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Researcher Centric Scholarly Publication and Research Journals Classification – New Insight based Model
Abstract
Research and Development is an essential activity in Society for technology, industrial, andsocial progress. Based on the historical review, higher education institutions focus on basic,conceptual, explorative, empirical, and analytical research methods whereas industries focuson new products and new processes development. It is also known that the end of everypiece of research of HEIs and Research Institutions is the scholarly publication and havingthe copyright of such basic or conceptual invention/innovation whereas the end of everypiece of research of industries is acquiring a patent in inventor/company name. In this paper,based on a survey on closed and open access scholarly publications, a new ScholarlyPublication based Research Journals Classification model is proposed by defining an idealscholarly publication process, analysing scholarly publication process, determiningnecessary and sufficient conditions to call an article as Scholarly article, identifying andanalysing various factors affecting Journal classification, and developing a new model called“Researcher centric Scholarly Journals grading”. The developed model of journalclassification is compared with existing Journal grading models and some suggestions madeon scholarly publications and citations from different stakeholders’ points of view.
... The national education policy is research focussed and the end part of every academic research is the publication and industrial research is commercialization. The tangible metric for research is the publication and the quality of research is through citation [32][33][34]. The minimum annual academic and research performance (AARP) should be standardized at a comparatively high level to boost the standard of higher education in the country. ...
Well defined and futuristic education policy is essential for a country at school and college levels due to the reason that education leads to economic and social progress. India with the leadership of its current prime minister and an expert team with members of varied backgrounds has developed and planned to implement a new education policy during the next decade of the 21st century called Indian National Education Policy (NEP-2020). The aim, objectives, and details are well known to practitioners and the public. NEP-2020 is an innovative and futuristic proposal with both positive and negative aspects, framed with the objective to provide a quality school education and higher education to everyone with an expectation of holistic & research-oriented progress. This paper initially depicts an overview of NEP-2020, distinguish the strengths & weakness of the policy at higher education & research part, evaluation of the implementation suggestions given in the policy, identifying and analyzing possible generic strategies for implementation of NEP-2020 to fulfill its objectives based on focus group discussions. The paper also includes many predictive proposals on issues like developing quality universities & colleges, institutional restructuring & consolidation, more holistic & multidisciplinary education, optimal learning environment & student support, transforming the regulatory system of higher education, technology usage & integration, and online & digital education. Finally, some recommendations are made to implement the NEP2020 effectively irrespective of various constraints. This article can be considered as a reference to the policy implementation teams of Govt of India.
... The national education policy is research focussed and the end part of every academic research is the publication and industrial research is commercialization. The tangible metric for research is the publication and the quality of research is through citation [32][33][34]. The minimum annual academic and research performance (AARP) should be standardized at a comparatively high level to boost the standard of higher education in the country. ...
Well defined and futuristic education policy is essential for a country at school and college levels due to the reason that education leads to economic and social progress. India with the leadership of its current prime minister and an expert team with members of varied backgrounds has developed and planned to implement a new education policy during the next decade of the 21st century called Indian National Education Policy (NEP-2020). The aim, objectives, and details are well known to practitioners and the public. NEP-2020 is an innovative and futuristic proposal with both positive and negative aspects, framed with the objective to provide a quality school education and higher education to everyone with an expectation of holistic & research-oriented progress. This paper initially depicts an overview of NEP-2020, distinguish the strengths & weakness of the policy at higher education & research part, evaluation of the implementation suggestions given in the policy, identifying and analyzing possible generic strategies for implementation of NEP-2020 to fulfill its objectives based on focus group discussions. The paper also includes many predictive proposals on issues like developing quality universities & colleges, institutional restructuring & consolidation, more holistic & multidisciplinary education, optimal learning environment & student support, transforming the regulatory system of higher education, technology usage & integration, and online & digital education. Finally, some recommendations are made to implement the NEP-2020 effectively irrespective of various constraints. This article can be considered as a reference to the policy implementation teams of Govt of India.
