From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 22:21:41 -0600

I find this presentation of the metrics of scholarly publishing
confusing because it does not distinguish among different sectors
(STEM from humanities and social sciences, for instance) nor between
books and journals.

Does it make any sense at all to say that an article's value depends
on "number of copies sold"? Nor is there any real relationship between
the profit margin of a journal and the value of an article. If there
were, then commercially published journal articles would virtually all
be  more valuable than those published by non-profit publishers, which
is absurd.

Impact factors and "altmetrics" have played little to no role in
scholarly journal publishing in the humanities and social sciences, as
far as I can tell. They have nothing at all to do with scholarly book
publishing, where the prestige of the publisher's imprint serves as a
proxy for value.

What counts much more for books are reviews published in the leading
scholarly journals and the book prizes awarded by scholarly societies.
I doubt that many university presses measure value strictly by any
economic criterion like "number of copies sold" and certainly not by
profits made.

I hope the JEP's special issue will prove to be more enlightening and
less obfuscating than this advertisement for it is.

Sandy Thatcher


At 2:29 PM -0500 12/3/13, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> From: Maria Bonn <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 10:49:53 -0600
>
> Historically, the value of publication has been measured by success in
> the marketplace and impact of the publication, whether that impact be
> cultural or scholarly. The calculus of this value has been as
> straightforward as number of copies sold (documented most widely in
> "best seller" lists) and/or dollars in profit generated to the complex
> citation and referral counts that result in a scholarly "impact
> factor." As with so many areas of our cultural and intellectual lives,
> the widespread adoption of digital technology and networked
> communication (with its attendant social media practices) has
> disrupted our metrics of publishing value and has called for a
> revision of the ways in which that value is calculated. In some
> professional and social circles, page visits, link referrals, Google
> ranks, presence in the Twitter universe and other social media
> prominence, are now taken as seriously as scholarly citation and
> profit margins, a shift that raises questions for how scholars balance
> the emerging professional requirement for an online presences with the
> need for privacy and protected space for research. In addition, the
> value measure of pages visits and glances (where a quick hit might
> "count" for the same as an extended period of study and engagement)
> are still in the early stages of development. While we have seen the
> rise of "altmetrics" and "impact stories," weeks on the New York Times
> Best Seller List continue to indicate worthiness for attention and the
> case for scholarly job security continues to be made by citation based
> measures. In addition, the increased ease of collaboration and
> co-authoring, even across wide spans of time and space, make assigning
> authorial and impact "credit" both more compelling and more difficult.
> We are also still developing rubrics for calculating the broader
> social contribution of work that is made widely available via the Web.
> In the scholarly context this revision of measures of value continue
> to be embedded in disciplinary practices and prejudices, contexts that
> have a significant impact upon shaping evaluation metrics.
>
> The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) invites reflections and
> reportage on enduring, emerging and potential measures of publication
> value. We expect such discussions will be rooted in the publishing
> context (of value to whom, for whom?) and will address both
> short-comings and usefulness of the metrics under discussion. While we
> anticipate that our contributors will be attendant to changes wrought
> by digital technology and networked communication, we are also
> interested in metrics embedded within print culture, both those that
> endure and those that are no longer current.
>
> Publication is anticipated for late spring, 2014; final drafts will be
> due in April, 2014. Please send article ideas and indications of
> interest to the editor, Maria Bonn [log in to unmask] Please see the
> journal website for more information about the journal and the
> submission process.
>
> JEP articles are peer-reviewed at the request of the author, and
> peer-reviewed articles are identified as such in both the article and
> in the preservation metadata. Editorial decisions are otherwise made
> by the editor in consultation with the editorial board. If you
> yourself are not prepared to write on these topics but you know of
> others who should be invited to contribute, please send suggestions to
> the editor, as above.
>
> - See more at: http://www.publishing.umich.edu/2013/11/26/cfp-metrics-for-measuring-publishing-value-jep/#sthash.p7zTqVfL.dpuf
>
> Maria Bonn
>
> Senior Lecturer,
> Graduate School of Information and Library Science
> University of Illinois
>
> Editor,
> Journal of electronic Publishing
> (http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org)