For all disciplines -- but especially for disciplines that are more
book-based than journal-article-based -- it would be highly advisable
for authors to self-archive the metadata as well as the cited-references
lists for their books. That way, scientometric search engines like citebase
http://www.citebase.org/
will be able to harvest and link their reference lists, just as they do the
reference lists of articles whose full texts have been self-archived.
Books cite and are cited by books; moreover, books cite articles and are
cited by articles. It is already possibly to scrape together a rudimentary
book-impact index from Thompson-ISI's Web of Knowledge as well as from
Google Books and Google Scholar, but a worldwide Open Access database,
across all disciplines, indexing both the article output and the book
output self-archived in all the world's institutional repositories could
do infinitely better than that:
All that's need is to mandate institutional (author) self-archiving of
(1) the metadata and full-texts of all their article output along with
(2) the metadata and reference lists of all their book output.
We can even do better than that, because although many book authors may
not wish to make their books' full-texts OA, they can instead make the
full-texts Closed Access -- accessible only to scientometric full-text
harvesters and indexers (like google books) for full-text inversion,
boolean search, and semiometric analysis (text endogamy/exogamy,
text-overlap, text similarity/proximity, semantic lineage, latent
semantic analysis, etc.) -- without making the full-text text itself OA
to individual users (i.e., potential book-buyers) if they do not wish to.
This will help provide the UK's new metrics-based Research Assessment
Exercise (RAE) with research performance indicators better suited
for the disciplines whose research is not as journal-article (and
conference-paper) based as that of the physical, biological and
engineering sciences.
Can journal-based research impact assessment
be generalised to book-based disciplines?
Carr, L,, Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J.W., Champion, T. & Harnad, S.
(U. Southampton and U. Loughborough)
SUMMARY: The "impact" of academic research is typically measured
by how much it is read, used and cited, and by how much new work it
influences. Services that measure impact work well for journal-based
disciplines. Book-based disciplines can now benefit from online
tools and methods of impact analysis too.These analyses also predict
fruitful directions for future research, and so can inform research
assessment and funding. This project will extend tools for online
bibliometric data collection of publications and their citations
with the aim of testing and evaluating new Web metrics to assist
research assessment in book-based disciplines.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/bookcite.htm
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2005)
is available at:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Sat Jun 17 2006 - 15:26:08 BST