As time progress, changes in human perception, thinking, and performance are inevitable and the same is true in research methods. There are many research methods accepted and adopted under qualitative and quantitative research umbrella and many new research methods are added by many researchers at different point of time. Such new systematic research methods provide or open a new avenue to succeeding researchers and provide anexpanded opportunity to see things differently. The process of research always focuses on either development of new knowledge or analysing and interpreting the existing things in anewer way. In this paper, we are proposing and forwarding a new qualitative research method called ‘Patent Analysis’. This method focuses on analysis, description, and interpretation of a chosen patent in any area in a systematic way. Such analysis process of the patent might lead to the development of new concepts or theory. The procedure of patent analysis contains an evaluation of the patent in terms of its advantages, benefits, constraints, disadvantages, effectiveness, and future value. Further, the use and applications of patent analysis in the organizational strategic decisions on foreseeing the new technologies are also discussed.
It is well known that scholarly research methods in science and philosophy are changing with time, needs, perception, thinking, and performance. Many research methods are used under the umbrella of both qualitative and quantitative research and many new research methods are being added by many researchers at different point of time. Many new directions in scholarly research methods are initiated by many innovative researchers in order to bring improvements in the quality of research. Such fearless innovations in the form of new models of scholarly research increased the research methods and models for new generations. This paper focuses on the conceptual analysis of some of the possible new directions in scholarly research for 21st century including the importance of innovations suitable for the progress in the century by analysing some of the important new scholarly research models which can contribute substantially to the research field. The paper also reviews some of the research analysis frameworks which have added tools, techniques, and values to the scholarly research.
Company analysis is the important type of case method in Research Methodology and is commonly used by the beginners of scholarly research. A case study based management research and teaching pedagogy are adopted by many business schools with the belief that it is a most powerful way to study and learn new lessons required to identify, understand, and solve the problems in the process of managing and leading the organizations. Developing a business case on various managing aspects of a company and analysing case forces students to grapple with exactly the kinds of situations, decisions, and dilemmas managers confront every day. Company analysis is a powerful tool in developing both research case study and teaching case study in business management subject. Compared to industry analysis, company analysis gives focused and deeper insight into a company and its business in terms of challenges and opportunities. In this paper, we have discussed the procedure of writing company focussed case study based on a newly developed company analysis framework. We also recommend the Company analysis as a class of case study methodology in management research for the beginners and budding researchers as a beginning step in scholarly research.
This paper aims to address the issue of predatory publishing, sensu lato. To achieve this, we offer our perspectives, starting initially with some background surrounding the birth of the concept, even though the phenomenon may have already existed long before the popularization of the term “predatory publishing”. The issue of predation or “predatory” behavior in academic publishing is no longer limited to open access (OA). Many of the mainstream publishers that were exclusively subscription-based are now evolving towards a state of complete OA. Academics seeking reliable sources of journals to publish their work tend to rely on a journal’s metrics such as citations and indexing, and on whether it is blacklisted or whitelisted. Jeffrey Beall raised awareness of the risks of “predatory” OA publishing, and his blacklists of “predatory” OA journals and publishers began to be used for official purposes to distinguish valid from perceived invalid publishing venues. We initially reflect on why we believe the blacklists created by Beall were flawed, primarily due to the weak set of criteria confusing non-predatory with true predatory journals leading to false positives and missing out on blacklisting true predatory journals due to false negatives. Historically, most critiques of “predatory publishing” have relied excessively on Beall’s blacklists to base their assumptions and conclusions but there is a need to look beyond these. There are currently a number of blacklists and whitelists circulating in academia, but they all have imperfections, such as the resurrected Beall blacklists, Crawford’s OA gray list based on Beall’s lists, Cabell’s new blacklist with about 11,000 journals, the DOAJ with about 11,700 OA journals, and UGC, with over 32,600 journals prior to its recent (May, 2018) purge of 4305 journals. The reader is led into a discussion about blacklists’ lack of reliability, using the scientific framework of conducting research to assess whether a journal could be predatory at the pre- and post-study levels. We close our discussion by offering arguments why we believe blacklists are academically invalid.
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is, by far, the most discussed bibliometric indicator. Since its introduction over 40 years ago, it has had enormous effects on the scientific ecosystem: transforming the publishing industry, shaping hiring practices and the allocation of resources, and, as a result, reorienting the research activities and dissemination practices of scholars. Given both the ubiquity and impact of the indicator, the JIF has been widely dissected and debated by scholars of every disciplinary orientation. Drawing on the existing literature as well as on original research, this chapter provides a brief history of the indicator and highlights well-known limitations-such as the asymmetry between the numerator and the denominator, differences across disciplines, the insufficient citation window, and the skewness of the underlying citation distributions. The inflation of the JIF and the weakening predictive power is discussed, as well as the adverse effects on the behaviors of individual actors and the research enterprise. Alternative journal-based indicators are described and the chapter concludes with a call for responsible application and a commentary on future developments in journal indicators.
