Open Access increases the “Superstar effect”

New Analysis on the impact of Open Access availability on citations finds out, that Open access increases cites to the top-ranked journals but reduces cites to lower-ranked journals.

Two Economists, Mark McCabe (University of Michigan School of Information) and Christopher Snyder (Dartmouth College), have published a new study of the impact of open access on citation rates for science journal content. McCabe and Snyder found that open access increases citation rates for high-quality content, while reducing citations to lower-quality content. In their paper, “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer: The Effect of Open Access on Cites to Science Journals Across the Quality Spectrum,” McCabe and Snyder construct a model to explain their findings, which was based on an analysis of 100 journals in ecology, botany, and general science. The authors document what they call a “superstar effect,” in which the benefits of open access (namely, increased citations) accrue to higher quality content and journals, while lower-tier content does not receive such benefits.

Social Media references as data for RePEc rankings? Network starts Online Voting

Citation analysis in RePEc is very popular among Economists worldwide. So far it is mainly based on citations in reference lists of Journal Articles and Working Papers. But as Social Media are more and more used not only for academic networking, but also for scholarly discussions, an extended impact analysis is up for discussion.

In his latest Blog Entry RePEc member Christian Zimmermann proposes some extensions to the existing RePEc rankings, e.g. the inclusion of Wikipedia or Economics Blogs. In order to get a better understanding of the Community View, Zimmermann started an Online Voting. The results are open for everyone and show so far, that there’s a split within Economists, with one part being open for the inclusion of Social Media for citation analysis, while others are very sceptical.

This shows, that there’s definitely some change going on the scholarly publication landscape in Economics, but so far Social Media are still controversial, when it comes to quality assessment of research papers. Nevertheless there are tools like Altmetrics, who show, that impact analysis goes beyond journal impact factors. And even large research organisations like the Leibniz Association in Germany with it’s research network “Science 2.o” have started to analyse how Social Media are affecting scholarly communication.

EconStor among the TOP25 repositories in Europe

New edition of webometrics ranking compares repositories worldwide and by region according to several categories.

The “Ranking Web of Repositories” is a service provided by the Spanish Reseseach Organization CSIC. Besides comparing repositories it also ranks Universities, Business Schools and Hospitals. The repository ranking is published every 6 months, now in it’s 12th edition.

Compared to earlier rankings EconStor has climbed several places and now ranks at number 52 worldwide, with the TOP positions held by SSRN, ArXiv and the NASA Astrophysics Data System. Looking at fulltext content only (category “rich files”), EconStor fares even better, being now number 15 worldwide and number 7 in Europe.

IZA launches 5 new Open Access Journals

The number of interesting new Open Access Journals in Economics increases, as IZA launches five new field journals

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) is a private research institute, based in Germany, with the focus on labour market research. They are already editing a prominent Discussion Paper Series (also available on EconStor), which belongs to to the TOP 20 Working Paper Series in RePEc.

On top of that IZA has now started five new Open Access Journals, which focus on the different aspects of Labour Markets:

• IZA Journal of Labor Economics
• IZA Journal of Labor Policy
• IZA Journal of Migration
• IZA Journal of Labor & Development
• IZA Journal of European Labor Studies

All Journals are published with SpringerOpen and do not charge any author fees. Each journal involves peer reviewing, with the focus on a fast decision making and publication process:

Acceptance/rejection decisions are expected to be made “within one month; publication is expected “within two months after submission of the final manuscript.The fast process from the submission to the acceptance/rejection decision is guaranteed by (i) an advanced desk rejection policy and (ii) the fact that only those papers refereed that require minor revisions are accepted while those not accepted are rejected without a detailed referee report. This requires the submission of manuscripts that are considered ready by the author/s for direct publication if found suitable by the editorial team.

With the reputation of the Discussion Paper Series already established, there might be a good chance also for the Journals to enter the ranking lists.

IZA paper provides new ranking for German Economic Research Institutes

A new IZA paper by Rolf Ketzler and Klaus F Zimmermann presents a ranking for German economic research institutes (all part of the Leibniz Association) based on their publications in SSCI-Journals from 2000-2009.

In the results of the raw data, ZEW Mannheim holds the leading position with 1,511 citations, followed by DIW Berlin (1,189 citations),  ifo Munich (753 citations), IfW Kiel (593 citations), RWI Essen (382 citations) and IWH Halle (90 citations).

