A blog by Ross Mounce
-
Scopus: caught-out and shirking responsibility
In December last year, it was widely publicized e.g. in Science magazine [1], that Scopus has been instrumental in legitimizing publication scams whereby authors pay to bypass real scholarly peer review and have their work published on a website that looks like a real scholarly journal but is in fact not a proper journal, merely…
-
How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals?
How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals? To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals. My first port of call was the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Although DOAJ certainly isn’t a complete listing of open access journals, as is…
-
Resilience: another advantage of openly-licensed content
As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services…
-
Central Tendency, Citation Distributions, and Springer Nature (Part 2)
“In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode.” — Wikipedia. In the UK, we teach school kids how to calculate the…
-
Pricing, Citation Impact, and Springer Nature (Part 1)
On the 26th October 2021, Springer Nature published version 1 of a (not peer-reviewed) “white paper” titled “Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals” by Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Jessica Monaghan, David Stuart, and Susie Winter. Springer Nature present cherry-picked analyses with an experimental design of…