The success of research projects funded by various agencies can be evaluated by studying the research
publications generated from those projects and the research publications can be evaluated using impact factors
and citation indices. There are several citation indices commonly used to assess the value/quality of a research
publication or the research impact of an author or a journal. Research indices are calculated based on either
citation values of research publications of a research scholar or the number of research papers published by a
research scholar for a given period. There are many research indices developed by many types of research
which include H-index, i10-index, G-index, H(2)-index, HG-index, Q2 -index, AR-index, M-quotient, M-index,
W-index, Hw-index, E-index, A-index, R-index, W-index, J-index, etc. Out of these citation based research
indices, h-index, G-index and i10-index are commonly used in some of the citation databases. Researchers have
also studied the problems and limitations associated with these indices. In this paper, we have discussed the
most popular research indices presently used which include h-index, G-index, and i-10-index along with their
advantages, benefits, constraints, and disadvantages. Most of the research indices are calculated based on
number of citations a paper receives. The major limitation of this model is that the citations usually increase
with an increase in time even after the researcher dies, the citations and hence the indices continue to grow. It is
argued that due to various reasons, a research publication may not attract citations initially for some years and
after ten to twenty years some papers may attract citations. The best method of identifying the contribution to
research is calculating the annual research index for an author by considering the annual research publications.
Accordingly, based on annual research index of an author, his average research contribution for five years, or
ten years, or twenty years or any desired period can be determined. Here, we have suggested some of the new
research indices to be used for calculating research productivity of individuals as well as a team of people in an
organization. The paper also contains some of our newly proposed indices including ARP-Index – (Annual
Research Publication Index), RC-Index – (Research Continuation Index), RE-Index (Research expansion
Index), Project Productivity Index, and Cost Index and the method of calculating these indices along with their
advantages and limitations.
p>This article introduces, defines, and describes predatory publishers and journals and shows how they hurt science and victimize individual researchers. Academic evaluation that only counts the number of publications may not provide an accurate measure of scholarly achievement, as journals routinely accept papers with little or no peer review.</p
Ideal properties of a device or a system can be used to upgrade or improve its properties towards reaching 100% efficiency. By comparing the properties/characteristics of a practical device/system with its ideal counterpart, one can find out the possible modifications in that device /system towards reaching the objective of achieving such an ideal system. Even though ideal systems are hypothetical systems, which cannot be realized completely in practice, gives a broad idea on how the practical systems can be improved continuously to reach ideal system characteristics. The ideal system characteristics of technology, business, education, banking, electrical energy, software, computing and strategy, discussed in this review, under input characteristics, system characteristics, output characteristics, and external characteristics shows an opportunity to the scientists and engineers to develop such practical systems further with an objective to reach the goal. Based on the review, we have also discussed the possible characteristics of some of the future anticipated systems like ideal automobiles, ideal library, ideal home, ideal human being, ideal organization, ideal city, and even, ideal world.
Scholarly publishing is the subfield of publishing in which research work
is published in the form of an academic journal article, edited book or thesis
form. Due to the monopoly of top ranking publishers, the researchers are
struggling to publish their research articles quickly and at low publication cost.
In order to reach the research findings to entire world, every author prefers to
publish in open access journal but, so called top ranking journals are charging
the huge fee as article processing charges which is in general between $1,000 to
$3,000 and some journals charges even $5,000 apart from article submission
fee. Since such journals are not paying any remuneration for peer review
process, the review process and final publication take a long time, generally
eight to ten months. This constraint of a long time and huge cost involved in
scholarly publishing made the smart publishers find alternative strategy for
publishing their research. In this paper, we have discussed why smart publishers
hesitate to publish in top ranking journals and their alternative strategy based on
their objectives. We have also discussed the black ocean strategy formulated by
such publishers as a counter strategy to face such move.
