Research Assessment: Publish (in high impact journals!) or Perish

Have you ever wondered if the lead author in a collaborative paper is the brains behind it, or just lucky enough have his name first alphabetically? Or do you think that some authors have high citation counts simply because so many papers refute their work? Maybe there are even groups of researchers habitually citing each other to boost each other's rankings?

All of these questions are explored in "Communicating knowledge: How and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings" by the Research Information Network.

UK funding bodies use the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) as a metric to allocate research grants. The RAE focusses on number of works published and their number of times cited. Many researchers feel that this system unfair, and rewards those who "play the game" best, rather than those producing the best, most innovative work. Many of the researchers quoted in Communicating Knowledge feel that the RAE is having an unhealthy influence on how they work, write, cite and publish.

Some researchers' comments from the report:

• “With my collaborators and colleagues I have been organising so as to facilitate mutual citation.”
• “Head of Research in my institute actively discouraged book chapters and reviews because they were not seen as prestigious for RAE.”
• “Sadly, I find myself increasingly moving away from publishing in journals which are important and read by a lot of colleagues, to publishing in high status journals instead. This had led to much longer delays [and] thus adversely affects science, but I feel the pressure to do this in order to advance career wise.”

Would funding decisions in Ireland be fairer under an "objective" assessment like the RAE? Or is it meaningless and even damaging to try to compare research in this way?

Major Step Forward for Open Access

In a major step forward for the open access movement, Berkeley, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week announced a joint commitment to provide their researchers with central financial assistance to cover open access publication fees, and encouraged other academic institutions to join them.

The aim of the 'compact for open access publication equity' is to create a level playing field between subscription-based journals (which institutions support centrally via library budgets) and open access journals (which often depend on publication fees).
http://news.biomedcentral.com/t/13102619/100546726/1544241/0/

Irish-US fund worth $100m to be raised for tech sector. John Collins – Irish Times

A $100 MILLION (€68.6 million) venture capital fund is to be raised by a group of Irish-American businessmen as one of the key components in a strategy to rapidly grow Ireland’s technology sector. Investors in the first fund from Irish Technology Capital (ITC) include John Hartnett, chief executive of solar energy firm G24 Innovations; Richard Moran, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist; and Johnny Gilmore, chief executive of Sling Media. Mr Moran, an executive with Venrock, the VC firm founded by the Rockefeller family, said that the fact ITC would be Silicon Valley-based would allow it to “syndicate” its investments to other VC firms in the area.
Irish technology firms have traditionally found it difficult to tap into funding from the valley. ITC, which is a spin-out from a Silicon Valley-based network of Irish-American business people – the Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG) – is in talks with other VCs in the US and Ireland regarding possible investment in the fund. It also hopes to tap the €500 million innovation fund established by the Government as part of its smart economy strategy. The fund will make investments in the broad technology sector with a particular focus on communications, software, digital media and green technologies.
Following an agreement signed between ITLG, Trinity College, Dublin and University College Dublin last June, the three groups met at the Irish Embassy in Washington yesterday to advance details of how they can work together. They discussed plans for an innovation academy to provide PhD students with business skills, the creation of the $100 million VC fund and for a business development unit which would accelerate the transformation of university research into new companies and jobs. The group also gave a presentation to Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan by videolink. The presentation said Ireland should aim within five years to have 20 Nasdaq-quoted companies, two universities in the top 30 globally and 200,000 people working in the technology sector.
The group is building a landmark Irish Tech Centre in downtown San José, which will open next January. Development of the project will be led by Tom McEnery, a former mayor of Dublin’s twin city.
Mr Hartnett said it would not just be a physical space that could be used by Irish start-ups. “We will be able to surround those companies with a virtual services organisation to provide IT, human resources and legal advice, as well as introducing them to networks of companies they can do business with,” said Mr Hartnett. ITLG’s members are senior Irish and Irish-American executives working at major technology firms such as Cisco, Yahoo!, Apple and Intel.
Read the full article here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0911/1224254276275.html

New for PubMed®: Auto Suggest and Titles with Your Search Terms

One PubMed feature expands and another evolves. (Figures below show how these features are expected to look in the redesigned version of PubMed.)

