From impact factors to impact craters | Green tea and Velociraptors

"Day 2 in the Big Brother house (aka the European Geosciences Union General Meeting). There’s no where near enough beer, and tensions are getting high. A horde of angry horses have invaded the lower levels, and taken the President of Austria hostage, with demands of lowering the Fair Straw Tax. But throughout all the acid-fuelled hysteria, two events have stuck out so far today. The first was a workshop discussion on open access publishing for early career researchers (ECRs), hosted by a new Editor for the EGU’s publishing house, Copernicus. Unfortunately, this event confirmed a lot of the current issues with the development of open access policies globally, in that there has been a serious communications breakdown about the effects the policy transitions, particularly in the UK now that Research Councils UK’s (RCUK) open access policy has come into play (April 1st), will have on how and where ECRs can publish. Here are comments on several of the more prevalent points raised: The misconception that Gold-route open access publishing requires you to pay, up front, an Article Processing Charge (APC). Gold open access is immediate open access publishing, under an appropriate license (CC-BY, according to the RCUK) – of all global open access journals, the APC median and mode is zero. The commercial publishers, who don’t have institutional backing, and largely out-dated models of publication, still charge exorbitant prices (up to $5000 in cases), as they are established names, with a track record of successful publishing. They also happen to operate many of the middle-tier ranked journals, based on impact factors (a journal-based metric that measures the average citations of the journal’s articles over two years), which makes them attractive to scientists in terms of where to publish. This is a prominent issue at the moment within academia. How do you avoid falling into the trap that journal title and impact factor mean anything about the quality of your research, and at the same time reach the audience who you want to (i.e., those in your field who read those journals). My response to this is that if you can’t reach the people who you want without having to submit to a particular journal, you’re not trying hard enough and under-estimate alternative non-subject specific methods of dissemination. Conferences and direct emails are a great way of distributing your research to the right audiences, as well as hosting them on your department or research group or personal website. RSS feeds of non-subject specific journals make discoverability a piece of cake nowadays. Using a combination of these methods, I don’t see any reason why your research can’t hit your intended audience. With respect to impact factor as a mode of quality assessment on an individual basis, I’m just gonna leave this here: http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2012/08/13/sick-of-impact-factors/. Along with this, it means that there’s no longer any excuse to conform to relevant policies and publish open access. Dissemination of research has never been easier in this digital age, and we have to kick the impact factor habit (RCUK has explicitly stated that IF won’t be used as an assessment metric). Alternatives such as ImpactStory and AltMetric are tools that are a step on the right path towards diving ‘true impact’ of research by providing more details about how the research has been picked up and distributed. Other things to consider with respect to cost are models like PeerJ, a new initiative where you can have a personal and unlimited publishing account, with open peer review, for $299; BioMed Central, PLoS and others offer fee waivers ..."