This paper gives an account of the origin and development of the Open Access Initiative (OAI) and the digital technology that enables its existence. The researcher explains the crisis in scholarly communications and how open access (CIA) can reform the present system. OA has evolved two systems for delivering research articles: CIA archives or repositories and OA journals. They differ in that CIA journals conduct peer review and CIA archives do not. Discussion focuses on how these two delivery systems work, including such topics as OAI, local institutional repositories, Eprints self-archiving software, cross-archives searching, metadata harvesting, and the individuals who invented CIA and organizations that support it.
p>This article presents the rationale, common practices, challenges, and some personal anecdotes from a journal editor on the production, use, and re-use of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles as open educational resources (OER). The scholarly and professional discourse related to open educational resources has largely focused on open learning objects, courseware, and textbooks. However, especially in graduate education, articles published in scholarly journals are often a major component of the course content in formal education. In addition, open access journal articles are critical to expanding access to knowledge by scholars in the developing world and in fostering citizen science, by which everyone has access to the latest academic information and research results. In this article, I highlight some of the challenges, economic models, and evidence for quality of open access journal content and look at new affordances provided by the Net for enhanced functionality, access, and distribution.
In the seventeen years since I graduated with a doctorate degree, the climate and acceptance of open access publishing has almost reversed itself. I recall a conversation with my PhD supervisor in which he argued that publishing online was not a viable option as the product would not have permanency, scholarly recognition, or the prestige of a paper publication. His comments reflect the confusion between online resources and those described as open access, but as well illustrate the change in academic acceptance and use of open access products during the past decade. The evolution from paper to online production and consumption is a disruptive technology in which much lower cost and increased accessibility of online work opens the product to a completely new group of potential users. In the case of OER these consumers are primarily students, but certainly access to scholars from all parts of the globe and the availability to support citizen science (Silvertown, 2009) should not be underestimated.</p
There is considerable interest in the ranking of journals, given the intense pressure to place articles in the “top” journals. In this article, a new index, h, and a new source of data—Google Scholar – are introduced, and a number of advantages of this methodology to assessing journals are noted. This approach is attractive because it provides a more robust account of the scholarly enterprise than do the standard Journal Citation Reports. Readily available software enables do-it-yourself assessments of journals, including those not otherwise covered, and enable the journal selection process to become a research endeavor that identifies particular articles of interest. While some critics are skeptical about the visibility and impact of sociological research, the evidence presented here indicates that most sociology journals produce a steady stream of papers that garner considerable attention. While the position of individual journals varies across measures, there is a high degree commonality across these measurement approaches. A clear hierarchy of journals remains no matter what assessment metric is used. Moreover, data over time indicate that the hierarchy of journals is highly stable and self-perpetuating. Yet highly visible articles do appear in journals outside the set of elite journals. In short, the h index provides a more comprehensive picture of the output and noteworthy consequences of sociology journals than do than standard impact scores, even though the overall ranking of journals does not markedly change.
The question of how to assess research outputs published in journals is now a global concern for academics. Numerous journal ratings and rankings exist, some featuring perceptual and peer-review-based journal ranks, some focusing on objective information related to citations, some using a combination of the two. This research consolidates existing journal rankings into an up-to-date and comprehensive list. Existing approaches to determining journal rankings are significantly advanced with the application of a new classification approach, ‘random forests’, and data envelopment analysis. As a result, a fresh look at a publication’s place in the global research community is offered. While our approach is applicable to all management and business journals, we specifically exemplify the relative position of ‘operations research, management science, production and operations management’ journals within the broader management field, as well as within their own subject domain.
Background:
Research rankings based on bibliometrics today dominate governance in academia and determine careers in universities.
Method:
Analytical approach to capture the incentives by users of rankings and by suppliers of rankings, both on an individual and an aggregate level.
Result:
Rankings may produce unintended negative side effects. In particular, rankings substitute the "taste for science" by a "taste for publication." We show that the usefulness of rankings rests on several important assumptions challenged by recent research.
Conclusion:
We suggest as alternatives careful socialization and selection of scholars, supplemented by periodic self-evaluations and awards. The aim is to encourage controversial discourses in order to contribute meaningful to the advancement of science.
Publishing in scholarly peer reviewed journals usually entails long delays from submission to publication. In part this is due to the length of the peer review process and in part because of the dominating tradition of publication in issues, earlier a necessity of paper-based publishing, which creates backlogs of manuscripts waiting in line. The delays slow the dissemination of scholarship and can provide a significant burden on the academic careers of authors.
