Open Access and the Nordic Publication Indicator: Friends or Enemies?

DORA, the Leiden manifesto, and the Metric Tide report promote responsible use of research metrics in research evaluation. This includes not ceding decision-making to numbers, and not using journal-based metrics as a proxy for research quality. These principles are endorsed by European Commission, LERU, and EUA in recently published open science recommendations and roadmaps. Incentives reinforcing the dominant position of commercial academic publishers is also a relevant concern.

In Denmark, Finland and Norway, the performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) use a channel-based publication indicator to allocate part of the block-funding annually to universities (so-called Norwegian model). In this presentation we discuss from the perspective of the Nordic publication indicator (NPI) three questions related to the responsible metrics and open science agenda:

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Open Access and the Nordic Publication Indicator: Friends or Enemies?

Janne Pölönen

Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, Helsinki, Finland

Vidar Røeggen

Universities Norway, Oslo, Norway

Gunnar Sivertsen

Nordic Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Oslo, Norway

DORA, the Leiden manifesto, and the Metric Tide report promote responsible use of research metrics in research evaluation. This includes not ceding decision-making to numbers, and not using journal-based metrics as a proxy for research quality. These principles are endorsed by European Commission, LERU, and EUA in recently published open science recommendations and roadmaps. Incentives reinforcing the dominant position of commercial academic publishers is also a relevant concern.

In Denmark, Finland and Norway, the performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) use a channel-based publication indicator to allocate part of the block-funding annually to universities (so-called Norwegian model). In this presentation we discuss from the perspective of the Nordic publication indicator (NPI) three questions related to the responsible metrics and open science agenda:

1. does NPI advance open access?

• dissemination of OA information

• inclusion of OA journals at level 1

• effort to exclude questionable OA

• promoting OA journals to level 2 and 3

• OA in the funding formula?

2. does NPI conform to responsible metrics?

• data and analysis simple, transparent and controllable

• promotion of locally relevant research

• consideration of field variation in publishing

• avoids misplaced accuracy

• recognizing systemic effects

• indicator is scrutinized and updated

3. is it responsible to use channel as proxy in NPI?

• rating is not based on publisher

• expert-based rather than JIF-based rating

• use at macro level

• funding-scheme vs research assessment

• guidelines against use at individual level