“Of particular note, many researchers still are not aware of the available OA resources in their field, as they likely remain focused on the publications they “grew up with” during their own education. With the current generation of new scientists, it will then be up to the OA publishers to bring their journals to distinction both in the view of their respective scientific communities and in the eyes of the individual scientists working in the field.”
I found the quote in The Rise Of Open Access Scientific Publishing, By Matthew T. Dearing, first posted on February 7th 2012 on the site Science 2.0. The key phrase that drew my attention was “bring their journals to distinction“. There is not a uniform path of success in this simple admonision. Becoming a noticed and recognized journal is really a multistage process that unfolds over months and years:
- Original research of distinction is conceived, written,submitted for publication, revised, published, distributed, indexed, discovered, noted, read, and referred to others by human networks.
- Perhaps original research feeds the imagination of a student, scientist, or team that absorbs that research into a proposal, project or lab.
- Perhaps the discovered research complements or is relevant to research or writing in process and gets cited.
- Over time, original articles cited by future published research are subjected to bibliometric analysis in free and subscription tools, leading to objective rankings for individuals (e.g. h-index) or journals (e.g. SCImago Journal Rank) or even countries (e.g. SCImago Country Ranking), based on quantitative analysis over a given period of time.
- The subscription-based Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and the more recent open access SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SJR) are the primary tools for establishing whether a journal is distinguished by being ranked higher in these bibliometric ratios.
Despite the ability to influence Google indexing through search engine optimization (SEO) or paid Google AdWords, the business of becoming a distinguished journal depends on an aggregation of author efforts.
More than ever before, the existence of author-maintains-copyright open access policies, public access policies for taxpayer-funded research, the ease and low cost of personal web sites, and growth in number of institutional repositories (IR) allow authors to increase their visibility and quantitative opportunities to be found and cited by others. It is no wonder then that green open access publishers that allow author manuscript IR deposits prefer that either the publisher’s final version of the article or an author copy with a citation and link to the publisher’s version be the IR copy.
With many options in the hands of authors for promoting literature originally submitted to journals, it would really make sense for open access journals to distinguish themselves as a recognized product of green publishers.