Using a stratified random sample we studied average publishing delays in 2700 papers published in 135 journals sampled from the Scopus citation index. The shortest overall delays occur in science technology and medical (STM) fields and the longest in social science, arts/humanities and business/economics. Business/economics with a delay of 18 months took twice as long as chemistry with a 9 month average delay. Analysis of the variance indicated that by far the largest amount of variance in the time between submission and acceptance was among articles within a journal as compared with journals, disciplines or the size of the journal. For the time between acceptance and publication most of the variation in delay can be accounted for by differences between specific journals.
The Open Access movement of the past decade, and institutional repositories developed by universities and academic libraries as a part of that movement, have openly challenged the traditional scholarly communication system. This article examines the growth of repositories around the world, and summarizes a growing body of evidence of the response of academics to institutional repositories. It reports the findings of a national survey of academics which highlights the conflict between the principles and rewards of the traditional scholarly communication system, and the benefits of Open Access. The article concludes by suggesting ways in which academic libraries can alleviate the conflict between these two paradigms.
Purpose
More knowledge about open access (OA) scholarly publishing on the web would be helpful for citation data mining and the development of web‐based citation indexes. Hence, the main purpose of this study is to identify common characteristics of open access publishing, which may therefore enable us to measure different aspects of e‐research on the web.
Design/methodology/approach
In the current study, five characteristics of 545 OA citing sources targeting OA research articles in four science and four social science disciplines were manually identified, including file format, hyperlinking, internet domain, language and publication year.
Findings
About 60 per cent of the OA citing sources targeting research papers were in PDF format, 30 per cent were from academic domains ending in edu and ac and 70 per cent of the citations were not hyperlinked. Moreover, 16 per cent of the OA citing sources targeting studied papers in the eight selected disciplines were in non‐English languages. Additional analyses revealed significant disciplinary differences in some studied characteristics across science and the social sciences.
Originality/value
The OA web citation network was dominated by PDF format files and non‐hyperlinked citations. This knowledge of characteristics shaping the OA citation network gives a better understanding about their potential uses for open access scholarly research.
We propose a new data source (Google Scholar) and metric (Hirsch's h-index) to assess journal impact in the field of economics and business. A systematic comparison between the Google Scholar h-index and the ISI Journal Impact Factor for a sample of 838 journals in economics and business shows that the former provides a more accurate and comprehensive measure of journal impact. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the continuous evolution of scholarly publishing and knowledge communication as a result of the internet revolution.
Design/methodology/approach
– Information was obtained from a literature review of the main contributions on “self‐archiving” – the broad term often applied to electronic publishing of author‐supplied documents on the web without commercial publisher mediation. The paper analyses the impact of the open access movement, which came to fruition after the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol was established, as it creates the potential for interoperability between e‐print repositories. It concludes by outlining the challenges for information managers in developing the full potential of open access.
Findings
– With regard to the future of self‐archiving, particularly in relation to peer‐reviewed journals, information managers have a very important role to perform within their organization.
Originality/value
– The paper highlights the benefits of publishing in e‐print repositories for authors and their institutions. It points to the roles and responsibilities of information managers, primarily within academic and research institutions, in devising clear institutional policies and assisting users to self archive their papers for the benefit of their own organizations and the global scientific community.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to engage in a thought experiment, exploring the use of Wikipedia or similar content‐malleable systems for the review and dissemination of academic knowledge.
Design/methodology/approach
– By looking at other sources, the paper considers the current state of the academic peer‐review process, discusses Wikipedia and reflects on dynamic content creation and management applications currently in use in academia.
Findings
– The traditional peer review process must be updated to match the rapid creation and diffusion of knowledge that characterises the 21st century. The Wikipedia concept is a potential model for more rapid and reliable dissemination of scholarly knowledge. The implications of such a concept would have a dramatic effect on the academic community.
Originality/value
– This paper promotes a radical idea for changing the methods by which academic knowledge is both constructed and disseminated.
The emergence of the Internet has triggered tremendous changes in the publication of scientific peer-reviewed journals. Today, journals are usually available in parallel electronic versions, but the way the peer-review process works, the look of articles and journals, and the rigid and slow publication schedules have remained largely unchanged, at least for the vast majority of subscription-based journals. Those publishing firms and scholarly publishers who have chosen the more radical option of open access (OA), in which the content of journals is freely accessible to anybody with Internet connectivity, have had a much bigger degree of freedom to experiment with innovations.
