What does Academia_edu’s success mean for Open Access? The data-driven world of search engines and social networking

What does Academia_edu’s success mean for Open Access? The data-driven world of search engines and social networking

With over 36 million visitors each month,
the massive popularity of Academia.edu is uncontested. But posting on
Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to
using an institutional open access repository, argues Gary Hall.
Academia.edu’s financial rationale rests on exploiting the data flows
generated by the academics who use the platform. The open access
movement is in danger of being outflanked, if not rendered irrelevant by
centralised entities like Academia.edu who can capture, analyse and
exploit extremely large amounts of data.

The ResearchGate Score: a good example of a bad metric

The ResearchGate Score: a good example of a bad metric

According to ResearchGate, the academic social networking site,
their RG Score is “a new way to measure your scientific reputation”.
With such high aims, Peter Kraker, Katy Jordan and Elisabeth Lex
take a closer look at the opaque metric. By reverse engineering the
score, they find that a significant weight is linked to ‘impact points’ –
a similar metric to the widely discredited journal impact factor. Transparency
in metrics is the only way scholarly measures can be put into context
and the only way biases – which are inherent in all socially created
metrics – can be uncovered.

Network-based Citation Metrics: Eigenfactor vs. SJR

Network-based Citation Metrics: Eigenfactor vs. SJR

Is the influence of a journal best measured by the number of citations it attracts or by the citations it attracts from other influential journals?

Number of Female Researchers in Germany Has Increased By 25 Percent Over the Past Five Years

Number of Female Researchers in Germany Has Increased By 25 Percent Over the Past Five Years

Over the past five years, the number of female researchers in Germany has grown far more rapidly than that of male researchers. Female-only publications are the most internationally collaborative while mixed gender publications are more interdisciplinary than the mono-gender ones, highlights a new study by Elsevier.