Storm in a teacup or dark conspiracy?

I'm cross-posting (sort of) my take on Shelley Batts' experience with Wiley and copyrighted figures.

Here's the short version:

The fact is, though, the whole thing is most probably down to an editorial assistant in London doing her job a bit too eagerly. Maybe it was six thirty, she’s had a tough day, figures that it’s better to err on the side of caution and send Shelly the stock ‘stop infringing our copyright’ email.

Here's the full post on Nature Network.

Eigenfactors

The Bergstrom lab's Eigenfactors site has just come out of preview mode and you can now query the whole dataset.

Eigenfactors are a novel alternative to journal impact factors. They're calculated using random walks through a network of citations:

The Eigenfactor algorithm corresponds to a simple model of research in which readers follow chains of citations as they move from journal to journal. Imagine that a researcher goes to the library and selects a journal article at random. After reading the article, the researcher selects at random one of the citations from the article. She then proceeds to the journal that was cited, reads a random article there, and selects a citation to direct her to her next journal volume. The researcher does this ad infinitum.

The amount of time that the researcher spends with each journal gives us a measure of that journal’s importance within network of academic citations.

One advantage of this approach is that it can handle the fact that different disciplines have different citation patterns:

The average article in a leading cell biology journal might receive 10-30 citations within two years; the average article in leading mathematics journal would do very well to receive 2 citations over the same period.

The list of the top 10 journals by eigenfactor looks pretty much as you'd expect - Nature and Science are sitting pretty at the top, natch.

One issue: in an attempt to include more material from the social sciences the eigenfactor dataset includes articles from newspapers and popular magazines. As newspaper articles don't typically have reference lists attached I'm not sure how they are incorporated into the network, but in any case don't they skew eigenfactors towards those journals that have the best press releases? Could I start a Journal of Sensational Medicine and start publishing pseudo-scientific quackery, be spurned by academia but have a high eigenfactor simply because I feed the London Lite headlines?

(via Three Toed Sloth)

PLoS One / Postgenomic mashup

Chris Surridge has an interesting post over at the PLoS blog about the comments (or the lack thereof) on PLoS One papers. He mentions one paper in particular that has a long discussion thread associated with it on Gene Expression but no real comments on the actual PLoS One site.

As a temporary solution (?) to the problem of blog comments not being immediately accessible from the paper, summaries of notable manuscripts are going to be posted to the PLoS publishing blog with open comment threads. Based on the three posts already up I think this is a terrible idea.

Partly this is personal preference - I hate blogs that just replicate tables of contents - but more importantly I think that it misses the point.

People like the GNXP folks have taken the time and trouble to build up a loyal community that fosters debate and to create an environment in which visitors enjoy interacting with the site and with each other. Sticking up an abstract or two on your own blog just isn't going to compete with that, doesn't matter how much traffic you get.

Blog properly - engage your audience - or don't blog at all. It's a personal communication medium, that's one of the reasons why people feel more comfortable commenting in a blogging environment. A link and an abstract on a publisher's blog isn't personal, it's an advert. The PLoS One blogs are generally a good read at the moment, don't ruin them.

I'm not just PLoS bashing here: I like the ideas behind PLoS One and we do the same 'if we blog the abstract then people will comment!' thing at Nature on some blogs (the ones I don't read any more). The intention is good, it's just misguided, IMHO.

Anyway, I think that a better solution would be to embrace the existing science blogosphere and to explore ways of working with it more closely. As a proof of concept, here's a Greasemonkey script that adds science blog trackbacks to PLoS One.

It's doesn't look particularly nice, mainly because I didn't have time to style things very well. Feel free to do with it as you will, though (you could get it working with PLoS Two, for a start).