The objective was to study how open access journals have experimented with innovations concerning ways of organizing the peer review, the format of journals and articles, new interactive and media formats, and novel publishing revenue models.
The features of 24 open access journals were studied. The journals were chosen in a nonrandom manner from the approximately 7000 existing OA journals based on available information about interesting journals and include both representative cases and highly innovative outlier cases.
Most early OA journals in the 1990s were founded by individual scholars and used a business model based on voluntary work close in spirit to open-source development of software. In the next wave, many long-established journals, in particular society journals and journals from regions such as Latin America, made their articles OA when they started publishing parallel electronic versions. From about 2002 on, newly founded professional OA publishing firms using article-processing charges to fund their operations have emerged. Over the years, there have been several experiments with new forms of peer review, media enhancements, and the inclusion of structured data sets with articles. In recent years, the growth of OA publishing has also been facilitated by the availability of open-source software for journal publishing.
The case studies illustrate how a new technology and a business model enabled by new technology can be harnessed to find new innovative ways for the organization and content of scholarly publishing. Several recent launches of OA journals by major subscription publishers demonstrate that OA is rapidly gaining acceptance as a sustainable alternative to subscription-based scholarly publishing.
While the business models used in most segments of the media industry have been profoundly changed by the Internet, surprisingly little has changed in the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals. Electronic delivery has become the norm, but the same publishers as before are still dominating the market, selling content to subscribers. This article asks the question why Open Access (OA) to the output of mainly publicly funded research hasn’t yet become the mainstream business model. OA implies a reversal of the revenue logic from readers paying for content to authors paying for dissemination in form of universal free access. The current situation is analyzed using Porter’s five forces model. The analysis demonstrates a lack of competitive pressure in this industry, leading to so high profit levels of the leading publishers that they have not yet felt a strong need to change the way they operate. OA funded by article publishing charges (APCs) might nevertheless start rapidly becoming more common. The driving forces of change currently consist of the public research funders and administrations in Europe, which are pushing for OA by starting dedicated funds for paying the APCs of authors from the respective countries. This has in turn lead to a situation in which publishers have introduced “big deals” involving the bundling of (a) subscription to all their journals, (b) APCs for their hybrid journals and (c) in the future also APCs to their full OA journals. This appears to be a relatively risk free strategy for the leading publishers to retain both their dominance of the market and high profit levels.
This article reports on a large-scale exercise of classification of journals in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences,
carried out by the Italian Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes. After discussing at some length
the controversies linked with journal classification and its impact, we endeavor to compare such a classification with the
scores that individual articles published in the same journals were assigned by completely independent assessors in the same
period of time. The data refer to an important subset of disciplines covering History, Philosophy, Geography, Anthropology,
Education, and Library Sciences, allowing for comparisons between scientific fields of different sizes, outlooks, and methods.
As the controversies surrounding the rating of journals focus on the difference between the container (the journal) and the
content (the individual article), we addressed the following research questions: (1) Is journal rating, produced by an expert-based
procedure, a good predictor of the quality of articles published in the journal? (2) To what extent different panel of experts
evaluating the same journals produce consistent ratings? (3) To what extent the assessment of scientific societies on journal
rating is a good predictor of the quality of articles published in journals? (4) Are there systematic biases in the peer review
of articles and in the expert-based journal rating? We find that journal rating is a legitimate and robust assessment exercise,
as long as it is managed carefully and in a cautious way and used to evaluate aggregates of researchers rather than individual
researchers.
This chapter investigates measures of journal performance and ranking. It begins by exploring the principal conventional sources of citation data, Web of Science and Scopus, and compares these with alternatives such as Google Scholar. Critical variables in citation analyses include coverage by discipline and different article types, such as review articles compared to articles documenting new research. The chapter concludes with an exploration of alternative metrics.
The article presents a large-scale comparison of journal rankings based on seven impact measures: Impact Factor (2- and 5-year), SJR, IPP, SNIP, H index, and Article Influence Score. Three aspects of ranking stability in the 2007-2014 period were analyzed: temporal, cross-discipline, and cross-indicator. Impact measures based on five-year citation windows enable more stable journal rankings over time. Journal rankings based on the source-normalized indicator (SNIP) have the largest cross-discipline stability. Journals in the fields of social sciences and humanities have lower temporal and cross-discipline ranking stability compared to those in "hard" sciences. Although correlation coefficients indicate relatively high agreement among the rankings based on different indicators, variations in quartile and percentile ranks suggest different conclusions. WoS journals almost linearly improve their ranking positions in Scopus lists, while many high-impact journals covered by Scopus are not available in WoS. An important element of the ranking stability is the discriminability of impact measures. Beyond the segregation between the top and bottom ranked journals, our assessment of "quality" relies in most cases on a rather arguable assumption that a couple of citations more or less is making a big difference.
