Archives des mots-clés : open access journals

Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

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Authors : Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon

Background

In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk.

Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model.

Methods

The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model.

Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich’s periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal.

A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data.

Results

Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996.

OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/73

A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges

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Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a central mechanism for funding Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing. We studied the APCs charged and article volumes of journals that were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as charging APCs.

These included 1,370 journals that published 100,697 articles in 2010. The average APC was 906 US Dollars (USD) calculated over journals and 904 US Dollars USD calculated over articles.

The price range varied between 8 and 3,900 USD, with the lowest prices charged by journals published in developing countries and the highest by journals with high impact factors from major international publishers. Journals in Biomedicine represent 59% of the sample and 58% of the total article volume.

They also had the highest APCs of any discipline. Professionally published journals, both for profit and nonprofit had substantially higher APCs than society, university or scholar/researcher published journals.

These price estimates are lower than some previous studies of OA publishing and much lower than is generally charged by subscription publishers making individual articles open access in what are termed hybrid journals.

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/preprint.pdf

Information research an internatinal electronic journal a bibliometric…

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Information research : an internatinal electronic journal : a bibliometric study :

“At present bibliometric study is an interacting research topic in the field of library and information science. Library and information science professionals are doing bibliometric study in various fields for the collection development of different subject in their libraries. This paper examines that the Bibliometric Analysis of the Information Research: an International Electronic Journal (IRIEJ). Which is included the study of form of documents, authorship pattern, ranking of authors, year wise distribution of references and articles, ranking of cited journals, cited publishers and research contributors of IRIEJ.”

URL : http://www.ijodls.in/1.html

Open access journals and institutional repositories practical need…

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Open access journals and institutional repositories: practical need and present trends in India :

“Trends in open access publishing in India are discussed. Data was collected from directories of open access journals and institutional repositories. The URL of each institutional repository and open access journals publisher was visited to collect relevant data and information including from earlier studies. Case study method was used to know the trends of open access publishing in India. Data is analyzed based on certain parameters, such as number of institutional repositories and open access journals, number of documents, software used, types of documents, etc. Among the top 25 open access publishing countries, India ranks 12th for the overall number of journals, but drops to 18th for journals with online content. However, its position in the list of open access journals is fifth. At present India ranks 12th in the list of countries with registered interoperable archives in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16852

Citing patterns in Open Access journals: a study of D-Lib Magazine

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the pattern of citing references of research articles published in D-Lib Magazine during 2002 to 2008. A total of 4775 citations were collected from 295 articles published during 2002 to 2008. Articles classified as editorial materials, power point slides, book reviews, columns, reports and news items were not considered for the analysis.

References of each article were collected and Microsoft Office Excel 2007 was used for analyses. The various analyses focus on year-wise distribution of articles and cited references, types of documents cited, country and language of cited documents, file format and domain of cited references, etc. The study shows the changing trends of research in the field of library & information science in the field of digital libraries particularly with the introduction of Internet and World Wide Web.

This change can be seen in digital library research as researchers have been used digital and web resources to conduct their research.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16851

A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open…

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A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals :

“Background: 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.

Objective: 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.

Methods: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.”

URL : http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e115/

The impact of open access journals on library and information scientists’ research in Taiwan

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“As some library and information science (LIS) journals in Taiwan are open access, the aim of the study is to investigate what, if any, impact open access journals have on library and information science scholars‘ research in Taiwan. Therefore, the objectives of the study is to explore the scholarly productivity of LIS scholars in Taiwan, to find out what articles they publish and OA articles as a percentage of all titles, and to calculate the mean citation rate of open access articles and articles not freely available online. A bibliometric method was used in the study. To determine whether a difference in research impact existed, two research impact indicators were used, that is, open access articles as a percentage of all published titles and mean citation rate of open access articles and those not freely available online. Data on published articles with citation counts by the LIS scholars in Taiwan from 2000 to 2009 was collected from the ACI Database and Social Science Citation Index Database. The study shows that for 72 LIS scholars who were subjects of the investigation, 64 of them had published 745 articles within the previous ten years: 679 articles in Chinese and 66 articles in English; 499 of these were OA articles, and 264 were non-OA articles; OA articles constituted 66.98% of the total number of academic articles. The mean citation rate of OA versus non-OA article citation was 1.29.Analysis of impact indicators shows that open access journals have an impact on the research of LIS scholars in Taiwan, in particular, LIS OA journals have more research impact in Chinese than those in English.”

URL : http://eprints.ptar.uitm.edu.my/3624/