Save research in Italy

About three weeks ago, Nature published a letter by Giorgio Parisi and signed by 69 italian scientists about the state of the research in Italy. This is the text:

We call for the European Union to push governments into keeping their research funding above subsistence level. This will ensure that scientists from across Europe can compete for Horizon 2020 research funding, not just those from the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia.
Europe's research money is divided between the European Commission and national governments. The commission funds large, transnational collaborative networks in mostly applied areas of research, and the governments support small-scale, bottom-up science and their own strategic research programmes.
Some member states are not keeping their part of the bargain. Italy, for example, seriously neglects its research base. The Italian National Research Council has not overseen basic research for decades, being itself starved of resources. University funding has dwindled to a bare minimum. The ministerial initiative known as PRIN (Research Projects of National Interest) has been defunct since 2012, apart from a few limited programmes for young researchers.
This year's PRIN allocation of a euro92-million (US$100-million) funding call to cover all research areas is too little, too late. Compare this with the annual French National Research Agency's allocation of up to euro1 billion, or with Italy's euro900-million annual contribution to the EU Seventh Framework Programme that ran in 2007–13. That resulted in a net annual loss of euro300 million for Italian science.
To prevent distorted development in research among EU countries, national policies must be coherent and guarantee a balanced use of resources.

You can sign the petition on change.org.

On impact factor

We recommend that the term "impact factor" be abolished and that this measure be renamed in keeping with its actual role, that merely of a time-specific "citation rate index" and nothing more. What is currently called the "impact factor" should not be misused to evaluate journals or to validate the scientific relevance of a particular researcher or research program, especially in decisions regarding employment, funding, and tenure.

(from The journal "impact factor": a misnamed, misleading, misused measure by Hecht F, et al.)

Impact Factors reflect the journal not the article, vary with time and correlate only poorly with perceived excellence. Simple comparison of impact factors in different specialties may be misleading. Review journals often have higher Impact Factors than those with original data. Both authors and editors can try to manipulate journal Impact Factors

(from Impact factors: uses and abuses by James Neuberger and Christopher Counsell - pdf)

The network of scientific journals

At the beginning of 2012, Science published a briefly paper about the coercitive action of the editors in most of the scientific journals in world:

We find that coercion is uncomfortably common and appears to be practiced opportunistically⁽¹⁾

One of the most coercitive practice is to say to the authors to cite in their paper more source from the journal where the work is submitted (the practice of coercive self-citation is common in the business disciplines, for example). Now a new research try to describe the interaction between scientific journals with a really particular network:

In the network, an arrow from journal A to journal B represents a “resubmission link,” that is, an article that was submitted to and published by journal B after submission to journal A. This network can be used to learn more about publication strategies and perceived journal importance than is available in citation networks alone⁽²⁾

The idea is: you submit to a journal with an high impact factor, your paper was rejected for example because is too specialistic, and you resubmit to another journal, and in this case your paper is accepted. And, incredible:

Resubmissions were significantly more cited than first-intents published the same year in the same journal⁽²⁾

Keith Bowers, commenting the results of the paper, write on the same issue of Science:

Journal editors could increase the quality of papers published in their own journals by exacting more rigorous standards for revision without rejecting them. Providing authors more opportunities to revise and resubmit manuscripts following peer review, while being clear to authors that substantial improvement must be made before a final decision is reached, would increase the citation impact of an editor's own journal.⁽³⁾

As is he right?

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(1) Wilhite A.W. & Fong E.A. (2012). Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing, Science, 335 (6068) 542-543. DOI: 10.1126/science.1212540
(2) Calcagno V., Demoinet E., Gollner K., Guidi L., Ruths D. & de Mazancourt C. (2012). Flows of Research Manuscripts Among Scientific Journals Reveal Hidden Submission Patterns, Science, 338 (6110) 1065-1069. DOI: 10.1126/science.1227833
(3) Bowers E.K. (2012). Journals: Increase Revisions, Not Rejections, Science, 338 (6110) 1029-1029. DOI: 10.1126/science.338.6110.1029-a

Mathematics Research Communities

The #AMS invites mathematicians to become part of #Mathematics Research Communities

Mathematics Research Communities | click to enlarge
via Notices of the American Mathematical Society

GILDA or the future of the financial resources for italian research

GILDA is an italian beam line based on Grenoble, France. It has some financial problems, and the two responsibles (and the only researchers that work on the experiment in this moment) write a letter to the president of CNR, L.Nicolais. I share it for my readers (via Peppe Liberti)

To the President of CNR, Prof. L. Nicolais

Dear President
Since 1994 GILDA has provided to the user community an access to a high quality third generation synchrotron radiation source. The project has been a success considering the high number of publications, exceeding 500 units with a rate of about 40 publications per year in the last decade. In these years we have actively contributed to the diffusion of the Synchrotron Radiation techniques in the Italian community and formed an entire generation of scientists that now can be found not only in universities and research institutes but also in the staff of several synchrotron sources. In all the reviews of the beamline activity, carried out by external referees, it has been underlined the quality of the science produced at GILDA and its fundamental role in the overall ESRF activity.
In spite of that, the financial and human resources dedicated to this activity have plunged in the last years, leaving at present GILDA in severe difficulties. At present GILDA is left with only two units of personnel at Grenoble and ageing instrumentation so putting at a serious risk the efficient operation and quality of support that have characterized our instrument during its several years of life. The present shortage of local staff prevents GILDA from coming back to operation in the forthcoming 2012-I run with a severe damage to the vast community (material science, biology, chemistry, physics, earth and environmental science , archaeometry) waiting to carry out experiments there.
Time has come to invert the trend and to provide to GILDA all the necessary resources for continuing, in an effective way, its action for at the benefit of the italian and international scientific communities. This, also in the light of the present situation of ESRF where all the older beamlines have undergone (or are about to carry out) major refurbishment programs creating in this way an impressively competitive environment. For this reason, we ask to CNR to define a long term strategy for the activity of GILDA. This will include the necessary financial and human resources to carry out a comprehensive refurbishment program of the beamline and to ensure, in the years to come, the consistent staff and funds for an effective operation.
Without a prompt and massive intervention it will be inevitable, in the forthcoming months, to definitely close down the GILDA project that will have heavy consequences on the activity of the italian and international scientific community at ESRF.

Sincerely Yours
The GILDA responsibles
Francesco d'Acapito
Settimio Mobilio