. Moreover, Open Science requires a systemic shift in current practices to bring transparency across the system, to ensure the ongoing sustainability of the associated social and physical infrastructures, and to foster greater public trust in science. Until now, the literature has focused its attention more on the final phases of the research process and, in particular, on Open Access, which is only one of the final steps of the Open Science research process. From this perspective, our research focuses on Open Science infrastructure, considering the openness and transparency attributes, with the aim of identifying a theoretical model able to assess web interfaces of Open Science platforms

Digital Periphery? A Community Case Study of Digitalization Efforts in Swiss Mountain Regions

Rural economies have undergone major changes in recent years as traditional rural economic sectors declined and shifted. At the same time, digital technologies emerged and rural communities experience profound transformations. In this chapter, we analyze how technological change leads to changing rural economies in a Swiss mountain community. Although Switzerland has one of the highest national coverage of broadband in the world, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the transformation of its rural economy due to digitalization. The community case study’s 46 qualitative interviews show that digital connectivity in peripheral mountain communities is experienced differently by various actors. On the one hand, digitalization offers new economic opportunities to larger businesses, larger hotels, schools and health service providers. On the other hand, particularly smaller businesses struggle with the high cost of becoming digital and their owners tend to become more cautious and stressed as competition and price transparencies in the digital economy become intensified. In terms of spatial aspects, we argue that digitalization reduces cognitive distance between core and periphery while physical distance between the urban and the rural still exist