Guest Post, the second in a four-part series, by KC Lynch:

Part 2: Impact Measurements

Collection Development Librarians will tell you that while Faculty members don’t look at Impact Factors of journals before publishing, many graduate students do. Which means the sooner TWC starts generating impact data, the better.

Measuring the impact of scholarly journals is a tricky, controversial business. Most of the established methods are highly flawed, simply because counting citations is not the most reliable way to track a journal’s impact, and the reporting of citation statistics even less so.

That being said, the gold standard is still the Journal Citation Report (JCR), published by Thomson Reuters. The JCR provides an Impact Factor (IF) for each of its titles, which measures the frequency with which an average article has been cited in a particular year. The IF is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years.

The first goal of the JCR was to track the impact of scientific journals, and they track an impressive 7,300+ titles. The social sciences JCR is newer and consequently smaller, with only 2,200+ titles. Getting a new journal listed in either report is highly competitive: Thomson Reuters reviews over 2,000 new titles each year, and accepts 10-12% for inclusion in the report. Evaluation criteria include diversity of authorship and citation data. Which are exactly the qualities TWC hopes to strengthen by being listed in the report.

For journals like TWC, the JCR is not a perfect match. But is it still worth pursuing? Absolutely. For newer journals, the JCR is an investment in the long term.

In the short term, TWC might consider following in the footsteps of PLoSONE, the online, open-access journal by the Public Library of Science. PLoSONE uses a system called Article-Level Metrics (ALM) to measure the impact of specific articles, in an effort to evaluate individual articles rather than the journal as a whole:

“Article-level metrics place relevant data on each article to help users determine the value of that article to them and to the scientific community in general. Importantly, they provide additional and regularly updated context to the article, which currently includes data on citations, online usage, social bookmarks, comments, notes, blog posts about the article, and ratings of the article.”

To those of us who work in website development, this sounds a lot like a cousin of Google Analytics, which, believe me, is a complement. These are the tools we should be using to measure the impact of online journals. Where the print model was subject to measuring readership through circulation and subscription data, for example, the online journal should measure the same through usage data (page views, downloads, unique users, etc).

At PLoSONE, ALM data is having a positive effect on author satisfaction. In their 2010 report, after just one year of using the system, ALM was a significant factor in deciding to publish with PLoSONE, and 32 of 101 survey respondents reported finding the data useful in some way. And whether or not they have ALM to thank, in the same year, authors considering PLoSONE as a first choice journal rose from 23% to 37%.

On July 27, PLoS launched the Article-Level Metrics API to give researchers access to their statistics.

So, there are two ways for TWC to get Impact measurement data. The old-school method of JCR and the new technology of ALM. Both are worth doing: one for longevity, the other for immediacy. And, who knows, ALM may be the new JCR for the open-access digital world.

Guest Post, the first in a four-part series, by KC Lynch:

Part 1: What Authors Look for in a Publisher

It is a truth universally acknowledged that academics need to publish. Where they choose to publish is most often determined by the opinions of committee, professors, and leaders in their field. But how does a new journal get on academia’s radar?

One of TWC’s challenges is attracting diverse, international contributors. From the outside, academic publishing seems like an impenetrable mass that runs on reputation and word of mouth, and having exceptional content isn’t enough. What is needed is a multi-level approach, using both traditional methods honed by print publishing, and new technology solutions still in development. They’re not always graceful, but there are more ways to get into the hallowed halls than you might expect.

In Ithaka’s Faculty Survey 2009, over 3,000 faculty members from colleges and universities responded to the question: Which factors are most important to you in choosing a journal in which to publish? The overwhelming response (80%+) was readership within the field. Other factors, from most important to least, were publishing at no cost to the author (70%+), that measures have been taken to ensure the protection and safeguarding of the journal’s content for the long term (60%+), a highly selective editorial process (50%+), global accessibility (40%+), and free accessibility (30%).

Let’s consider each factor with regards to TWC with the goal of soliciting more high-quality submissions. Readership within the field, closely tied to reputation amongst academics, is the great white whale of scholarly publishing. It requires more than a simple solution, so we’ll come back to it later.

The fact that authors are concerned with fees for publishing is a direct response to the “author-pays” model employed by many digital journals. TWC, run entirely by volunteers, does not require contributing authors to pay to publish. Clearly, this needs to be advertised as a selling point.
It is also imperative to stress that TWC is here to stay. In the past, there was some question as to the permanence of online journals, as if the internet were a passing phase compared to the longevity of print. But nowadays, everyone who watches criminal procedurals on TV is convinced that not only is the internet here to stay, but “once you put it out there, it’s out there forever.”

