EXTERNAL ASSESSORS AS “REVIEWERS” FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS

"External validation provides important recognition for primarily young, open access, and interdisciplinary journals. Human Technology has been indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals1 (DOAJ)—a key player in whitelisting OA journals (Berger & Cirasella, 2015)—since 2005, receiving reaccreditation under the directory’s revised guidelines in 2016. In February 2017, our journal was accepted by Scopus,2 Elsevier’s bibliographic database, and will be indexed there in the coming months. In the process for being considered for, and then accepted by, these two well-known indexers, we at Human Technology had to supply to the indexers’ editors a wide variety of materials that supported our claim of quality, of reputable OA practices, and adherence to ethical standards. We are pleased that our consistent emphasis on publishing ethics, attention to quality in accepting papers, and filling an important niche in the vast academic publishing world has been assessed and accepted as equally valuable as those journals published by large, established publishing houses.

Obviously, young, independent OA journals cannot have their quality assured right away; indeed, in the early years, many face several challenges. For instance, predatory journals (see, e.g., Cook, 2017) and low-quality journals (Gasparyan et al., 2015) threaten the reputations of good, ethics-abiding journals in that the unscrupulous and poor scientific behaviors of these journals cast a long shadow over all journals, particularly OA journals that cover their publication costs through APCs (Shen & Björk, 2015). Good, young journals accept that, inevitably, it takes time and ongoing attention to reputable and ethical publishing in order to, eventually, earn the recognition of the academic community and accreditation by the quality assessors.

But, considering the reality that quality journals may not yet have been vetted by external assessors such as DOAJ, Scopus, or Web of Science, a separate but equally important question is, How can authors and researchers know to which journal to submit their work or which OA papers reflect sufficiently peer-reviewed quality for citation? The following points are based in part on the checklist of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association,3 and Butler (2013), Clark and Smith (2015), and Hansoti, Langendorf and Murphy (2016)"