Tim Brody

Earlier Web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact

Abstract: The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly accessed through the Web, the number of times an article is downloaded can be instantly recorded and counted. One would expect the number of times an article is read to be related both to the number of times it is cited and to how old the article is. This paper analyses how short-term Web usage impact predicts medium-term citation impact. The physics e-print archive -- arXiv.org -- is used to test this.

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

Background Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publishers version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002–2006 in 1,984 journals. Methdology/Principal Findings The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and highest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). Conclusions/Significance The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.

PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services

To date many institutional repository (IR) software suppliers have pushed the IR as a digital preservation solution. We argue that the digital preservation of objects in IRs may better be achieved through the use of light-weight, add-on services. We present such a service – PRONOM-ROAR – that generates file format profiles for IRs. This demonstrates the potential of using third- party services to provide preservation expertise to IR managers by making use of existing machine interfaces to IRs.

The impact of OAI-based search on access to research journal papers

Intuitively, if a product is useful and has both a priced and a free version its total usage rate would be expected to be higher than if there is only a priced version. Evidence is emerging that this is true for online research journal papers. Authors need accessible online sites in which to deposit their published papers, and users need a means of discovering and evaluating those papers. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has now produced free software packages for building OAI-compliant institutional archives and OAI search services, including a citation-ranked search and impact discovery service. New data from this service shows that higher usage of free papers leads directly to a higher number of citations and thus greater research impact. Institutional archives need far more papers to be deposited, and one way of bringing this about is to implement institutional and national policies mandating the self-archiving of all funded research output in open access archives. This paper outlines why such policies are beneficial to researchers, their institutions, funders, and to research itself.

Evidence of Hypertext in the scholarly archive

This paper attempts to substantiate recent observations about the development of hypertext rhetoric in scholarly archives by reporting the results of some simple quantitative studies of the use by researchers of a major scholarly archive.

A Scalable Architecture for Harvest-Based Digital Libraries - The ODU/Southampton Experiments

This paper discusses the requirements of current and emerging applications based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and emphasizes the need for a common infrastructure to support them. Inspired by HTTP proxy, cache, gateway and web service concepts, a design for a scalable and reliable infrastructure that aims at satisfying these requirements is presented. Moreover it is shown how various applications can exploit the services included in the proposed infrastructure. The paper concludes by discussing the current status of several prototype implementations.

Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments

We describe “digitometric” services and tools that add value to open-access eprint archives using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Celestial is an OAI cache and gateway tool. Citebase Search enhances OAI-harvested metadata with linked references harvested from the full-text to provide a web service for citation navigation and research impact analysis. Digitometrics builds on data harvested using OAI to provide advanced visualisation and hypertext navigation for the research community. Together these services provide a modular, distributed architecture for building a “semantic web” for the research literature.

Practices and perspectives of research evaluation

The policy context for evaluation has been changing. There is growing recognition of the links between science, innovation, economic growth, health, etc. The funding for research has increased, but with some strings attached in the form of new models of governance of public research. Competition between universities and research laboratories has increased through research rankings, and there is increased emphasis on evaluation of institutions and their research output. National research funding has grown and average annual growth in real government R&D funding between 1995 and 2005 has varied between countries but has outpaced the inflation index by a few percent. However, in large countries which are big science producers, the growth has been somewhat constrained, which has caused quite a bit of angst in research institutions and the science system itself. Some of these constraints in research funding are linked to the changes in governance of public research and the shift from basic research funding to a process of governance of the science system. Under the old model, the government finances basic research through funding institutions. Universities and government laboratories have greater autonomy in setting scientific objectives and the scientific community is expected to take care of the funds, allocate them appropriately to different fields, and identify those projects that have scientific merit and the universities and government research laboratories where to conduct quality research. The main mission is to conduct quality research and educate students. This type of model is somewhat limited when it comes to evaluation and provides few incentives to measure the quality and the impact of research. In the new model, greater emphasis is placed on priority setting and some countries have formalized foresight and strategic planning processes. Greater attention is paid to the notion of return on investment because there have been significant changes in the way science is governed. Business and social groups play a greater role in government funding and the NIH is trying to find the gaps in its research portfolio, in collaboration with the scientific community, policy makers and the business community and also in consultation with advocacy and patient groups to help determine where the research dollar should be spent. There have been changes in the funding schemes to support research with an increase in competitive funding awards, especially in European countries and China, and an emphasis on collaborative activities targeting multidisciplinary research, and collaborative research bringing together investigators from universities and industries to move forward in a field oftentimes identified in the priority settings. There have been additional missions for research organizations. The idea that education and research are the main missions of universities and research organizations is still paramount but now a third mission