DET – interest levels rising - OASPA

"OASPA wants to support and create a vibrant and competitive market for open access publishing that also stimulates innovation. In recent years there’s been good progress towards these goals as reflected by the membership of OASPA. Not only have we seen strong growth in fully open content published by OASPA members, there are also publishers experimenting with business models, different approaches to peer review, and new ways of presenting content. This is all good, but it’s happening quite slowly, and so OASPA is also on the lookout for areas where members can work together to accelerate open access and innovation. One idea emerged over a year ago at an OASPA board meeting on the topic of article-level metrics and indicators – an idea which rapidly developed into the project called the DOI Event Tracker (DET). One of our challenges is that OASPA is now quite a mixed bag of publishers: old and new; hybrid and fully OA; mega and micro; radical and conservative; commercial and non-profit; journals and books; and all the scholarly disciplines. This is a sign of progress of course, but it does mean that there are topics where it’s hard for us to reach a consensus. One of the things many of us can agree on, however, is that current methods of research evaluation are deeply flawed. We seem to be stuck in a system where researchers are judged by where they publish their work, rather than what they’ve actually accomplished and how it affects their field. As outlined in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, there are lots of reasons to change this. What is particularly relevant for OASPA is that most researchers feel they have to publish in established traditional journals, and that tends to stifle innovation and open access where most of the publication venues tend to be quite new. Publishers as well as scholars seem to be slaves to this antiquated system. How can we break out of this, so that scholars can explore new publication venues without fearing that their work will be ‘downgraded’ simply because of where they chose to publish it? One approach is to move away from a single journal-based metric – the impact factor – towards indicators (qualitative and quantitative) about the article itself. In a digital environment, when an article is downloaded, bookmarked, written about, commented on, cited etc, all of this can be tracked. The same is true for other research outputs like data, code, blog posts and so on. One of the pioneers in such article-level metrics was PLOS (disclaimer – I worked at PLOS when article-level metrics were first released), but there are now a host of projects and organisations with article metrics as a focus. It’s a promising area with a lot of potential to support more sophisticated and meaningful approaches to research evaluation. It’s also an area that needs to be approached with much caution – the importance of an individual research output cannot be reduced to a single number (an “article impact factor”). Used with care, however, article-based indicators can provide evidence of different kinds of outcomes, and they can also serve many other purposes such as revealing links between content, people, and other research outputs ..."