ANALYSIS AND NEWS
MOVING IN NEW DIMENSIONS
Article-level innovations continue to unite and disrupt the scholarly publishing scene, writes Stephanie Dawson
F
or many years, the scholarly journal or book series was the most important context for an article. The journal provided the framework in which an article was understood and valued – an exclusive venue, an expert editor, or an important society lent gravitas to a researcher’s work. To flip through the pages of the newest issue in the library was to put an article in the context of other ideas and authors in a topical selection. This context environment was rated and ranked with a journal ‘impact factor’ and readers used this to orient themselves in their communities. And of course the journal context continues to play a role for researchers. But the internet has disrupted this framework of understanding with powerful new tools for search, discovery and evaluation on the level of the article and the individual. Speed and efficiency – combined with the explosive growth in journal and article numbers – have completely changed how researchers find information.
They no longer first encounter an article within the context of a journal, bound between glossy covers. They search for key words on
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global search platforms such as Google, Baidu, or PubMed. They find an article within the context of this search and use clues from the metadata such as title and abstract to assess whether it is relevant to them. High-profile journal brands may continue to be indicators of quality, but researchers also rely on affiliations, funding body, number of citations or altmetric score to evaluate an article.
Context has become multi-dimensional, publisher-independent and intrinsic to the article.
Publishers have responded in innovative ways to this new reality. At the recent annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishers there were numerous sessions on the importance of persistent identifiers to make content more discoverable and provide new kinds of context for readers. ORCID has been a central, independent player ensuring persistent identifiers for authors make sure that their publications are correctly attributed. It is a helpful context for the reader in evaluating an article to know whether the author has written one or 300 articles on a certain subject. Many publishers have begun requiring
an ORCID ID at submission and then automatically updating the author’s ORCID profile after publication. It has therefore become easier than ever to browse an interesting author’s works – without ORCID, this remains a challenge for authors named Wang or Smith. Persistent identifiers are a structural way for publishers to connect and interconnect their articles within the greater fabric of the scientific literature.
A similar movement is taking place on the level of funding bodies. CrossRef has introduced the Open Funder Registry to standardise a funder taxonomy and add funder information to the article metadata. The European OpenAIRE project is further helping researchers to link their research results with funding post- publication via institutional repositories.
‘Article-level innovations will continue to unite and disrupt’
These efforts would allow a reader to filter searches by funder as a quality criterion. This is relatively new and is quite a bit of extra effort for publishers and authors, so some ask what is in it for them. The answer is more context at the article level, which translates to more discoverability and quality assurance in a global flood of nearly two million publications per year.
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