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”.

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