Stories by Hadas Shema

A while back I covered a study called "From funding agencies to scientific agency," by researchers from Indiana University's Department of Information and Library Science (Bollen, Crandall, Junk, Ding & Börner, 2014) which suggested an alternative for today's method of allocating research funds using peer review.

Last post we talked about traditional peer review, which is at least single-blinded. This time we will focus on Open Peer Review (OPR). The narrowest way to describe OPR is as a process in which the names of the authors and reviewers are known to one another.

My PhD mostly dealt with research blogs from ResearchBlogging.org (RB) an aggregator of blog posts covering peer-reviewed research. In this article, we (Prof.

Peer review was introduced to scholarly publication in 1731 by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which published a collection of peer-reviewed medical articles.

One of the challenges we face when using alternative metrics is the interpretation of what we measure.  This is even more confusing than interpreting traditional citation impact (which is challenging and confusing in itself) because "altmetrics" is an umbrella term for a wide range of activities.

With over a billion views, TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) talks are a huge business. There are two main TED conferences a year the TED conference and the TEDGlobal, and a large number of satellite conferences (TEDx) all over the world.

When in trouble or in doubt, invent new words. We have bibliometrics and scientometrics from the Age of Print. Now they are joined by informetrics, cybermetrics, webometrics and altmetrics, which might not be an accurate term, but it’s sticky (more than social media-based complimentary metrics, that’s for sure).

Funding agencies allocate funds for scientific research mainly based on peer-review of research proposals.  In 2010, more than 15,000 researchers peer-reviewed more than 55,000 proposals.

I  haven’t written about altmetrics so far. Not because it’s not a worthwhile subject, but because there’s so much I don’t know where to begin.