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In reply to The Fiorillo index -- a new index to attempt to spot citation gaming

Dear all

having created a bit of confusion about the Fiorillo index before the summer break, with a couple of colleagues who were also sorry to be "suspected" by the Fiorillo index of having done citation gaming and orchestration, I wanted to delve deeper into the issue and apologize to my colleagues by writing a small note, in which I correct Fiorillo's conclusions and suggest not to apply this index except for statistical or very preliminary studies, to be integrated with in-depth qualitative analyses of suspected cases. I hope the reading is interesting.   See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383532645

 regards, MC

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In reply to My doc on STR, incomplete, myself leaked, version 1

Yeah, you ``NLP'' dude in Endicott, New York, United States of America...

Read it again!

LOL!

Best (for whatever!), and permanently get lost, OK?

--Ajit

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In reply to The Fiorillo index -- a new index to attempt to spot citation gaming

Ioannidis has proposed (after Fiorillo) a very similar index (the inverse of FI) as a marker of small scale orchestration, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19219 I think one has to be cautious though about interpreting values that are not extreme.

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In reply to The Fiorillo index -- a new index to attempt to spot citation gaming

See in the main post the image posted as attachment "FiorilloScore-Rank-Ioannidis.jpg" where you can see that being in the top 100 000 scientists in the world according to Ioannidis Stanford ranking is incompatible with having FiorilloScore>40 ----- hence FiorilloScore is a very quick tool to spot low quality scientists, independently on their discipline, with a calculation far simpler than the Ioannidis calculation involving a 5 dimensional parameter space.  Moreover, many scientists do not enter in that database, and for them the Fiorillo score is even more appropriate.

You also find as attachment another figure, "FiorilloScore-selfcitations.jpg" where a correlation is attempted with % of self-citations. There is a clear trend to have higher Fiorillo index if you have very high % of self-citations, confirming that the Fiorello index is a good mix to spot citation gaming and also self-citation excesses...

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In reply to thanks

Thank you John for your feedback!
I agree that Clarivate is supposed to be "publisher-neutral data" as stated on their website, nevertheless, they handle a paid and rather opaque platform which is not compatible with Open Science principles. There are alternative open projects, like, for example, OpenAlex, which could be used in the future.

I also agree that getting a lot of traction without indexation could be a problem, but anyway, I believe that a forced alignment with commercial indices is not a good long-term solution for Diamond OA initiatives.

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In reply to John,

I understand the principled argument.  With Clarivate, although they are in this space they are disconnected from the publishing process itself.  I view them as less of a problem but perhaps I haven't considered this aspect as fully as you have.  

Unfortunately my sense is that the indexing drives many decisions, globally.  Breaking from it completely might make it a challenge for the journal to really gain traction with the community, to the point where it can genuinely compete with some of the top journals.  Nevertheless, I wish it the best of luck and will certainly pay attention to it.  

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In reply to John,

Another point that I forgot to mention is that we follow, along with many institutions and organizations in the World, San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment SF DORA which promotes quality over quantity assessment, notably, we need to avoid bibliometric characteristics.

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In reply to regarding the indexing

John,

Thank you for your interest!

The core motivation behind this non-indexation with these citation databases is the conflict of interest and of values. These databases are owned by Elsevier and Clarivate, for-profit organizations and not by the scientific community, therefore I see a conflict of interest on their side to promote Diamond Open Access journals which chase ethical, open and free publishing strategy.

Since we believe that the scientific community can judge on their own the relevance of a journal and its quality, we do not really need Elsevier to tell us which journal is good and which one is not. In what concerns the administration, it is more tricky, but in France at least, a lot of decisions on promotion and hiring are made by the academics, so the administration normally follows our recommendations.

There are also several stories about increasing external pressure from these databases on the number of papers, which we would like to avoid.

In conclusion, it is hard to win or even survive in this publication "game" if the rules are written by Elsevier and the referee is also Elsevier. We prefer to offer different values and establish a more sustainable set of rules.

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In reply to John,

Vladislav,

  Thank you for the very informative response, I appreciate it.

  I am curious about the fact that you do not plan to be indexed in Scopus or the Web of Science.  Was that a financial decision, or are there other considerations?

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In reply to please tell me more about JTCAM!

John,

Thank you for your interest!

Briefly, JTCAM is the first (and as far as I know, the only) Overlay Diamond Open Access journal in mechanics. Overlay means that it exploits open archives, such as arXiv, the French HAL, and Zenodo, to store papers and version control.

