Choose the right journal: Think > Check > Submit

Think. Check. Submit is a campaign set up by a coalition of partners from the scholarly communications field to help researchers to identify creditable journals in which to publish. It also helps them to assess open access publishers who may have approached them.


Researchers work through a check list to assess the journal they are investigating. If they can answer yes to the majority of questions then it is likely that it's worth submitting research to.


This article by Jonathan Manely gives an insight unto the problem of opaque open access journals and how to avoid them.


For further advice contact your Academic Liaison Librarian or RaY

International survey on scholarly communication

Our colleague Ruth recently received this email about a survey on scholarly communications and we thought it would be useful to offer our research community the chance to take part. Here's what the email said...

How do open (access) publication strategies fit into a research workflow? Do researchers use Google Drive instead of Word? Papers instead of Endnote? Google Scholar instead of Scopus? Megajournals instead of topical journals? ResearchGate instead of repositories? We are engaged in an ongoing effort to chart the evolving landscape of scholarly communication (http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1286826). New tools are constantly being developed, as reflected in our list of 400+ scholarly communication tools (http://bit.ly/innoscholcomm-list). Researchers vote with their feet on these changes by adopting or rejecting new modes of working. With an international survey we intend to investigate how tool usage varies by field, country and position. The survey will run until February 2016.

A SURVEY.  WHERE? HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?
If you have not yet done so, please take this graphical survey:
https://innoscholcomm.typeform.com/to/Csvr7b?source=ML
People tell us it is easy and fun to fill it out by just clicking the tools you use. It takes 8-12 minutes to complete and you can opt to receive a visual characterization of your workflow compared to that of your peer group.

FOR WHOM?
Anyone carrying out research (from Master's students to professors), or supporting research (such as librarians, publishers and funders) can participate.

HOW CAN I HELP?
Kind of you to ask!  If you want to help make this a success please consider passing it along to people not on this list (researchers, librarians etc.). And yes, feel free to share the link on your website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc..
More specifically, do you represent an institution/society that wishes to promote this survey among its members? Then please contact us. We can arrange a special URL that will enable us to provide you with resulting data for just your organization. That way you can see what tools your members are using, compared to overall usage patterns. We do the work, you get the (anonymized) data.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS
We will post preliminary results here: https://101innovations.wordpress.com/
On this site, you can also find background information on the survey. Eventually we will share our (thoroughly anonymized) data. Would you like to work with those data? We are interested to hear what kind of analyses you would like to carry out or see carried out! There are many hypotheses that can be tested with the data that comes from this survey. In the field of Open Access I can think of many:

-       Do researchers choose either Gold or Green OA or do they combine these approaches?

-       Are researchers that share in an early phase (workflows, data, posters) more likely to also publish OA or archive their papers in repositories?

-       Do researchers use search tools that have an option to restrict to publications that are OA available?

-       etc.
The data also allows to discern between different positions, affiliation countries and career lengths.

Please support this research by taking the survey or promoting it.

Many thanks!

CONTACT
Bianca Kramer @MsPhelps b.m.r.kramer@uu.nl<mailto:b.m.r.kramer@uu.nl>
Jeroen Bosman @jeroenbosman j.bosman@uu.nl<mailto:j.bosman@uu.nl>
(both at Utrecht University Library in The Netherlands)

Open Library of Humanities

A consortium of libraries and academics has banded together to create a platform (or what they're called a mega-journal) to support gold open access  in the Humanities. It's called the Open Library of Humanities and there are already an array of editors and referees in place, so anything published in the library will be subject to double-blind peer review and editorial scrutiny. They plan to launch and host 5 new open access journals in September 2015 and are currently welcoming any other OA journals in the humanities that might like to join up. More about the OLH plans and model can be found here.

What's interesting about this model is that there will be no Article Processing Charge (APC) for publishing in the journals. Because the economics of the Humanities are different from other disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the OLH recognises that coming up with the requisite £600-£2000 to publish in gold OA journals isn't going to be possible for most humanities researchers. There's a major funding agreement in place with JISC, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and an institutional subscription model from universities (Leah's alma mater, Wesleyan, is one of the most recent universities to sign up).

The names and institutional affiliations of the librarians consulting on the project are impressive. Does it look like something that's going to be useful in your discipline?

OpenLibHums Twitter feed.

Elsevier's Open Access Policies

Elsevier have updated their policies on green open access and there has been some initial, critical reaction (suprised?) which you can read about on this scholarly communication blog. If you'd like to talk more about what green open access means to you at YSJ and how our research repository can help improve the reach and impact of your research, please come along to ILS' next Researcher Support session on RaY, Thursday 7 May at 9:00AM in DG 104.

More on impact factors and complementary metrics

As promised in the most recent post, here is the presentation we gave on impact factors, altmetrics, and all that jazz.

Impact factor, altmetrics etc. from Information Learning Services, York St John University

There have been various updates in this area this week, especially when it comes to altmetrics. The company that runs this service announced some changes in the way they display metrics data to users. Some researchers, having looked into this further, are worried that it will affect their ability to evaluate how their work is being used. We're going to look into this more ourselves, but it is clear that measuring research impact and influence has moved far beyond the traditional journal impact factor already.