PubMed's Also try feature was introduced to the right of the search results almost a year ago. It suggests searches previously done on PubMed. Many searchers are giving them a try. A similar feature, Auto Suggest, will soon work with the search box. Based on the terms you enter, some of the most popular PubMed searches will be displayed in a menu (see Figure 1). Click on one to run that search.There is a "Turn off" function at the bottom of the menu. This deactivates Auto Suggest for the search session. After eight hours of inactivity, it is reactivated. Future enhancements to My NCBI are expected to offer a setting to turn off Auto Suggest whenever you are signed in to My NCBI.

Titles with Your Search Terms
The PubMed discovery ad that started out as More PubMed Articles has evolved into Titles with your search terms. This ad, also to the right of the search results, displays links for article titles. Notice that your search terms are bolded. Up to three are shown and each can be expanded to see the full source information using a mouseover (see Figure 2). There is a link to "See more" which takes you to a ranked list of up to 20 titles. (Keep in mind this list is generated using your search terms, and there could be more than 20 titles in PubMed.) The ranking is based on the number of times PubMed searchers have viewed the single record display.

Read the full article and view images at the following link: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_autosuggest.html

Effective Investment in Research - the Irish Research eLibrary (IReL)

Many, many blogs, discussions and articles recently have been devoted to the subject of continued investment in Irish research. This week's Irish Times Innovation Magazine, for example, devotes several articles to the topic.

Part of the growing body of evidence providing support for continued funding for research in Ireland comes from the IReL Impact Survey, undertaken by the IUA libraries and the RCSI in Spring 2009. 5465 researchers responded to the survey.

IReL, the Irish Research eLibrary funded by SFI (Science Foundation Ireland) and the HEA (Higher Education Authority) includes such well-known names as Academic Press (ScienceDirect), Academic Search Premier, ACS, Blackwell Synergy, Business Source Premier, Datastream, IEEE, JSTOR, LexisNexis, Nature, Oxford University Press, SciFinder Scholar, Springer/Kluwer, Web of Knowledge, and Wiley InterScience.

Not surprisingly, given this content, 98% of researchers with a definite view agreed that IReL contributes to increased competitiveness of Irish research internationally, with one survey respondent commenting that in fact IReL is "by far the wisest and most important funding decision taken in Ireland for the third level sector. It truly enables research in Ireland."

Another survey respondent commented:

“This is a no-brainer. Having access to all the same information as our competitors means that we have caught up with and in many cases overtaken them. With the resources issue gone, it’s just a question of who has the best ideas.”

This last point is interesting. We have access to the resources now, but are we having the good ideas? Is there a correlation between the quality of information available, the input, and the quality of research being done, the output? Certainly, we believe that there is a link, but no study has ever managed to put figures on the link.

Until now.

In April 2009 a UK report from the Research Information Network (RIN) - E-journals: their use, value and impact - found that

“There is a clear correlation between levels of use of e-journals and research outcomes, with more usage linked to the number of papers published, number of PhD awards and income from research grants and contracts. This link is independent of institution size."

Professor David Nichols of the Center for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at University College London summarised the report's findings in a podcast at July's RIN event The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research:

1. Journals are the lifeblood of the UK research community.
2. The best researchers are also the best users of journals.
3. The volume of usage of ejournals is phenomenal.

The first finding matches the IReL evidence for Ireland, and the last finding is corroborated in Ireland by the detailed usage reports submitted regularly to IReL funders and IUA librarians. (In 2007, for example, over a quarter of a million articles were downloaded from just over 400 Science Direct journals across the seven Irish universities. Source: Usage of IReL Resources in 2007, Report of the Monitoring Group, October 2008, unpublished.)

Finding 2, that the best researchers are also the best users of journals, is of particular interest and merits further investigation. To that end, Phase 2 of the RIN project, to be completed in Spring 2010, is to involve interviews with approximately two hundred scientists, researchers and students.

In the meantime, Irish researchers are in no doubt as to the value of the e-resources currently available to them. Asked how a discontinuation of IReL would affect them, researchers said that it would be "a return to the stone age", "a devastating blow", "unthinkable". It is to be hoped that decision makers take note.