Much of the recent library literature related to scholarly communication and predatory publishers has focused on faculty concerns regarding publishing in questionable journals for tenure or promotion purposes. However, little attention has been paid to predatory publishers in the context of student research and library instruction. The presence of predatory journals in library databases may put students at risk of including questionable content in their academic output. While the results of this study reveal that the number of predatory publishers and their associated journals are fairly small in the three article database packages and one directory that were examined, predatory journal content was more prevalent in one particular resource and in certain subject areas.
Scholarly, open-access publishing has made scholarly research freely accessible, but some unscrupulous publishers are exploiting the model for their own profit. The author-pays (gold) open-access model finances scholarly publishing with fees charged to authors at the time a paper is published. This model creates a conflict of interest, for the more papers a publisher accepts, the more revenue it earns. This article describes how to identify these "predatory" publishers and describes the unethical practices they engage in.
This paper focuses on institutional repositories as a case study to examine the design of a new scholarly communication technology from a social constructivist perspective. Institutional repositories are online databases of scholarly materials such as articles, reports, datasets to enable and foster sharing, discovery, and archiving of scholarly resources produced at a given institution. As a scholarly communication mode, institutional repositories represent a particularly interesting case to examine as they incorporate both normative and ideological agendas and illustrate how technical products embody social goals and power relationships. Although the analysis is based on institutional repositories, the theoretical approach is relevant to various information and communication technology development efforts aiming to introduce new tools in support of scholarly communication. The paper's discussion draws from the social construction of technology theory, actor-network theory, and the socio-technical interactions networks model. Such a social constructivist framework provides an effective method for uncovering multiple perspectives that frame the design and appropriation of institutional repositories.
This paper theoretically models and econometrically tests the determinants of third-degree price discrimination concerning institutional versus individual pricing by the publishers for the top 99 journals in economics. Three measures of price discrimination are employed for the basis of all statistical analyses as they pertain to subscribers in the United States for the year 1985: the existence of price discrimination, an index of monopoly power as devised by Lerner (1943), and the difference between institutional and individual subscription prices. Unstandardized and standardized coefficient estimates from probit and least-squares regression methods are derived across each measure of price discrimination. Policy recommendations are offered given empirical findings for libraries as to how to limit the negative consequences of price discrimination practiced by publishers.
Compares 2 strategies employed in evaluating the relative standing and importance of psychology journals. The following studies used the ranking strategy: D. Koulack and H. J. Keselman (see record
1976-24649-001) and K. C. Mace and H. D. Warner (1973). These studies advocate the citation statistics strategy: M. Boor (1973), A. R. Buss and J. R. McDermott (1976), M. J. White and K. G. White (1977), E. Garfield (1975), and A. D. Porter (1976). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Journals that exploit the author-pays model damage scholarly publishing
and promote unethical behaviour by scientists, argues Jeffrey Beall.
A review of recent developments in electronic publishing, with a focus on Open Access (OA) is provided. It describes the two main types of OA, i.e. the `gold' OA journal route and the `green' repository route, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the two, and the reactions of the publishing industry to these developments. Quality, cost and copyright issues are explored, as well as some of the business models of OA. It is noted that whilst so far there is no evidence that a shift to OA will lead to libraries cancelling subscriptions to toll-access journals, this may happen in the future, and that despite the apparently compelling reasons for authors to move to OA, so far few have shown themselves willing to do so. Conclusions about the future of scholarly publications are drawn.
Predatoryopen-access scholarly publishers
- J Beall
Rethinking scholarly communication: building the system that scholars deserve. D-Lib Magazine
- H V D Sompel
- S Payette
- J Erickson
- C Lagoze
- S Warner
Ranking the management journals
- C Harris
Criteria for determining predatory open-access publishers
- J Beall
Scholarly electronic journal publishing: a study comparing commercial and nonprofit/university publishers
- G G Moghaddam