Open Access - a Netherlands' perspective

Wouter Gerritsma's blog, WoW! Wouter on the Web carries a YouTube video in which a number of senior scholarly figures from the Netherlands make statements about the virtues of Open Access. As Wouter says, it's a pretty boring video (spoken in Dutch with English sub-titles) but, from my point of view, the worst thing about it is the lack of vision in the statements. Here, OA is viewed simply as consisting of open archives (or repositories), and these are the kind of people who are actually involved in making decisions about the future of scholarly communication. Not a word about free, OA journals when, for a country the size of the Netherlands, creating a pool of such journals would be very much cheaper than funding repositories.

When are the so-called 'leaders' of the academic and research communities going to understand what is at stake here? To remain in the grasp of the commercial world, with ever-rising 'author charges' or denial of archiving rights, or to break free and begin to take advantage of what the technology now offers?

Journal ranking - ISI, etc.

Following ISI's introduction of a 5-year Journal Impact Factor measure, I took another look at the position of Information Research and found that its 5-year JIF is 1.309, which ranks it 16th out of 56 in ISI's rather curious list. However, when we look at the 'general purpose' LIS journals, leaving out the niche journals, like Scientometrics, and those journals that are not really in the LIS field, like MIS Quarterly, and ARIST, which is an annual serial rather than a journal, we find IR in the fifth position, headed by Information Management, JASIST, IP&M, and Journal of Documentation.

IR's climb up the ranking lists is recognized by the Australian Research Council's draft journal ranking for its Excellence in Research initiative (which will form the basis, if I understand things aright, of its equivalent of the UK Research Assessment Exercise) - IR appears as an A* journal, along with those mentioned above.

Thanks to John Lamp of Deakin University for making the list available.

New from Journal Citation Reports

This was picked up from Wouter Gerritsma's blog, WoW! Wouter on the Web

Thomson Reuters are upgrading the journal citation reports to provide:

--Eigenfactor™ Metrics, which are based on the network of journal to journal relationships
--five-year Impact Factor
--journal Self Citations – their contribution to the Journal Impact Factor calculation.
--graphic displays of Impact Factors, and
--Rank-in-Category tables for journals covering multiple disciplines.

More information at Wouter's site and from Thomson Reuters' press release