I would like tot hank Joseph for inviting me to this interesting meeting. I am a physicist and um, um, well, I've heard abuot interesting things. I don't think I am sold on open science, maybe I am only one year (here?), of course I am interested in getting scccience to dddo as much as it can, annd if that's opppen science then that's great. So, um, what I want to talk about is, um, how is science doing these days? I think it's in some sense very well, measured by some measures that I number of papers beign written or so, and in some sense it's doing badly and that's one of the reasons I was interested in coming to this meeting. This session is on reputation, I have done some work on that, and even though my main interest is in pyhsics. Reputation is very important. Rewards are very important in doing scientific work. Um. So, basically, there's three reasons why we want to decide on reputation of scientists, we want to decide on distributed resources like grant money, equipment money, we want to decide who gets hired to do science, who adavnces in their positions, and we want to decide who gets rewarded and who gets prizes. These are the reasons for looking into these questions, and I might say it's rare to find a scientist who hasn't thought about getting a Nobel prize for his work, so if we're advocating open science, maybe the Nobel prizze should not be reesttricted to the recipients, because once you have large collaborations it becomes a problem.
Work I have done that. The h-index. And uh, it's really very simple and a trivial idea. The reason it got attention is because it is better than what got used before, which really wasn't that good- the impact factor. Let's see. Which one is the one that works here. So, as a, you probably know, the impact factor measures how many times a journal article is cited, the impact factor of aj ournal is a measure of the impact of that journal in the last three years or something, so the impact factor was introduced in the 1960s and it became very important and most used to judge not only journals but also scientists, so the criteria for advancement and for success was to publish and still is to publish in journals with the highest impact factor, like Science and Nature and so on. And of course that, um, has its flaws and a lot of people recognize the flaws. The main flaw I suppose is that obviously it does not really fairly reward a good paper because you have on the average- you have a very bad papers- that don't really contribute much, and there's a lot of, and the big barrier in publishing in a high impact journal having to do with the way a paper gets reviewed and accepted, and so, anyway, I think many people recognize the impact factor is a problem. So I came up with the idea of an h-index, which basically simply counts the citations of individual papers no matter where they are cited or where they are published, so it's really very simple thing that I think got attention about is that it's just a single number that quantifies in a way both the productivity and impact of a scientist and that's explained in this view graph, so you plot the number of citations that your paper has received in decreasing number of papers, so paper 1 the highest paper, the citations, the next paper this many citations, and the .. more citations than that same number, so it's really really very simple idea um and I thought about it several years ago and we talked about it and used it and sometimes when we were for example looking at who to hire in our department, and anyway, I thought maybe I'd write up a little paper, and not knowing whether or not the paper would be publishable, I hosted it at the preprint archive (arxiv) and it got immediate attention and so it became quite popular. Here's an example. Within the most highly cited physicists, and then the paper, 133, 150 citations, so .. it's nothing very profound abuot it, Albert Einstein has an h-index of 150 which is actually very high for people working in this time period, so it's kind of interesting that Albert Einstein was- a couple of very important things that contributed a lot. This h-index has created a lot of activity aruond it. What I find most remarkable is that it really extended to be used in all kinds of disciplines both natural sciences, social sciences, physics and- signals the papers that um, that I talk about it, and so on. But, anyway.
That's the past. But I mean, so, what does this tell us? One thing it tells us is that it's incredibly important for scientists to measure themselves. I personally never expected that this would have the impact and attention that it got, but it says that- it's very important to figure out how to make it worthwhile for scientists to be more open and to share information because really it's all about the credit, and you know, the uh, uh, it's really provident in open science, and I don't have it in this point a lot of good ideas, but I would like to make a point about, so what's wrong with all this. The h-index and impact factor, it measures something very limited. What other people are saying or basically paying attention to, it does not necessarily mean that this work is groundbreaking, that it is going to be lasting. It only means that it is getting a lot of attention now. there are lots of bandwagons in different areas in science, people racking up the citations, but is that really the best way to move science forward? The h-index has much ggggood as itt makes it a liittle moore democcratiic to ppublishh in a journall that is not very weell knoown bbbut sstilll get peoplee to ppay atttention to it,, but itt stilll ahss the prooblem tthat we ddon't hhave good ways of advanciing or rrecoggnizing science ithhat is peerhaps nnot so much maainstreeam and that is that I personally in my own career that I have seen - i have gone through periods where I work in mainstream areas, and then there are some where I think it is moer groundbreaking, and they do not get attention because they are not mainstream, annd that's one of the maiin probblems in sciencce todaay, bueecccause iit's ffocuseed on thhe next graaaand application and the promotttion and so on..... People buuuild on what other people have done instead of recognizing the fundamental problems instead of the things that are generallllly thought to be right and so I really perhaps, there is a way of opening up science so that more people involved to make it easier to go against some of these traditions that might not be correct, but of course one has to be careful- when one oepsn up something, then itm ight introduce more noise into the signal to noise ratio, how do we get it down, and we need to figure it out and devise tools so that we can really take advantage of the new opportunities for these new ways of sharing. Thank you very much.