Choosing the Target Journal: Do Authors Need a Comprehensive Approach?

Editorial News

The role of impact factor in evaluating the value of scientific publications is critically reviewed.
\nOther possible criteria for evaluation are assessed and proposed.

FTC Sues OMICS: Claims Open Access Academic Publisher Scams Academics

This study aims to compare the annual impact factors (IFs) for the period 1999-2017 and the tri-annual IFs in 2011, 2014 and 2017 of the subscription access (SA) and open access (OA) journals published in the field of orthopedics, traumatology and sports medicine according to the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). All data for this study were obtained from the SCImago Journal & Country Rank database. We compared the change in the mean annual IFs of 197 SA journals with 52 OA journals in the field of orthopedics and sports medicine for the period between 1999 and 2017. In addition, we determined and compared the changes in the mean tri-annual IFs of these journals in 2011, 2014 and 2017. The mean publication fee values of the OA journals as well as the correlation between the three-year IFs of the year 2017 and the publication fee values were evaluated. From 1999 to 2017, the mean IF of SA journals increased 0.47-fold to 0.69, while the mean IF of the OA journals increased 0.85-fold to 0.63. Significant positive correlation was observed between the tri-annual IF and publication fee of OA journals in 2017 (r=0.458, p=0.001). We can predict that the mean IFs of OA journals in the field of orthopedics and sports medicine will reach the mean IFs of SA journals after several years. Choosing OA journals becomes advantageous when the desire for a higher number of citations is the most important factor.

Is it wrong for an author to pay a journal to publish a research paper? This has become one of the most common questions audiences ask when I speak at universities and meetings in my role as the editor-in-chief of a medical journal. The proliferation of open-access journals — defined broadly as journals whose content is available freely without barriers apart from those involved from the ability to use the Internet itself [2] — is causing important changes in the world of scholarly publishing. Open access also confuses readers, which should cause journals and the press to promote education and dialogue. Unfortunately, headlines like "Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee" [7] and "The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing" [6] make that dialogue harder to sustain. Let's try to keep it cool for another 900 words or so, and examine the various ways information can be disseminated, as well as the incentives that each approach might create. Before diving in, it is worth remembering what journals actually do, and what "scholarly publishing" means. For a few dollars a year, one can create a website or blog, and post research results on it instantly; most academic departments have websites that likewise allow near-immediate dissemination of new knowledge at no cost to the scientist. Instead, most researchers opt to endure peer review's indignities and delays, and some even pay for the privilege. Reasons for this vary, but the perceived values of scholarly publication include the validation of one's findings by colleagues, the ability to participate in the debate that advances a specialty's knowledge (an essential part of the scientific method), the wider dissemination of one's work afforded by the reach of a good journal or publisher, and the primacy that university promotions committees place on peer-reviewed publications. Most things that have value also have costs. Journals' expenses generally are not offset by advertising revenue [4]. Speaking generally but accurately, some of the remaining costs can be covered in two ways: Charging users or users' institutions to access content in a journal (a subscription-based model), or charging authors to publish in a journal (one common open-access model, though other open-access approaches certainly exist). In broad terms, the subscription model involves dividing costs by the number of readers or users, while a common alternative involves dividing costs by the number of articles published. Subscriptions are premised (and critically dependent) upon the idea that the contents of the journal are worth paying for. This tends to incent particular behaviors on the part of journals, including a focus on quality of the finished product, and a stringency of process that confers an air of selectivity; high-rejection-rate journals in medicine often are considered more prestigious. While no doubt there are some excellent open-access journals, and it is clear that not all subscription-model journals achieve those two aspirational standards, the incentives created by the subscription approach (along with the relative novelty of the open access movement) remain sufficient to allow easy substantiation of the following claim: The best journals in medicine and science still sell subscriptions. Even so, there are some important philosophical and practical reasons why open access is gaining traction, and for why the answer to the opening question of this editorial is unequivocally "no" — or at least "not in all cases". First, governments fund a great deal of research, and taxpayers fund governments. Because of this, there is an ethical case to be made that publicly funded work should be publicly available. Moving the paywall back from the subscriber to the author, as in an open-access model, accommodates this principle. Because of this, major public funders of research in the United States and Europe — including the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom — have open-access mandates. Some university librarians assert that rising subscription costs represent a crisis that impairs their ability to support the academic mission [8]; many libraries support open access for this reason among others [10, 11]. Finally, most [9] open-access models allow authors to retain copyright, allowing them to disseminate their work on university websites, and distribute it elsewhere without further charge. There is evidence that that open-access articles are more influential in terms of usage than are articles placed behind subscription-model paywalls [3, 5], although truly fair comparisons on this question will be difficult to conduct. But open access has a dark side. There is a perception that if journals collect fees from authors rather than subscribers, those journals will accept work of lower quality in order to collect more fees. This perception is what lies behind the opening question of this essay, and was the motivation behind a recent "sting" carried out by the journal Science [1]. The journal found a very high proportion of open-access journals that purport to do peer review appear to be little more than pay-to-play scams [1]. I hasten to add that many others are entirely reputable, some open-access journals have impact factors several times higher than any orthopaedic surgery journal, and as we all know, the quality of subscription-model journals also varies widely. I suspect many subscription-model journals would have been "stung" had Science opted to include them in its recent operation; one need not be a cynic to imagine why a subscription-model journal like Science might not choose to do so. Finally, open access is impractical for many researchers in a specialty like orthopaedic surgery, where most research is not funded extramurally. Open access fees can cost several thousand dollars, and most authors simply cannot or will not pay them. By way of disclosure, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research® is a hybrid. We remain principally a subscription-model journal, but our publisher, Springer®, offers authors an open access option in which — for USD 3000 — authors can retain copyright on their paper, and the work will be accessible to all users without charge to those users. Few authors choose this option. Importantly (we believe), in a variation on the open-access theme: 1 year after publication, all of the content in CORR® becomes freely available to everyone on PubMedCentral at no cost to authors. The fact that major public funding agencies, large university libraries, and multinational publishers are behind open access suggests it is here to stay. We do not completely know how this emerging trend will change scholarly publishing in general, and orthopaedic publication practices in particular, but I have a strong sense that it will. Stay tuned.

