Authors paid by the impact factor? - it happens!

["Scott-Lichter, Diane" <diane.scottlichter@aacr.org>]

Learned Publishing, Issue 2, 2011, is now available.

>From the Editor

Authors paid by the impact factor?   it happens!

Yes it does. In China, at least. Our latest issue has a piece 
which, while bemoaning the outflow of good papers from China, 
actually gives the figures for payments which are made in some 
universities for successfully publishing in journals with 
"decent" impact factors (IFs) -- even to the extent of an 
"official" table giving the amounts for the various IFs. How much 
do you think it is for a paper in Nature or Science? -- No, it's 
more than that. The paper also list a number of necessary (but 
you may not think sufficient) things that have to happen to 
indigenous titles if such an outflow is to be stemmed. And of 
course, not everyone wants it to be!

And, talking of Impact Factors, we have an interesting piece from 
the Horse's Mouth, so to speak (I hope Thomson Reuters don't mind 
such a label), on exactly how the numerator of the IF is 
established, just in case you thought it was simple. And what 
about the denominator, you ask? Well, we're not indulging in 
salami publishing in LP. An article was published on that some 
time ago -- in another journal -- the reference is given, but I'm 
not going to publicise another journal here. There will not be, 
I'm sure, an article on how you divide one by the other.

But say your journal is not covered by such as Web of Science 
etc? This of course is the case with many journals from the Third 
World, but many others too. Don't despair, there are other ways 
of getting an evaluation. An article from Professor Zainab points 
the way, showing how they used Google Scholar and other methods. 
It always seems to me that this is a bit of a case of the "more 
the merrier" in that the more evaluation methods and metrics 
there are, the less any one will dominate -- which is good if you 
don't believe that any are fully sufficient to tell you what you 
really want to know.

Then there are three pieces focusing on use of what is published 
-- two surveys and an interesting and helpful innovation. The 
innovation is the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP), which, 
when fully operational, should take some of the grief out of 
aggregating all those Counter statistics from a range of 
publishers. Then Laura Cox reports on a survey on just how 
libraries use usage stats. Carol Tenopir, one of the doyens of 
measurement, and her team from Tennessee, report on how readers 
perceive journals -- we all know, for example, how important the 
actual and specific journal is to authors, but it turns out it's 
pretty important to readers too. Read the piece to see all the 
other aspects covered, as well as to find out what "conjoint 
analysis" -- the main method used -- actually is (perhaps you 
already know!).

"Data" is (or are) a rather topical issue (and we had a very good 
scene-setting article in January), and there's an article by 
Hailey Mooney just starting us off with a small survey seeing how 
a group of authors do cite (or rather don't) used data sets in 
the social sciences - I'm sure there'll be a lot more to come on 
this issue, as long as I can get key players to write it up.

Have you heard of CrossMark? From the CrossRef people - it's all 
about versions of record and how they can/should/might be 
maintained and how you will know that they are etc. Carole Anne 
Meyer from CrossRef takes you through what it is, and how it will 
be used -- this should be important and extremely helpful to all 
in all sectors of the scholarly communication community.

Last, but not least, there's the first in our series of "Selling 
to the BRIC". The first is on Russia (no way I can keep to the 
order of the acronym) from the people at the largest Russian 
agency, NEICON. Not only does it give some interesting stats and 
demographics, it charts the ways a publisher can try to enter 
this market with its journals. Some hopeful signs, but the 
message is clear -- when waiting for new subscriptions, don't 
hold your breath.

Plus, of course, the usual tranche of meaty book reviews.

And, there's a thoughtful editorial on publishing ethics from our 
new North American editor, the distinguished publisher (no, 
distinguished doesn't mean old) Diane Scott-Lichter. It even 
includes a cartoon -- are we ground-breaking or not?

  Alan Singleton
Editor, Learned Publishing
editor@alpsp.org

  All articles are free to all ALPSP and SSP members and to 
journal subscribers; in addition, editorials, reviews and letters 
to the Editors, as well as any articles where the author has 
taken up the "ALPSP Author Choice" OA option, are now free to 
all.  If you would like to receive an email alert or RSS feed 
every time a new issue goes online, all you have to do is sign up 
at http://alpsp.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp

To obtain free access to the journal, ALPSP members should access 
it via the ALPSP website .  If you do not have a username and 
password, please emailinfo@alpsp.org



Diane Scott-Lichter
North American Editor, Learned Publishing