Open Access Review and Publishing

I've seen two articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week that testify to the shake-up that's happening around issues of open-access review and publishing. 

As Scholarship Goes Digital, Academics Seek New Ways to Measure Their Impact describes an approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—that aims to "measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked .... Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented ... 'It's like we have a fresh snowfall across this docu-plain, and we have fresh footprints everywhere ... That has the potential to really revolutionize how we measure impact' .... It's a way to measure the 'downstream use' of research."

As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsever Defends Its Practices describes an on-line pledge by 2,400 scientists and mathematicians not to publish or do any editorial work --including refereeing papers--for the the world's largest scientific journal publisher. The scholars who have signed the pledge think that the cost of supporting the publishing infrastructure has become too high: "researchers can now evaluate and review one another's papers on open Web sites. 'That would be far cheaper than anything a commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective.'"