Impact Factors and Other Measures of a Journal's Influence

Knowledge Organization in editorial policies for titles, abstracts and keywords in JCR-indexed journals: an exploratory study in the areas of Information and Communication Sciences

Background: Novel metrics measure the dissemination of research articles over the web in news stories, blog posts, policy documents, tweets and other resources. We aimed to study the widely-disseminated research articles over the web in 2016 and analyze the scientific metrics of this dissemination. Methods: We have used the Pubmed query in Altmetric explorer to retrieve mentions of the scholarly research on multiple sclerosis in 2016. Altmetric attention score, number of news stories, number of blog posts, and number of tweets were used in this study. We used the top 5 percent of the widely-disseminated articles in 2016 for further analysis. Impact factor (IF), and 5yr-IF for Journals and Citations for each article were retrieved from Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge. Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) for Journals were retrieved from Scopus. We used the Pearson correlation and linear regression to analyze the association of scholar metrics with media metrics on multiple sclerosis research on 15th May 2017, Altmetric data and citations may be subject to slight change afterwards. Results: Pubmed query retrieved 5251 articles published in 2016, Altmetric provided the scholarly mentions for 4693 articles. The top 5 percent of widely-disseminated articles have been mentioned in 3238 news stories, 358 blog posts, and 11014 tweets. When we refined top 5 percent articles to be specific to MS research, Number of news stories for these articles was not correlated with any scientific metric (P>0.05 for IF, 5yr-IF, Citations, SNIP, SJR). Number of blog posts was weakly correlated with IF (r=0.22, P=0.0015), 5yr-IF (r=0.23, P=0.0014), Citations (r=0.32, P< 0.0001), SNIP (r=0.27, P=0.001), and SJR (r=0.16, P=0.02). Number of tweets was weakly correlated with IF (r=0.35, P< 0.0001), 5yr-IF (r=0.34, P< 0.0001), Citations (r=0.24, P=0.005), SNIP (r=0.35, P< 0.0001), and SJR (r=0.28, P< 0.0001). The Altmetric attention score was very weakly correlated with IF (r=0.14, P=0.04), Citations (r=0.16, P=0.02), and SNIP (r=0.17, P=0.01). Conclusion: Web and social media provide new possibilities for researchers to interact and distribute scientific findings among audience. The MS research output dissemination analysis in 2016 showed that number of news stories on the web might not reflect the scientific value of the studies, while number of blog posts and number of tweets are correlated with the scientific metric.

Purpose:This retrospective database analysis study aims to present the scientometric data of journals publishing in the field of ophthalmology and to compare the scientometric data of ophthalmology journals according to the open access (OA) publishing policies.Methods:The scientometric data of 48 journals were obtained from Clarivate Analytics InCites and Scimago Journal & Country Rank websites. Journal impact factor (JIF), Eigenfactor score (ES), scientific journal ranking (SJR), and Hirsch index (HI) were included. The OA publishing policies were separated into full OA with publishing fees, full OA without fees, and hybrid OA. The fees were stated as US dollars (USD).Results:Four scientometric indexes had strong positive correlations; the highest correlation coefficients were observed between the SJR and JIF (R = 0.906) and the SJR and HI (R = 0.798). However, journals in the first quartile according to JIF were in the second and third quartiles according to the SJR and HI and in the fourth quartile in the ES. The OA articles published in hybrid journals received a median of 1.17-fold (0.15–2.71) more citations. Only HI was higher in hybrid OA; other scientometric indexes were similar with full OA journals. Full OA journals charged a median of 1525 USD lower than hybrid journals.Conclusion:Full OA model in ophthalmology journals does not have a positive effect on the scientometric indexes. In hybrid OA journals, choosing to publish OA may increase citations, but it would be more accurate to evaluate this on a journal basis.

The recognition and progression of an academic or research career is hinged on the number and quality of publications in high-impact journals. Open access publication, especially in high-impact journals, confers...

There has been an increasing call for peer-reviewed journals that publish scholarly evidence to become ‘Open Access’ whereby their contents can be freely retrieved with cost incurred to individuals accessing them. Two subtypes of Open Access journals are ‘hybrid open access’ (some articles are open access and others not), and ‘delayed open access’ (some articles are open access and other articles have delayed access) (Ohno-Machado, 2011). Traditionally, journals have been published in two ways. In the first instance, professional associations, government organisations, universities or learned societies published journals that were only available to members as a benefit or subscribers to that journal. The second option included journals that were published by private companies (e.g. Sage and Wiley-Blackwell) and subscriptions were sold to those who wanted access to the journals. In both these contexts, access to journal articles was restricted to individuals who had a paid subscription or access fee. There are several reasons why journals' becoming Open Access has become a timely topic. An emphasis on evidence-based practice; knowledge translation; journal quality metrics (such as impact factor); increased international visibility; higher citation rates for authors; plus many agencies who fund research requiring grant recipients to publish their findings in journals that are classified as Open Access (Willinsky, 2006) all put pressure on journals to provide this. Journals can be ‘Open Access’ in several ways. Firstly, a journal can be completely ‘Open Access’ using a fee-based approach or a no-fee option. The costs associated with fee-based open access journals is borne either by the journal's sponsoring organisation, the journal's publisher, the authors who submit the articles to the journal, the author's employer, a research grant an author has received, or a combination thereof. The Australian Physiotherapy Association's Journal of Physiotherapy is a recent example of a journal that is now no-fee, open access. Alternatively, a journal can have specific articles that are classified as accessible even though there may be other articles that are not. Editors can decide to make an article freely available or authors pay a fee to the journal publisher to enable free access. This is the current arrangement for the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal (AOTJ) with Wiley-Blackwell. One result of passing on the cost of making an article ‘Open Access’ is the rise of ‘vanity publishers’ and ‘predatory publishers’ who produce material that is presented as ‘open access’, but then charge authors large fees to accept and publish their manuscripts as a means of generating profits. ‘Many of these publishers are corrupt and exist only to make money off the author processing charges that are billed to authors upon acceptance of their scientific manuscripts’ (Beall, 2013, n.p.). These sources of information are considered not credible and are best avoided. A list of these journals and their publishers is available from Beall's List of Predatory Publishers 2013 (http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/). AOTJ currently complies with all relevant research funding requirements by offering a variety of Open Access options. The AOTJ utilises a ‘hybrid open access’ approach where an author who has an article accepted for publication is able to pay a fee directly to the publishers to make it Open Access. The first issue of the current year and special issues of the AOTJ are also freely accessible for a period of time when they are first published. If the AOTJ wanted to become completely Open Access, then the cost linked to this would need to be carried either by the individual authors publishing in the AOTJ or by Occupational Therapy Australia Limited (OT AUSTRALIA) who contracts Wiley-Blackwell to publish the AOTJ and provides AOTJ as a member benefit. Both options would have additional cost implications for the parties involved. One primary advantage of making the AOTJ Open Access would be that it would likely increase the journal's Impact Factor by making its articles easier to retrieve and cite (Björk & Solomon, 2012). The question to be considered and debated is the cost-benefit of such a move for the Australian occupational therapy community, OT AUSTRALIA as an organisation, and OT AUSTRALIA's membership, Wiley-Blackwell as the publisher of the AOTJ and the users and consumers of occupational therapy evidence.

Preprint posting is the right thing to do for science and society. It enables us to share our results earlier, speeding up the pace of science. It also enables us to catch errors earlier, minimising the risk of alerting the world to our findings (through a high-impact publication) before the science is solid. Importantly, preprints ensure long-term open access to our results for scientists and for the public. Preprints can be rapidly posted for free on arXiv and bioRxiv, enabling instant open access. Confusingly for any newcomer to science who is familiar with the internet, scientific journals don't provide open access to papers in general. They restrict access with paywalls and only really publish (in the sense of to make publicly available) a subset of papers. The cost of access is so high that even institutions like Harvard and the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) cannot afford paying for general access to all the relevant scientific literature. For example, as MRC employees, members of my lab do not have access to the Journal of Neuroscience,because our MRC Unit, the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, cannot afford to subscribe to it. The University of Cambridge pays more than one million pounds in annual subscription fees to Elsevier alone, a single major publishing company, as do several other UK universities. Researchers who are not at well-funded institutions in rich countries are severely restricted in their access to the literature and cannot fully participate in science under the present system. Journals administer peer review and provide pretty layouts and in some cases editing services. Preprints complement journals, enabling us to read about each other's work as soon as it's written up and without paywall restrictions. With the current revival of interest in preprints (check out ASAPbio), more and more scientists choose to post their papers as preprints. All major journals including Nature, Science, and most high-impact field-specific journals support the posting of preprints. Preprint posting is in the interest of journals because they, too, would like to avoid publication of papers with errors and false claims. Moreover, the early availability of the results boosts early citations and thus the journal's impact factor. Check out Wikipedia's useful overview of journal preprint policies. For detailed information on each journal's precise preprint policy, refer to the excellent ROMEO website at the University of Nottingham's SHERPA project on the future of scholarly communication (thanks to Carsten Allefeld for pointing this out). All the advantages of using preprints to science and society are good and well. However, we also need to think about ourselves. Does preprint posting mean that we give away our results to competitors, potentially suffering a personal cost for the common good? What is the selfish scientist's best move to advance her personal impact and career? There is a risk of getting scooped. However, this risk can be reduced by not posting too early. It turns out that posting a preprint, in addition to publication in a journal, is advisable from a purely selfish perspective, because it brings the following benefits to the authors: Open access: Preprints guarantee open access, enhancing the impact and ultimate citation success of our work. This is a win for the authors personally, as well as for science and society. Errors caught: Preprints help us catch errors before wider reception of the work. Again this is a major benefit not only to science, society, and journals, but also to the authors, who may avoid having to correct or retract their work at a later stage. Earlier citation: Preprints grant access to our work earlier, leading to earlier citation. This is beneficial to our near-term citation success, thus improving our bibliometrics and helping our careers - as well as boosting the impact factor of the journal, where the paper appears. Preprint precedence: Finally, preprints can help establish the precedence of findings. A preprint is part of the scientific record and, though the paper still awaits peer review, it can help establish scientific precedence. This boosts the long-term citation count of the paper. In computer science, math, and physics, reading preprints is already required to stay abreast of the literature. The life sciences will follow this trend. As brain scientists working with models from computer science, we read preprints and, if we judge them to be of high-quality and relevance, we cite them. My lab came around to routine preprint posting for entirely selfish reasons. Our decision was triggered by an experience that drove home the power of preprints. A competing lab had posted a paper closely related to one of our projects as a preprint. We did not post preprints at the time, but we cited their preprint in the paper on our project. Our paper appeared before theirs in the same journal. Although we were first, by a few months, with a peer-reviewed journal paper, they were first with their preprint. Moreover, our competitors could not cite us, because we had not posted a preprint and their paper had already been finalised when ours appeared. Appropriately, they took precedence in the citation graph - with us citing them, but not vice versa. Posting preprints doesn't only have advantages. It is also risky. What if another group reads the preprint, steals the idea, and publishes it first in a high-impact journal? This could be a personal catastrophe for the first author, with the credit for years of original work diminished to a footnote in the scientific record. Dishonorable scooping of this kind is not unheard of. Even if we believe that our colleagues are all trustworthy and outright stealing is rare, there is a risk of being scooped by honorable competitors. Competing labs are likely to be independently working on related issues. Seeing our preprint might help them improve their ongoing work; and they may not feel the need to cite our preprint for the ideas it provided. Even if our competitors do not take any idea from our preprint, just knowing that our project is ready to enter the year-long (or multiple-year) publication fight might motivate them to accelerate progress with their competing project. This might enable them to publish first in a journal. The risk of being scooped and the various benefits vary as a function of the time of preprint posting. If we post at the time of publication in a journal, the risk of being scooped is 0 and the benefit of OA remains. However, the other benefits grow with earlier posting. How do benefits and costs trade off and what is the optimal time for posting a preprint? As illustrated in the figure below, this selfish scientist believes that the optimal posting time for his lab is around the time of the first submission of the paper. At this point, the risk of being scooped is small, while the benefits of preprint precedence and early citation are still substantial. I therefore encourage the first authors in my lab to post at the time of first submission. Conveniently, this also minimises the extra workload required for the posting of the preprint. The preprint is the version of the paper to be submitted to a journal, so no additional writing or formatting is required. Posting a preprint takes less than half an hour. I expect that as preprints become more widely used, incentives will shift. Preprints will more often be cited, enhancing the preprint-precedence and early-citation benefits. This will shift the selfish scientist's optimal time of preprint posting to an earlier point, where an initial round of responses can help improve the paper before a journal vets it for a place in its pages. For now, we post at the time of the first submission. Benefits and costs to the authors of posting preprints as a function of the time of posting. This figure considers the benefits and costs of posting a preprint at a point in time ranging from a year before (-1) to a year after (1, around the time of appearance in a journal) initial submission (0). The OA benefit (green) of posting a preprint is independent of the time of posting. This benefit is also available by posting the preprint after publication of the paper in a journal. The preprint-precedence (blue) and early-citation (cyan) benefits grow by an equal amount with every month prior to journal publication that the paper is out as a preprint. This is based on the assumption that the rest of the scientific community, acting independently, is chipping away at the novelty and citations of the paper at a constant rate. When the paper is published in a journal (assumed at 1 year after initial submission), the preprint no longer accrues these benefits, so the lines reach 0 benefit at the time of the journal publication. Finally, the risk of being scooped (red) is large when the preprint is posted long before initial submission. At the time of submission, it is unlikely that a competitor starting from scratch can publish first in a journal. However, there is still the risk that competitors who were already working on related projects accelerate these and achieve precedence in terms of journal publication as a result. The sum total (black) of the benefits and the cost associated with the risk of being scooped peaks slightly before the time of the first submission to a journal. The figure serves to illustrate my own rationale for posting around the time of the first submission of a paper to a journal. It is not based on objective data, but on subjective estimation of the costs and benefits for a typical paper from my own lab.

Journal Metrics in Psychiatry: What do the rankings tell us?

To question the efficacy of 'gold' open access to published articles. Open access is unrestricted access to academic, theoretical and research literature that is scholarly and peer-reviewed. Two models of open access exist: 'gold' and 'green'. Gold open access provides everyone with access to articles during all stages of publication, with processing charges paid by the author(s). Green open access involves placing an already published article into a repository to provide unrestricted access, with processing charges incurred by the publisher. This is a discussion paper. An exploration of the relative benefits and drawbacks of the 'gold' and 'green' open access systems. Green open access is a more economic and efficient means of granting open access to scholarly literature but a large number of researchers select gold open access journals as their first choices for manuscript submissions. This paper questions the efficacy of gold open access models and presents an examination of green open access models to encourage nurse researchers to consider this approach. In the current academic environment, with increased pressures to publish and low funding success rates, it is difficult to understand why gold open access still exists. Green open access enhances the visibility of an academic's work, as increased downloads of articles tend to lead to increased citations. Green open access is the cheaper option, as well as the most beneficial choice, for universities that want to provide unrestricted access to all literature at minimal risk.

Some Research Wants to Be Free, Some Follows the Money: Bogus Journals Complicate the Open Access Movement