[first day of work]

Welcome to me...to the life of a *real* person and not a student (even if it was doctoral!).

Today is my first day of work and I've already found the stationary closet and have piled my desk with a myriad of fluorescent highlighters, coloured pens, pink and yellow post-its and even, yes, a pencil! I've located the coffee maker and the fridge and have settled in nicely. Now that those important first-day things are out of the way, I'm diving into the minefield of scholarly publishing - issues about open access, electronic or not or both, impact factors, citations and the like. Through my browsing I've come across The Scholarly Kitchen, an excellent blog on, well, all things scholarly and publishing. Today's blog post at the Kitchen hits a major question in academia today: what to watch. Should academics (publishers, researchers, writers) keep an eye on issues like those I mentioned above or should the focus move to the reader, funding bodies, "author talent" and the like?

Kent Anderson, author of this post at Scholarly Kitchen, mentions an article I read recently in Science on the nature of electronic publishing. That Science article noted that readers *use* (key word here) online resources rather differently from print ones:

"Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon."

Anderson has picked out some responses to the Science article and it's interesting to see the high value readers/users are putting on notions of accessibility, usability and personalisation:

"I]f a paper isn’t on G[oogle] S[cholar], and I haven’t seen it in another publication, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist. . . .

Basically, if I can’t download a “free” pdf, the paper doesn’t get referenced. I do go from time to time to the library for mission critical papers, but the time it takes to get a paper is on the order of 30 min to an hour. A massive waste of time.

[O]ften older papers aren’t worth referencing, the 80’s and 90’s probably saw more invalidation of old research than the entire preceding century in total (in the biological sciences anyway). And this decade will probably be more than the 80’s and 90’s combined, the pace of research is just that much faster, and that many more people doing it. You don’t reference a 1970’s paper that is half wrong, you reference the 1998 paper that examined the 70’s one and refined the concepts."

I wonder how these kinds of comments affect impact factors/"mono-metrics" and what this means for the new generation RAE which is supposed to be more fair.