The authors, after sharing preprints on open archives, submit a link to the preprint, and the review process is classical and is handled by Associate Editors (there's no EIC). The review can be single-blind or not-blind-at-all depending on the choice of the reviewer. However, whatever the choice, the review is published alongside the paper. See, for example:

• Audoly, B. and Lestringant, C. (2023). An energy approach to asymptotic, higher-order, linear homogenization, Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics [doi]
• Audoly, B., Lestringant, C., Seppecher, P., Pasini, D., Ganghoffer, J.F., Brassart, L. Review of "An energy approach to asymptotic, higher-order, linear homogenization" [HAL]

• The journal is indexed in the DOAJ and we do not plan to be indexed in Scopus and Web of Science.
• The journal is free for authors and readers (no APC = Diamond Open Access) and relies on the existing infrastructure arXiv, HAL, and we are hosted by a French platform Episciences.org.
• Associate editors are elected by the journal's Board which includes a Scientific Advisory Board, Editorial Board, and Technical Board.
• We have a Data Editor who checks the data consistency and helps the authors to share their data, here's a [Zenodo community]

Regarding the real cost of publishing, if we do not count the [Episciences.org] platform and the cost of arXiv and HAL, it resides in very high standards of copy-editing that we ensure:

• All plots are in vector graphics.
• All references are triple-checked and whenever available, we provide not only DOI but also sustainable OA links including (HAL, arXiv, etc.).
• All tables and equations should be consistent and well-formatted.

For the moment, at the start, we have a dedicated Technical Board which takes care of that, but we are about to improve this point with some minor funding from French institutions.

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In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)

Thank you for this interesting debate.  From my experience about other publishers, which are often called predatory, or just about at the border with predatory, the question is proliferation of email spamming, robots finding (weak) reviewers, fast publication, all this is against quality.    Many journals are run by secretaries, not scientists.

See about MPDI for example https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publi...

Regards

Mike  

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In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)

Thank you for this interesting debate.  From my experience about other publishers, which are often called predatory, or just about at the border with predatory, the question is proliferation of email spamming, robots finding (weak) reviewers, fast publication, all this is against quality.

See about MPDI for example https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publi...

Regards

Mike  

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In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)

Excellent piece of text John. My Editor experience is very limited but I see many common patterns. One that I keep seeing more and more lately is that selfish reviewer that does not give a useful review and goes on to list a large number of papers (all of which have him/her as a co-author) for the authors to cite. I have decided to keep a list of these people and provide it to our journal manager to ban them as reviewers. For the moment, only from our journal; I tried banning them from all Elsevier journals but this is apparently not possible. 

See you soon in Vancouver
Emilio

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In reply to John,

Duke went through a similar calculus recently.  An outcome of this is that I no longer have access to FINEL myself, even though I am still the EIC!  

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In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)

John,

Thank you very much for your great service to the community and for sharing your experience and thoughts as a researcher, author, reviewer, and EIC. There is a lot for us to learn from your experience. But also very importantly, your efforts and insights to push back the increasingly concerning conductions (i.e., unreasonably high subscription cost where the community is doing all the work; pursuing higher publish volume blindly) by the publisher is much appreciated and inspiring, and many including myself will agree that it is valuable to think as a community on how to shape future publishing for equitable and sustainable access of publications.

As a side note, my home institute UW, as part of a regional consortium, recently initiated a contract renewal negotiation with Elsevier, hoping to make the renewal more affordable such that researchers can access more journals. They pointed out that "The Elsevier contract is larger than all of our other consortial journal package contracts combined", and  "The Alliance institutions collectively have more than 180,000 students and thousands of faculty. Their Elsevier journal subscriptions represent a significant investment for members and currently represent a cost in excess of $7 million annually. Our hope is that through positive engagement and mutual understanding, an improved and sustainable model for the dissemination of scholarship can be achieved. " The negotiation was considered successful, but compromises were made. For instance, we lost access to some impactful and relevant journals in our field, including FINEL. 

Best,

Xiang

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In reply to Thank you very much, @John E.

Vladislav,

   Thanks so much for reading my post and your comments.  

   I was wondering if you might say more about JTCAM.  In particular, I wonder what it costs to publish OA in the journal.  If it is free, then I wonder how the journal is supporting production costs.  Any comments you have around this would be greatly appreciated.

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In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)

Thank you very much, @John E. Dolbow, for sharing your experience as EIC with Elsevier! I especially appreciate that you shared your frustration about pushing "to publish more and more papers, regardless of whether or not submissions had increased."

I also liked your comment: "How is it that we have allowed an organization that is not staffed by academics and scientists to have such a vital role in disseminating science? Personally, I think our community is long overdue to have a serious conversation about these basic questions."

I absolutely agree with you that a good discussion among institutions and academics is needed. It would be great if we could have more control over scientific publishing and the public money it involves.

France has just signed a new "transformative agreement" with Elsevier for 135 M€ for 4 years; this agreement also includes unlimited publication with Gold OA. I'm afraid that it will only deepen the problem, increase the publication pressure, increase inequalities between countries, and further postpone such a global discussion on the needed changes.

Personally, along with many colleagues, I'm involved in a young Diamond Open Access publication initiative, JTCAM (Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics), which promotes Open Science principles (quality review process with Open Reviews published along with the papers) and also reproducible science (data and software are also published, and the authors are aided by a Data Editor).

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