The authors also found an employer and publisher bias among the cites of published articles of research staff from the German research institutes: If from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), articles have significantly more cites than if from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) or one of the others. If published in a Springer journal, the articles receive more cites than with Blackwell, and if published with Sage, the articles receive significantly less cites than with Blackwell.

Handelsblatt Ranking causes uproar among German Business Economists

The German Business Newspaper Handelsblatt publishes annual rankings on German Economists and Business Economists based on their publication output. This years ranking (which was published today), caused a big uproar beforehand among  researchers. As a result, over 300 Professors (about 11% of all Business Economists In Germany) opted out, which means, that they are no longer included in the ranking.  This seems quite a number but, looking at the research output of  the boycotteurs in more detail, one finds out, that most of  them are not very active in publishing research articles, in fact only about 6-7% are among  the TOP100 of the Handelsblatt Ranking.

Nevertheless this behaviour brought up a national debate about the sense and nonsense of rankings and the right parameters to choose for evaluation. Most of this debate is unfortunately available only in German, but there are also a few English blogposts out there, e.g. from the “Lumpy Economist” and “Econ Tidbits”.

EconStor now integrated into OpenScout

Our  publication  server EconStor now has added a further dissemination channel for it’s content. Besides Google Scholar, RePEc, BASE, EconBizOpen,  Economists Online and LeibnizOpen, the publications from our repository can now also be found via OpenScout. The portal is funded by the European Union and provides open content for management education and training.

New survey shows: Economists sympathize with publishing reforms and Open Access

A recent ZBW survey among German economists shows that they sympathize with the Elsevier boycott and Open Access, but still support the established reputation and ranking systems

Right now scientists from around the world are boycotting the Elsevier publishing house. The dominant magazine publisher stands accused of monopolizing scientific content by only making it accessible to the public for astronomical subscription prices. In contrast to this, the Open Access community requests that all publicly financed research findings should be made accessible for free. In early May, the ZBW held a survey regarding the current Elsevier boycott and the subject of Open Access which found that the established system of expensive subscription magazines is indeed unpopular, but is largely upheld because of a shortage of alternatives.

Read the full press release here

EU survey confirms: 90% support Open Access for publicly funded research publications

The EU recently released the results of the survey “scientific information in the digital age”. They are based on 1140 responses from Member states, coming from research funding organisations, university/research institutes, libraries, publishers, international organisations and individual researchers.

The survey focused on the three topics “scientific publications”, “research data” and “Preservation of digital scientific information”. Concerning scientific publications the answers were:

• 84% see access problems to scientific publications in Europe
• The main reasons are seen in high prices of journals/subscriptions (89 %) and limited library budgets (85 %)
• 91% agree that Open Access increases the dissemination of scientific publications
• 90% support the idea that publications resulting from publicly funded research should be avaliable in open access
• 56% see six months as a desirable embargo period for licensed material, before it has to be available in open access
• 86% agree on the development of an EU network of repositories

The World Bank starts its own Open Access repository

More than 2,000 books, articles, reports and research papers available

The World Bank last week launched its Open Knowledge Repository, which is a one-stop-shop for most of the Bank’s research outputs and knowledge products, providing free and unrestricted access. Additional material, including foreign language editions and links to datasets, will be added in the coming year.

The repository uses a dissemation strategy similar to Econstor, which means that their publications are also visible in

“major international repositories (and databases) such as RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), SSRN and Economists Online. This means that the World Bank publishes just once in its own Open Knowledge Repository while its research is also “harvested” and made openly available through many other searchable online repositories, increasing the number of people able to find World Bank content.”

On top of that, the World Bank also tries to negotiate an Open Access friendly environment for future publications of their researchers:

“The Bank is working with journal publishers to determine fair embargo periods after which peer-reviewed journal articles, as accepted for publication, will be added to the repository. The working paper versions of journal articles are available in the Open Knowledge Repository under a Creative Commons attribution-only (CC BY) license without any embargo period.

World Bank Publisher Carlos Rossel expects embargo periods on journal articles to shorten as more organizations opt for open access and the academic publishing industry adapts to the Internet age. “The changes have been tremendous already, but I think there is a groundswell that is saying that frankly part of the value added by journal publishers can be accomplished through other means, and really what’s most important is for our knowledge to be readily accessible,” he said.”

Read  the full press release here