mikael laakso
Mikael Laakso is an Associate Professor in Information Studies at Tampere University, Finland, and a Project Expert for the Finnish Federation of Learned Societies. His research interests relate to scholarly information and communication very broadly, where one of the consistent themes has been research related open access publishing and open science practices. Having conducted research in this space for over 15 years, Mikael is experienced in a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to apply to create new knowledge within the space of scholarly information, ranging from policy/document analysis, bibliometrics & web metrics, surveys, interviews and beyond.
Why we need to work together for better open bibliometric data: improved research, more informed science policy, and a healthier publishing landscape
Scholarly journals have been publishing materials on the web for several decades which could easily lead one to assume that there during that time would have emerged an all-encompassing open and transparent way of indexing and keeping track of all the content being made available. That is unfortunately not the case and we are still in a situation where the data provider one choses for representing the scholarly journal landscape has a massive impact on what gets included and what is left outside of consideration (Khanna, Ball, Alperin 2022). This deficiency concerns rudimentary journal-level data signalling their existence, more detailed metadata concerning individual articles are in an even much worse state when it comes to data comprehensiveness and data quality. I call for collaboration among all actors in the international scholarly journal landscape to improve practices for massive benefits to research, in having better informed science policy, and a healthier publishing landscape.
