Open access and impact factors ( was: Open access and the ALA)

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

In the posting below, Becky Smith notes:

"If open access means little or no impact in ISI, then there is an
opportunity as a profession (or another scientific scholarly organization)
to create its own impact index..."

I realize that this doesn't have a lot to do with Rick Anderson's original
posting, but I have experimented a bit with personal impact factors beyond
those one might find in the ISI citation indices. And perhaps my
investigations might be relevant to determining the impact of open access
publications.

Here's one example of some work I did on what I call a "personal citation
index" (this example relates to a paper that appeared in Library Trends):

http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/serper-2.htm

Interestingly, my "personal citation index" concept has been cited in
several scholarly papers. The "interesting" thing about this is that my
report on my research in this area has been self-published on the Web.
This is completely non-peer-reviewed, i.e., the ultimate in open access
publication. See the following for some comments on this phenomenon:

http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/pci-2.htm

I welcome comments....

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: Smith, Becky [mailto:becky@uiuc.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 7:56 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Open access and the ALA

Samuel and other Colleagues:
 
Joseph Zumalt, Yoo-Seong Song and I have an article published in RUSQ in
the Winter 2003 issue; it came out 2 weeks ago.  We were given the choice
of ALA having exclusive rights or the other option of retaining copyright
ourselves.  The latter looked as though it would not be carried by any
indexing, but we were assured this would not be the case after some
inquries with the editors.  We noticed that RUSQ offered other authors
last year her/his own copyright which is why we chose to get our own, and
agreed to give permission granted for nonprofit, educational use.  
Because ALA doesn't pay for articles submitted, we didn't mind this clause
at all.
 
I might add that ALA Editions offers sharing of copyright between the
organization and the authors.
 
In terms how much is online, RUSQ and other related is available through
Library Lit or other means.  I happen to work at an institution whereby
quite a few of our customers are students enrolled (as well as faculty) in
library and information science and/or have professors in related
disciplines, so Lib Lit is a must here.
 
Haworth, another dominant publisher of library and other business-related
literature, offers e-journal access, yet none of their publications do not
have any impact at all in ISI, which is a sore point with some of us here.  
If open access means little or no impact in ISI, then there is an
opportunity as a profession (or another scientific scholarly organization)
to create its own impact index, which is what I believe Jean Claude
Gu�don of the University of Montreal has suggested.  What a concept!
 
Best wishes,
Becky Smith
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
becky@uiuc.edu