There’s little chance that a small, independent publishing house or research society can offer authors the same efforts and reach that come with the economies of scale inherent to the biggest publishing houses. Oxford University Press, for example (full disclosure: my employer), already has in-house a large, global marketing team, augmented by a well-staffed publicity group, charged solely with reaching out to traditional media outlets as well as driving attention through social media channels including a highly-trafficked blog and more than half a dozen widely-followed Twitter accounts. Like nearly every other recent development in the world of journal publishing, this would favor the bigger publishers, further entrenching the current power structure. Journal publishers will find themselves with a new means of differentiation, of separating oneself from one’s competitors in the eyes of authors: “Come publish your paper with my journal, and here’s the marketing campaign we’ll mount on your behalf.” You can almost picture the Mad Men style pitch from competing journals in the laboratory conference room (though hopefully a less smoke-filled atmosphere, unless the fume hoods are on the fritz that day). Each university will likely build a publicity department (or expand their current one) if it means an increase in grant funding. At the same time, anything that smacks of advertising is likely to induce a kneejerk reaction from the academic community, which, in principle if not in action, often considers the pure pursuit of knowledge to be above such sordid behaviors.īut if altmetrics take hold in the funding and career structure of academia, then expect marketing efforts to massively ramp up. They are legitimate efforts to disseminate information, and valuable services that authors appreciate. It’s unclear where these sorts of activities would fall along the acceptable/gaming spectrum. The range of activities includes full-blown press conferences, press releases, setting up interviews with major media outlets, blog posts, tweets, social media campaigns, Google adword campaigns, email marketing campaigns, advertising, awards, etc., etc. Journal publishers regularly do a tremendous amount of work to draw attention to articles. He doesn’t begin to touch on the promotional efforts that are provided by scholarly journals (which should perhaps be added in as number 61 on this list). Those extremes offer pretty clear white/black, good/bad scenarios, but the activities listed in between start to fall into shades of grey.Īdie’s examples all revolve around the actions of the researcher herself. If you don’t want others to hear about the results and to drive future research, then why bother working on it in the first place? But where do you draw the line between good faith efforts to spread knowledge and cynical attempts to game the system? Adie offers a variety of scenarios, from a researcher sending out a tweet about her new paper to a researcher purchasing retweets from a shady promotional service. Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric, recently posted an insightful look at the notion of gaming altmetrics.Īdie rightfully argues that it’s perfectly reasonable for a researcher to want to draw attention to his own work. But identifying actual gaming - what behaviors are acceptable and what should be considered cheating - is not as straightforward as you might think. The power of publicity efforts in driving performance in these metrics offers journals a potential new arena for differentiation and added value for authors.Īny time the subject of altmetrics comes up, the question of gaming is immediately raised. Altmetrics could provide a paradigm-shifting toolset that radically remakes the way we judge the value of a researcher’s work, or the field could prove to be merely the latest flavor-of-the-month, riding the hype cycle to an eventual niche role in the periphery of the research career structure.If the former, then a major hurdle to overcome is a reliance on factors that can be easily gamed: measurements of interest and attention. The ultimate value of altmetrics remains an open question.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |