The Cuban scientific output in Cuban and foreign indexed academic journals was analyzed. Total output and longitudinal trends were identified through a multi-database unified record approach ...considering thirteen databases and indexes for foreign and national journals (Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, Biosis, Current Contents Connect, Zoological Record, Pubmed/Medline, SciELO Citation Index, Pascal and Francis, CABI Websites, CLASE and PERIÓDICA, and AGRIS), three open access databases (SciELO, Redalyc and Dialnet), two Cuban digital libraries of scholarly journals (Health Virtual Library (BVS) and InfoAgro) and 200 national certified academic journals. Cuban journals were analyzed mainly from publishers’ collections, library services or open access databases. From 2000 to 2016, it was found that the national output doubled from 2000 until 2015 (over 8000 articles) and close below that mark in 2016. Overall, the Cuban scientific output in Cuban journals increased, both by space of publication available (journals) and by article production. By the contrary, it stabilized in indexed foreign journals since 2014 on, with a slight tendency to grow until 2018. Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection accounted for 66.74 and 61.68%, respectively, of the output in foreign journals. It is shown for the first time that roughly 22% of the Cuban yearly scientific output is published in foreign journals, whilst the highest quality and most visible part of it by indexing. This is the first study approaching the entire Cuban output in scholarly journals, regardless journal origin.
La revisión abierta es uno de los componentes de la ciencia abierta que las revistas científicas están incorporando en la gestión de los procesos editoriales. A diferencia del acceso abierto a las ...publicaciones o a los datos de investigación, la revisión abierta suscita aún dudas y recelos por parte de los agentes implicados (editores, revisores y autores). Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la percepción de los editores de revistas publicadas en Brasil sobre la revisión por pares abierta (open peer review). Para ello, se utilizó un cuestionario online de 42 preguntas que se envió a 3.208 editores, de los cuales contestaron 351. Los editores mostraron satisfacción por el modelo actual de comunicación cientifica, el modelo de revisión doble ciego, mostraron desacuerdo con la identificación de los revisores, aunque percibieron una ventaja en que la revisión abierta permitiera la interacción mutua entre autores y revisores con el objetivo de mejorar la calidad de los contenidos. Como barreras, señalaron los conflictos de intereses y las rivalidades que la apertura de la revisión pudiera generar y la dificultad para encontrar revisores dispuestos a aceptar este modelo de revisión. La conclusión general apunta a un perfil conservador de los editores en lo que se refiere a la introducción de prácticas de apertura en la revisión.
Abstract
The assessment of research based on the journal in which it is published is a widely adopted practice. Some research assessments use the Web of Science (WoS) to identify ‘high quality’ ...journals, which are assumed to publish excellent research. The authority of WoS on journal quality stems from its selection of journals based on editorial standards and scientific impact criteria. These can be considered as universalistic criteria, meaning that they can be applied to any journal regardless of its place of publication, language, or discipline. In this article we examine the coverage by WoS of journals produced in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. We use a logistic regression to examine the probability of a journal to be covered by WoS given universalistic criteria (editorial standards and scientific impact of the journal) and particularistic criteria (country, language, and discipline of the journal). We find that it is not possible to predict the inclusion of journals in WoS only through the universalistic criteria because particularistic variables such as country of the journal, its discipline, and language are strongly related to inclusion in WoS. We conclude that using WoS as a universalistic tool for research assessment can disadvantage science published in journals with adequate editorial standards and scientific merit. We discuss the implications of these findings within the research evaluation literature, specifically for countries and disciplines not extensively covered by WoS.
Abstract
Finding a suitable open access journal to publish academic work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with ...publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of predatory publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. A systematic requirements analysis was conducted in the form of a survey. The developed tool suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendations are built on open data, publisher-independent and work across domains and languages. Transparency is provided by its open source nature, an open application programming interface (API) and by specifying which matches the shown recommendations are based on. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using two different evaluation techniques, including several new recommendation methods. We were able to improve the results from our previous paper with a pre-trained transformer model. The beta version of the tool received positive feedback from the community and in several test sessions. We developed a recommendation system for open access journals to help researchers find a suitable journal. The open tool has been extensively tested, and we found possible improvements for our current recommendation technique. Development by two German academic libraries ensures the longevity and sustainability of the system.
•We compare the internationality of Q1 and Q4 higher education journals.•We find that ‘international’ journals may be more concentrated in regions.•Journals with diverse editorial boards have more ...internationally inclusive content.•Q4 journals are more likely to include research/ers from outside the ‘core’.•Q4 journals facilitate the inclusion and visibility of under-represented contexts.
With the trend toward internationalization of higher education systems across the world, international journals play an important role in disseminating research from a diverse range of national contexts. While studies have continued to show a persistent western hegemony in published scholarship, research has largely focused on the most prestigious journals in the field, and it remains unclear how journals from beyond the most elite contribute to geographic diversity. This study makes a unique contribution to the existing knowledge body, through comparative analysis of the internationality (as a product of editorial boards, published authors, authorship compositions, and study contexts) of higher education journals in both the highest quartile of impact (Q1) and the lowest quartile of impact (Q4). The results show that while some journals may orient themselves as international in scope, in practice they may be more concentrated in particular regions. Although Q-ranking was not found to be a clear indicator of geographic diversity, Q4 journals are statistically more likely to include research and researchers from outside of the core anglophone countries, making an important contribution to the diversity of scholarship beyond the dominating western and English-language discourse.
•We estimated network positions of 2232 author/referee couples in an interdisciplinary journal..•Referees tended to recommend more positively submissions by authors who were closer in their ...collaboration networks.•Co-authorship network positions changed after peer review: respective distances decreased more rapidly than could have been expected by chance.•Findings suggest that peer review could not only reflect but also create and accelerate scientific collaboration patterns.
Peer review is not only a quality screening mechanism for scholarly journals. It also connects authors and referees either directly or indirectly. This means that their positions in the network structure of the community could influence the process, while peer review could in turn influence subsequent networking and collaboration. This paper aims to map these complex network implications by looking at 2232 author/referee couples in an interdisciplinary journal that uses double blind peer review. By reconstructing temporal co-authorship networks, we found that referees tended to recommend more positively submissions by authors who were within three steps in their collaboration network. We also found that co-authorship network positions changed after peer review, with the distances between network neighbours decreasing more rapidly than could have been expected had the changes been random. This suggests that peer review could not only reflect but also create and accelerate scientific collaboration.
Drawing on the evolution of socio-geographical imaginaries of scholarly journals published in Chile, this article provides a picture of the socio-historical trajectories of internationalization of ...scholarly journals and communities in that part of the (semi-)periphery of science. In order to break with the presentism of many contemporary discussions, the analysis covers a relatively long period of time, from the end of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twenty-first century. However, based on an inductive analysis of the journals, the article particularly focuses on the rise of nationalist and regionalist orientations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the intensification of the pressures for internationalization in more recent decades. Building on the findings, the article concludes highlighting key elements and making some general observations on the internationalization processes in the semi-periphery of science.
In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or ‘flipping’, from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing ...model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact. We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database. We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed. Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.
PDF
