My selection of the most interesting news on the internets:
- Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web – The growing flood of scholarly literature is exposing the weaknesses of current, citation–based methods of evaluating and filtering articles. A novel and promising approach is to examine the use and citation of articles in a new forum: Web 2.0 services like social bookmarking and microblogging. Metrics based on this data could build a “Scientometics 2.0,” supporting richer and more timely pictures of articles’ impact. This paper develops the most comprehensive list of these services to date, assessing the potential value and availability of data from each. We also suggest the next steps toward building and validating metrics drawn from the social Web.
- Video: Who Pays For Open Access? – Is publishing an open-access journal good business? And for whom? Many in the academic community agree that the goal of open access—increasing the availability and usability of the results of research and scholarship—is laudable. Yet there is great uncertainty about the financial viability of open-access journals. Will authors have to pay publication fees out of their own pockets? Can universities afford to support open-access journals? Can respected journals convert to open access and survive? The panelists consider which models hold the most promise for sustainable open-access publishing.
- Colleges That Will Make You Rich – To find the colleges that make their students rich, we first control for student background, looking at things like the average SAT scores of incoming students, and the percentage of student body that receives financial aid. Then we calculate, based on those background factors, how much you would expect graduates at each school to earn in their careers–and we compare that to their actual earnings.



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