OA discussion at BILETA 2017, Universidade do Minho, Portugal, focusing on legal journal publication. Co-authored with Catherine Easton and Abhilash Hair

1. Legal scholarship and OA publishing: developing
radical pathways to free, open models
Catherine Easton
Paul Maharg
Abhilash Nair
paulmaharg.com/slides

2. preview
1. Scholarship in the digital era: some pertinent research
2. REF and OA
3. The experience of editing an OA journal
4. Some editorial conclusions

3. why should we care about this?
What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated
after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had
turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and
specialists. The book had taken over as the transmitter of
European written culture, before scholars and educators had
had time to come to terms with its power and influence.
(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)

4. transforming features of digital…
• Replicability
• Mutability
• Connectivity
• Instantaneity (& the ‘nearly now’)
• Portability
• Identity
(Jones 2013, 162-65)

5. How does digital alter scholarship?
1. What’s digital?
Specific devices, networks, assemblages? Technical, educational, research
affordances, modes of text and search, specific skills, competences, practices,
environments?
2. How does digital alter social?
Eg distributed communities, socio-material understandings, means of production
& modes of use
3. How does digital (+ social) alter scholarship and literacies?
Eg artefacts and practices, formal and informal contexts of research, visual
artefacts, digital curation.
4. How does digital + social + scholarship encourage metricization of our working
lives, and what can we do about it?

6. existing impact: how we are judged
Existing filters:
•Peer-review
•Citation counting
eg h-index
•Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

7. existing impact: how we are judged
• … of a journal: A measure of the average number of citations
to articles published in science & social science journals in a 3-
year period (Eugene Garfield, ISI). Calculated annually for the
journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Journal Citation
Reports.
• Calculation: number of times articles were cited in indexed
journals divided by number of items published in journals.
• Pressure on authors to enter high-ranked journals
• Pressure on journals to stay high-ranked

8. existing impact: how we are judged
BUT…
•JIF is easily gamed:
http://bit.ly/1uYDPgE
•And gives inaccurate views of
journal quality:
http://bit.ly/1Ddo8Be

9. … hence altmetrics
See altmetrics.org:
‘the creation and study of new metrics based on the
Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship’

10. altmetrics manifesto
‘With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two
opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and
bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-
review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research
Notes or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for
identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from
altmetrics.
Unlike the JIF, altmetrics reflect the impact of the article itself, not its venue. Unlike
citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of influential
but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed. Some have
suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite.’
altmetrics: a manifesto -- http://bit.ly/1tldeJA

11. what might altmetrics look like?
Altmetrics: a manifesto – http://bit.ly/1tldeJA

12. Citation analysis – differences between tools?
• Web of Science should not be used alone for locating citations to an author or
title.
• Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of
valuable citations not found in Web of Science;
• Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of
citations in document types not covered by ISI citation databases;
• Scopus and Google Scholar may assist in providing a more comprehensive
picture of the extent of international and interdisciplinary nature of
scholarly communication of and among researchers; and
• Google Scholar has several technical problems that users should be aware
of in order to accurately and effectively locate citations.
• The selection of the database(s) for locating citation is field-dependent.
g,KidukandMeho,LokmanI.CitationAnalysis:AComparisonofGoogle
olar,Scopus,andWebofScience.,2006.In69thAnnualMeetingofthe
ericanSocietyforInformationScienceandTechnology(ASIST),Austin
),3-8November2006.[Conferencepaper],
://eprints.rclis.org/8605/

13. …which is also related to the Open movement,
in data & scholarship
Eg
•Datacite
•DASH (Harvard)
•Caselaw
•Ravel Law
Further reading:
http://bit.ly/1LgPtbo

14. OA vs commercial access
• OA that isn’t really OA, eg Nature/Macmillan’s SciShare:
• https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/12/03/natures-
fauxpen-access-leaves-me-very-sad-and-very-
angry/#comment-473695
• Commercial take-over of OA resources, eg Elsevier > SSRN.
See Maharg’s blog @
http://paulmaharg.com/2016/05/19/ssrn-sells-out-to-
elsevier/

15. • ‘Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project on peer-
reviewed publications between 1980 and 2006, we show that women are
systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of
variables including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus,
theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation.’
• ‘Articles authored by women are systematically less central than articles
authored by men, all else equal. This is likely because (1) women tend to cite
themselves less than men, and (2) men (who make up a disproportionate share of
IR scholars) tend to cite men more than women. This is the first study in political
science to reveal significant gender differences in citation patterns and is
especially meaningful because citation counts are increasingly used as a key
measure of research's quality and impact.’ Maliniak et al 2013
results from analytical literature?

16. what can legal education researchers do?
• Acknowledge the ceaseless emergence of
technology, and engage with it as widely as our time
& energy allows
• Base our practices on community and collaboration
• Be open to diverse, global voices
• Be Open in teaching and research

17. Finch Report & REF
• The Finch Report – transition to open access
• Rationale – ‘publicly funded’ research should be
accessible to the public
• Stern Report agrees, as do almost all scholarly
reports on the subject

18. challenges
• Percentage of OA journals; slight uptake, but long way to go (for
e.g., over 1/3rd
of Springer OA journals listed in 2015 Journal
Citation Reports)
• Non-UK journals
• ‘Gold OA’ – stealing from Peter to pay Paul?
• Fees – $8-$3,900 in some ‘top ranking’ journals Solomon & Bjork
(2012) (NB: these are mostly science journals)
• ‘Capping’ fee? Regulation? Non-UK journals?

19. ‘burdens’ of OA?
• The true spirit of OA – open access!
• True costs of OA publishing: exemplar of cost
efficient true OA publishing – EJLT, EJOCLI
• BUT, staff time…

20. what can institutions do?
• Workload considerations
• More recognition for OA journals
– Aiming for ‘higher-impact’ selective journals means only 5% of articles
of UK researchers are in Gold OA Van Noorden (2012)
– (Distorted) notions of ‘quality’?
• Further incentivise publishing in OA journals
• Clearer guidelines for internal REF audits/selection
• Role of BILETA and other scholarly bodies?

21. references
Cheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E., Chisholm, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: A systematic
review, Academic Medicine. 88, 6, 893-901.
Holmes, K. (2014). Going beyond bibliometric and altmetric counts to understand impact.
http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/2014-05/going-beyond-bibliometric-and-altmetric-
counts-understand-impact#sthash.4stanFFN.dpuf
Jones, C. (2013). The digital university: a concept in need of definition. In R. Goodfellow, M.R.Lea, eds, Literacy
in the Digital University. Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. SRHE,
Routledge, London, 162-172.
Jardine, L. (1996). Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, London.
Konkiel, S. (2014) Playing with altmetrics. http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/altmetrics-
services/#more-3175
Maliniak, D., Powers, R., Walter, B.F. (2013). The gender citation gap in International Relations. International
Organization, 67, 4, 889-922. http://bit.ly/1yYFxym

22. Email: c.easton@lancaster.ac.uk
abhilash.nair@strath.ac.uk
paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides