What is Open Access about? Debates at the heart of the Open Access movement » Sci:Debug

"Yesterday, the National Contact Point Open Access (Germany) sent a mail to several mailing lists in which it pointed to a list of highly cited Open Access journals. According to the mail, this list could be helpful in motivating scientists to publish in Open Access journals [translated by the author of this posting]: “From now on, an overview is available under the resources category with approx. 700 highly cited Open Access journals from all scientific disciplines. The aim of this overview is to make established and relevant Open Access journals visible to researchers and to increase their findability. In this way we are helping researchers to identify suitable and influential Open Access journals from their discipline to submit their manuscripts.” The list relies on the journal metric Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) (based on Elsevier’s database Scopus), which differs from the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) mainly by considering average citation rates of the discipline when calculating the impact (or SNIP score) of a specific journal.nnIn an answer Katja Mruck, editor of the Open Access journal Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung FQS (not in the list mentioned above), commented critically on this list. For example, she pointed out that in order to be indexed in relevant citation databases (like Scopus or the Web of Science, the latter is used to calculate the JIF), FQS would have to adapt its characteristics to the specifications of the databases, e.g. by

• • publishing less articles and issues per yearn

• • covering a smaller thematic spectrum

• • ask FQS-related authors to place their publications strategically, namely in journals that are already indexed in these databases, and to cite FQS-articles...."