Review of "Ranking the openness of criminology units"

Andrew Wheeler

doi:doi:10.21428/cb6ab371.f514a7ba

SearchLogin Login or Signup

Review of "Ranking the openness of criminology units"

by Andrew Wheeler

Published onOct 06, 2022

This Pub is a Review of

Ranking the openness of criminology units: An attempt to incentivize the use of librarians, institutional repositories, and unit-dedicated subpages to increase scholarly impact and justice

by Anonymous

dx.doi.org

In terms of metrics, I would probably say a sentence about normalized metrics (e.g. per piece of work) will be more consequential when uptake it higher to distinguish units in rankings. At this stage a simple count, given the lack of uptake from the majority of CJ departments, is sufficient. 0 divided by anything is still 0.

Other more general, I feel like the copyright section is too much for most criminologists. Why not just a sentence or two that says individual responses to post articles often violate copyright restrictions, and IR/URs are a clear, effectively no cost solution.

Preaching to the choir, but I am guessing most academics don't think about copyright at all, since there is never intention of monetizing the work. It is more an inconsequential bureaucratic thing to publishing.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)

Comments

Scott Jacques:

Hi Andy. Thanks for the feedback on my paper. For your metric suggestion, I added a footnote: “Normalized metrics will be needed once more US criminology units are adding more outputs to URs.” For your copyright section suggestion, I thought a lot about how to address it. The reason I detail copyright is you need knowledge of it to understand open access, why it’s needed, how to make it work, etc. For example, a lot of criminologists illegally post their versions-of-record because, I think, they don’t know copyright. This illegal access is arguably better than providing no access, but it’s clearly better to provide legal open access. Yet if criminologists don’t realize they’re committing a crime, they’re less motivated to understand open access and contribute to it. To them, open access doesn’t make sense—they can already freely share the version-of-record on ResearchGate, Academia, or their personal website. They can do so, just not legally. Once authors understand this, open access becomes more important to them; or at least it should. To address your suggestion, therefore, I kept the copyright section as-is, except I added the argument outlined above.