{"id":6082,"date":"2015-09-15T09:24:33","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T09:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/experts\/what-makes-for-good-science-stacy-konkiel-on-open-access-impact-metrics-and-more\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T15:21:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T09:51:40","slug":"what-makes-for-good-science-stacy-konkiel-on-open-access-impact-metrics-and-more","status":"publish","type":"experts","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/what-makes-for-good-science-stacy-konkiel-on-open-access-impact-metrics-and-more","title":{"rendered":"What makes for “good science”? Stacy Konkiel on open access, impact metrics, and more"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meet Stacy Konkiel, Outreach & Engagement Manager at Altmetric<\/a>, a company that tracks online activity relating to scholarly literature. Previously, Stacy was the Director of Marketing and Research at Impactstory<\/a>, a nonprofit organization that helps researchers use altmetrics through a web-based tool and Indiana University Bloomington<\/a>\u2019s first Science Data Management Librarian. Before that, Stacy worked at PLOS<\/a> as a Marketing Associate. Stacy holds two Master\u2019s Degrees in Information Science and Library Science at Indiana University. An active blogger and tweeter, Stacy is a well-known name in the open access and altmetrics circles.<\/p>\n

\u201cDynamic\u201d is the word that comes to mind when we think about the scholarly publishing scenario today. Everything seems to be about transformation or reformation. Old systems are being questioned and new systems are being proposed with the promise of revolutionizing academic publishing. Given this situation, how progressive is academia and how has it responded to the call for movements such as open access and altmetrics? Also, where will these tides of change lead us? In this interview with Editage Insights, Stacy Konkiel answers these questions and shares her views on how things are shaping up in the academic research and publication landscape.<\/p>\n

You started out as a librarian and are now an open access advocate. What caused this transition?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that I\u2019ve always been an open access advocate, even before I had even heard of the phrase. Like a lot of librarians, I was called to work in the field because of a sense of social justice, a belief that everyone should have access to information. But it was my first job out of library school, working under Marilyn Billings at the\u00a0University of Massachusetts Amherst Institutional Repository<\/a>, when I began to understand the negative consequences of paywalled scholarship and started to really consider myself an \u201copen access advocate.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2006 (nearly 10 years ago), Mike Eisen, one of the co-founders of PLOS ONE<\/em> <\/strong>remarked<\/strong><\/a>, \u201cScientists are eager to apply the awesome power of the Internet revolution to scientific communication, but have been stymied by the conservative nature of scientific publishing.\u201d How far do you think the scientific community has progressed in this regard?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen a huge shift in attitudes<\/a> towards open access since Eisen made that statement\u2014more researchers are choosing to make their articles open access, there\u2019s been a marked rise in the number of researchers practicing open science by making their code, data, and other scholarly outputs openly accessible online, and even some funders are now requiring open access and data sharing as a condition for grantmaking.<\/p>\n

That said, academia still has a long way to go (at least here in the States we do). At many institutions, tenure & promotion committees are still very conservative. Generally, they tend to put much more weight on high citation counts or h-indices than they do on whether research has actually made a difference in the world<\/a>. And often these committees may fail to recognize the important, diverse contributions that researchers make–by creating software that changes the way analysis is done in their discipline, for example, or in allowing their data to be reused by others in their field and beyond, and so on.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hopeful that in the near future, promotion & tenure committees will start to become more nuanced in how they review the contributions that researchers have made to science. Once more incentives for researchers to publish open access are in place (especially those related to career advancement and funding), I believe we\u2019ll see the conservative nature of publishing fully change, as well, based on an increased demand for open access publishing services.<\/p>\n

Today, almost everyone is talking about open science and open data. How would you define or describe open science and open data? How open<\/em> do you think is the scientific and publishing community to open access<\/em>\u00a0as a concept today?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Open science and open data both exist on a spectrum, in my opinion. They are not only about making research available in an open access publication. For example, you can adopt certain \u201copen\u201d practices like licensing your data with an Open Data Commons License<\/a>, while still choosing to archive it in a repository like ICPSR (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research<\/a>) that can require a subscription for access. (Though, I\u2019d definitely encourage all Editage Insights readers to make their data freely available on a local repository or on Figshare, barring data sensitivity concerns!) Or you can choose to publish your work in a toll access journal, while archiving your preprint in your institutional repository\u2014this is merely a different \u201cflavor\u201d of open access than the one that journals like BioMed Central and PLOS have made popular.<\/p>\n

I believe the scientific and publishing communities are both more open than they ever have been before to open access (though we definitely have a way to go, as there are still many conservative scientists and publishers out there!).<\/p>\n

Measuring the impact of research has gained more importance and newer altmetrics have made an appearance. While the impact factor is still used as an indicator of journal prestige, more and more people are talking about doing away with it altogether or using it in conjunction with newer altmetrics. What are some of these altmetrics, how have they emerged, and what benefits do they offer various stakeholders of the scientific community?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sad (but surprisingly little-known) fact that a journal\u2019s impact factor (or JIF) has little to do with the quality of the individual articles it publishes<\/a>. Yet, the JIF is still used as a shorthand for understanding the quality of scholars\u2019 work in many scenarios, including in hiring and promotion decisions. In some countries, scholars are even rewarded for publishing in high impact factor journals<\/a>. Talk about perverse incentives!<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve exchanged views with researchers from all over the world and when I ask them, \u201cWhat makes for \u2018good science\u2019?\u201d their answers are always the same: To be \u201cgood science\u201d research must be (a) high-quality work and (b) it must make a difference in the world. Citation-based metrics like the JIF can\u2019t tell us a lot about either of those things, but some altmetrics can.<\/p>\n