This is a common misconception. In reality, websites fail all the time, and the attention span of users is less than 5 seconds. So if a page fails to load, they’ll be on to something else before you can fix the problem, and chances are they won’t be back.

The cost of such a failure is even greater for scholarly journals than for commerce sites, since the business of journals is based largely on citations. If a researcher looks up a cited article and ends up with “page not found,” the citation becomes useless, and the reputation of the journal suffers. So it’s absolutely critical that the article in question be available 24 hours a day, without fail.

TWC gives permission to libraries to copy all issues to their local servers, and use Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), providing proxy support, to ensure the persistence of URLs.

Academia offers additional options, like Portico, a digital archive devoted to the preservation of scholarly digital content. While Portico does not replace traditional backups, it does provide services in case of trigger events, like catastrophic system failure, or cessation of publishing. Archives like Portico extend the life of digital journals beyond their run, insuring cited articles can always be found.

Another factor authors consider before choosing to publish is a journal’s highly selective editorial process. For TWC, this is another obvious draw, as its content is decided by double-blind peer review.
Last but not least are questions of accessibility. While Ithaka reports that global and free access are not as important overall to faculty as they were three years ago, they are still important factors, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

TWC is an open-access (OA) online journal. Most of us know what that means, but it remains important to spell it out to avoid any criticism on the subject of academic rigor. So, let’s review: open access (OA) means that anyone, anywhere can read your content for free. It does not mean that everyone can create or manipulate content. To put it bluntly, TWC is not Wikipedia.

In addition to guaranteed quality of content, TWC, like most OA journals, allows contributing authors to retain copyright of their submissions. TWC therefore allows authors to reach a global audience without restriction to future publishing.

So in summary, there are four aspects of TWC that must be emphasized in any and all requests for submission: free to publish, a bullet-proof online presence, open access (not open content), and copyright retention.

But what about the white whale? How do we increase readership within the field, and therefore improve TWC’s reputation overall? I propose three different, if overlapping, approaches, coming up in subsequent posts: Impact Measurements, utilizing Librarians, and social networking.

Twice in the last two weeks, I’ve been introduced to technological innovations designed to expand the sensory purview of media consumption. In the first instance, I heard an ad on Pandora recommending (perhaps sarcastically?) that I pair my taste in music with my taste in wine. Then on Wednesday, a friend told me that researchers at the University of California were exploring ways to connect televisual phenomena to synthetic smells transmitted somehow into my living room. (As I Google to make sure I didn’t make up this conversation, it turns out that this phenomenon, alongside bronies, was recently covered in Wired.)

Needless to say, these developments excited my curiosity, and inspired me to reflect on the limits of media consumption that I see as desirable. I’m something of a conservative in this area — 3D, for example, holds little appeal for me, and my enjoyment of both music and wine is too great for me to seek out any streamlining of their ideally serendipitous interplay. Perhaps I was influenced at too vulnerable a stage by Theodor Adorno’s anxieties about the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. He feared that such a work, particularly as attempted by Wagner in opera, necessarily sacrificed the vast potential of individual disciplines, like music and storytelling, in the service of an authoritarian fantasy.

My own vision of the totally immersive artwork looks more like Whedon than Wagner, although fortunately, the Buffyverse has altered the politics of sensory overload in the opposite direction, by switching medium from television to comics. The story of the controversial Season Eight, the first comics season, was the most ambitious to date, and in my reading, the most fiercely critical of the authoritarian desires underlying every superhero narrative. This was made possible because the sheer amount of sensory stimulation was pared down and spatialized onto the page, thus laying bare the consequences of every aesthetic decision. While in television, it takes fans creating transcripts, screencaps, and gifs to approach this depth of focus, in the comics, that work is done for us, and we are asked to get straight to analysis.

Comics, I suppose, are my “endgame” medium for 21st-Century storytelling. I’d rather read a comic in my favorite beer and coffee-scented cafe than watch smellivision in a private chamber of the senses, where so many elements of my experience are pre-determined by a media owner. Perhaps this bears a relationship to my fannish approach to texts — I already enjoy my sensory experience of the texts we have, whether it’s the tears that come at those Sarah McLachlan moments (oh yes) or the crackling sound I swear I can hear when I see a young witch tap out on magic. These are the moments that I want to talk about with my friends after I’m finished with media consumption for the day, the moments that help me to anchor my experience of the story, my “gif” moments, if you will.

These, especially ratcheted up to being Sarah McLachlan moments, are manipulation enough for me. I’m not sure that my poor heart could take much more. So, television and music of the future, let me catch up to the emotional stakes currently on offer, before you program my sensory response mechanisms completely. I’ll be over here with my glass of water, the smell of Ohio summer in the air.