POLL: Are scientific journals unfair or biased?

April 20, 2014 4 Comments

I had the feeling sometimes that some scientific journals, particularly those belonging to certain regions, departments or associations, have some bias or require certain characteristics to research and to the manuscript that make it difficult to publish articles that are not of their affinity group.

  1. This has happened to me especially in Spain and the USA, so I imagine it will be a global widespread problem.
  2. In particular, I find difficult to publish in American journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters), which often have a series of demands that I don’t find in other countries journals the same level of impact factor; I don’t not know if their quality level is higher or that they distrustful of the research done outside the USA, which would be discriminatory. I believe that it has to do with what is taught in the USA doctorates, betting on a certain way of doing things and a specific requirement in research, although it’s best not to generalize.
  3. This feeling of discrimination have also been felt by some Asian colleagues, but instead, they directly accuse European and American journals of racism, which I do not think it exists for what was mentioned above.

But fortunately I feel that this presumably unjust situation is changing with the entry of new competitors / players in scholarly publishing, such as Open Access journals, article repositories, academic social networks or platforms such as Gaudeamus, which democratize the knowledge of scholarly publishing and open the opportunity to disseminate research from authors all around the world.

With these thoughts I propose you to vote on this survey and change a little our scholarly publishing world!

POLL: Are scientific journals unfair or biased?

 

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What are scholarly journals doing to attract authors and papers?

April 7, 2014 Leave a comment

What are scholarly journals doing to attract authors and papersBasically what scholarly journals do to maximize exposure and find content (authors and papers) is indexing them in data bases and directories, whether they are recognized journals, or new and open access.

  • The difference will be on the relevance of the database, because if they are indexed in Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters) they have already virtually assured a minimum content, but they should continue fighting for the journal quality and improvement in the medium term.
  • For maximizing exposure of your open access journals I’ve found the following less common abstracting and indexing services that they may be of interest: Google Scholar, Ulrich’s Web, JURN, CrossRef, Open J-gate, or ticTocs Journal Table of Contents, among many hundreds others.

For the better or worse this is so because it’s what authors are seeking; for example my journal search process is as follows:

  1. As I look for the best journal for my manuscript, I seek first those who publish articles similar to mine, and I get them mainly from the literature review.
  2. I usually also save the e-mails from the editors that have directly approached me to publish in their journals, so I have a look at them.
  3. After that I review the ones within the first quartile at Journal Citation Reports impact factor ranking.
  4. And finally, I try to find a common ground with their editors or someone who knows their editorial policy and can give me feedback about them, what articles are looking for or even if my paper could fit there.

At a second level, although it’s also important, is to create a database of authors, scientists and professors of the journal specialty field, either searching directly for them when they publish in other journals, or using their database of subscribers/readers.

Finally there is the Internet and social networks, creating their own pages for being followed by scientists, but I think it is still to be developed. Some journals make their call for papers in their own portals and even in specialized websites; undoubtedly it’ll be part of the future.

  • And how about the idea of ​​an academic network for publishing in journals? Where authors and editors could interact and publish their articles, such as Gaudeamus?

So, in short, to find authors and content journals should be well indexed in quality directories and work the social networks for potential new authors. After that it would only remain selecting the right papers among dozens, making use of the more or less automatized internal processes, particularly peer-review. Almost nothing!

 

Filed under Journals, Publishing in general Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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