HBR's fee policy questioned

Found on Flickr - CC

Joshua Gans, chaired professor at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto questions whether changes to Harvard Business Review article fee policy should impact their participation to the FT's business school rankings.

While this is a long shot - FT has already said that they would keep HBR on the list of publications used for their ranking - the article raises good questions about access to research content.

Links to his original post, his article in FT and HBR's answer are available from his Digitopoly blog.

Update: Librarians chime in via Chris Flegg's [Bodleian Business Librarian at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford] article in the Financial Times (Oct. 23, 2013):
Access to research comes at a price

Open Access and Peer Review issues

John Bohannon, journalist at Science, sent a fake research paper under a fake name to several open access peer review journals. He reports on the experiment in Science: Who's Afraid of Peer Review  (INSEAD community only)

CREDIT: C. SMITH/SCIENCE

Unfortunately "Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction."

Some critique the paper for lack if its own academic rigor in not using a control group of subscription based journals to compare the acceptance/rejection rate, read: 

Open Access “Sting” Reveals Deception, Missed Opportunities .

Update Oct. 8, 2013: Read more reactions here or here

edX+Google = mooc.org

A new alliance in the ever growing field of MOOCs was announced on the Google Research blog:
The platform mooc.org is set to go live in the first half of 2014.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

edX press release. 

Google Scholar Metrics

The 2013 version of Scholar Metrics was released on July 24, 2013. It covers articles published between 2008 and 2012.

'Scholar Metrics currently cover articles published between 2008 and 2012, both inclusive. The metrics are based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar in July 2013. This also includes citations from articles that are not themselves covered by Scholar Metrics.'

More information... 

Altmetrics - an overview

Richard Cave, Director of IT and Computer Operations, Public Library of Science has released a paper titled: Overview of the Altmetrics Landscape.

Definition from the Altmetrics website

"Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship."

AJ Cann via Flickr

Infographic: World's Biggest Data Breaches

The Information is Beautiful site has released an infographic showing the World's Biggest Data Breaches (losses greater than 30,000 records) overtime, click on the bubbles to read more.

Top 10 journals by impact factor - Latest JCR is released

Thomson Reuters released its latest Journal Citation Report (2012 data)

• 10,854 titles appear in the 2013 release of JCR. 
• 379 journals will be posting their first Journal Impact Factor this year. 
• 67 titles were suppressed from this year's release. (methodology used to suppress titles)

"Suppressed titles were found to have anomalous citation patterns resulting in a significant distortion of the Journal Impact Factor, so that the rank does not accurately reflect the journal’s citation performance in the literature." 

Top 10 Journals in Business, Finance by impact:

1. Journal of Finance
2. Journal of  Accounting & Economics
3. Journal of Financial Economics
4. Review of Financial Studies
5. IMF Economic Review
6. Accounting Review
7. IMF Staff Papers
8. Journal of Financial Intermediation
9. Journal of Accounting Research 
10. Accounting Organizations and Society 

INSEAD community: login here to start using JCR. 

Registry of Research Data Repositories lauched

"The goal of re3data.org is to create a global registry of research data repositories. The registry will cover research data repositories from different academic disciplines. re3data.org will present repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. In the course of this mission re3data.org aims to promote a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data."

 

UK Survey of Academics

In partnership with the US Ithaka Survey of Academics, JISC and Research Libraries UK, the UK Survey of Academics 2012 has recently been released.

Starting point for research

9 Useful Educational Tools

Ned Potter is an Academic Liaison Librarian at the University of York and has created this great Prezi to suggest 9 educational tools to be used in research or teaching by academic (including Prezi itself).

Read the full article from the LSE blog