Informationsplattform Open Access: Journals

Open Access journals

Open Access (OA) journals aim to achieve maximum dissemination of the articles they publish so that as many scientists and scholars as possible can have access to them. By making electronically-published research results available free of charge, their visibility and accessibility is increased. This leads to higher citation rates which, in turn, increases the respective journal's impact factor and, thus, its reputation.

Contributions in OA journals are original publications. Before publication they go through a peer-review process. In addition to toll-free access for users, a further advantage of OA journals is the fact that the publication process is usually more cost-effective. Nonetheless, the tasks in the various publication stages in an OA journal cannot be performed free of charge. This means that new business models are called for. An overview of peer-reviewed OA journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Essentially, the quality of scientific and scholarly articles depends on whether their scientific content is relevant and well-founded. Two evaluation strategies which are implemented at different stages in the publication process are peer review and the determination of the impact of a publication by means of citation analysis.

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Peer review

Before an article is published in a journal it usually goes through a review process during which the scientific or scholarly manuscript is evaluated (as a rule by other scientists or scholars) in terms of its significance and publication-worthiness. This process is known as peer review. In double-blind peer reviews neither the author nor the reviewer knows the other's identity. Like their conventional counterparts, many OA journals use peer review as a means of controlling the quality of the articles they publish. However, the traditional peer-review process is subject to a lot of criticism. For example, the slowness of the process is criticised as is subjectivity and bias on the part of the reviewers. In response to this criticism, new (supplementary) review procedures are being developed.

One example of these new procedures is the interactive review process employed by the OA journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP). OA enables immediate full-text access to scientific and scholarly information which means that the relevance and scientific quality of contributions can be publicly discussed by the scientific community (open peer commentary, collaborative peer review). The interactive two-stage publication process at ACP and other European Geosciences Union OA journals is supported by an international network of editors. In the first review stage, the manuscript is evaluated by a topical editor to ensure its basic scientific and technical quality (access peer review). The editor may ask independent referees of hisher choice for their support. He or she may suggest technical corrections which the author may perform before the manuscript is published as a discussion paper on the website of the scientific discussion forum Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions (ACPD). The paper is opened for interactive public discussion. During an 8-week period, referee comments (anonymous, if desired) and attributed comments by members of the scientific community are published alongside the discussion paper. At the end of the open discussion the authors are given the opportunity to respond with final comments. In the second stage, the manuscript is revised by the author and submitted for publication in ACP. It is then either accepted or rejected immediately or reviewed again. In other words, manuscripts can sometimes go through several revision stages before publication as a final revised paper. The discussion paper and comments from the first stage are permanently archived in the online discussion forum, irrespective of whether a manuscript is published (cf. ACP: Review Process).

Publicly reviewed manuscripts are available to the scientific community for use and evaluation at an early stage so that inaccurate or dishonest results can be detected faster. Furthermore, this procedure is likely to tend to prompt authors to take greater care when producing and submitting their manuscripts. This will make the editor's job easier and may lead to a reduction in the journal's rejection rate.

 

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Journal Impact Factor and Citation Index

The Journal Impact Factor (IF), a quantitative tool for ranking and comparing journals, is used as a measure of the reputation of a scholarly journal. It indicates how often the articles published by a particular journal are quoted in other periodicals. The quality of a scientific or scholarly article is often assessed on the basis of the IF. This can affect the author's career prospects, especially with regard to recruitment and review procedures. What is often forgotten is the fact that, even in a journal with a high impact factor, the quality of articles can vary considerably.

The Science Citation Index (SCI) – in the social sciences the Social Science Citation Index (SCCI) and in the arts and humanities the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) – are multidisciplinary databases which provide access to cited references in scientific and scholarly journals. They form the basis for the calculation of the impact factor. The IF is the average citation rate of the articles published by a particular journal and it is calculated once a year. The calculation is done by dividing the number of current year citations of articles published during the previous two years by the number of citable articles published in that period. Since the reference period is two years, an impact factor is issued in the third year of publication at the earliest. This can prove a problem – especially for many OA journals – because most of them have been launched only quite recently.

The criticism of the IF as a measure of scientific quality is directed at this method of calculation and the parameters used. The lower the number of articles published by a journal, the higher the impact factor. Moreover, the journals covered are mostly English-language journals and journals which have been on the market for at least three years. According to Dong, Loh and Mondry (2005), less than a quarter of the peer-reviewed journals worldwide are covered by SCI.

Despite the criticism levelled at the IF as a measure of the quality of scientific and scholarly journals, a study by Thompson ISI found many references in the Internet to lists of OA journals with an impact factor. However, there are also alternative yardsticks for visibility. In addition to citation-based indicators of the reputation of a journal, the increased visibility of OA-published scientific and scholarly texts can be deduced from the number of downloads, although this measure should also be interpreted with caution. A further indication of the visibility of texts published in OA journals is the increased number of invitations to participate in conferences or book projects reported by authors after the appearance of OA publications.

 

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General lists of Open Access Journals

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