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Scholarly Communication

OU Libraries guides scholars in matters relating to scholarly communication, which we define as the formal and informal ways research and scholarly works are created, evaluated, disseminated, preserved, used, and transformed.

Selecting Where to Publish

Selecting Journals

You can use tools to find journals in your discipline or related to your manuscript.

  • DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals - largest repository of OA journal. Includes a filter to find journals without publishing fees. 
  • Eigenfactor.org - uses the whole citation network to factor in discipline differences
  • Journal Citation Report database - list journals by category and you can examine their impact factor within that field.
  • SCImago Journal and Country Rank - lists journals by category and you can examine their rank within that field. Also allows you to view all Open Access journals by subject area.
  • Ulrich's Periodicals Directory- provides information on a journal, publisher information, open access status, and what databases index the journal.

Other tools:

  • Google Scholar Journal Metrics - uses it own h-index to compare
  • Scopus – compares journals using SCImago
  • Jane - is a journal/author name estimator tool that compares your document to millions of documents in Medline to find the best matching journals, authors or articles. Still need to evaluate suggested journals.

Book publishers

Comparing Journals

What ethical commitments has the journal made?
Is the journal a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) or publically committed to ethics in publishing as outlined by COPE? 
*For more on journal publishing ethics view the Code of Conduct and Best Practice for Journal Editors.

What is the impact factor of a journal?

There are very different methods for comparing journals based on different metrics. Informed and careful use of these impact data is essential. Journals from different disciplines can not be compared easily. For more in-depth information see  ASSESSING JOURNAL QUALITY: IMPACT FACTORS (Boston College Libraries)

  • Journal impact factor measures the importance of a journal by calculating the times its articles are cited.
  • Eigenfactor is a rating of the total importance of a scientific journal based on the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted to make a larger contribution than those from poorly ranked journals.
  • SCImago – similar to eigenfactor based on Scopus data.

Other indicators of quality:

  • Who is on the Editorial board?
  • Where is the journal indexed?
  • What is their business model?
  • What is the journal's acceptance rate?
  • What is there copyright/licensing agreement require?

*For more on Evaluating Journal Quality Reputation view the Principles of Transparency guide from the OASPA. 

The Problem with Journal Impact Factors

The journal impact factor was originally created as a tool to help librarians identify journals to purchase, not as a measure of the scientific quality of research in an article. With that in mind, it is critical to understand that the Journal Impact Factor has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment.  These limitations include:

  1. citation distributions within journals are highly skewed
  2. the properties of the Journal Impact Factor are field-specific: it is a composite of multiple, highly diverse article types, including primary research papers and reviews;
  3. journal Impact Factors can be manipulated (or “gamed”) by the editorial policy;
  4. data used to calculate the Journal Impact Factors are neither transparent nor openly available to the public. 

Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals, recognized the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated. They released an international declaration in 2013 calling on the world scientific community to eliminate the role of the journal impact factor in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness. To date, 904 organizations and 12,511 individuals have signed the declaration.
(From San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment Putting Science Into The Assessment of Research)