New resource aims to provide quality insight into OA resources - Research Information

Ever since the concept of open-access journals began gathering steam, the question of journal quality has been an issue for sceptics and advocates alike. It has become a normal part of our daily lives to delete emails inviting submissions to a new open-access journal with obscure origins and questionable relevance to the email recipient. US librarian Jeffrey Beall does a thorough job of investigating and questioning such so-called predatory open-access journals and their publishers in his Scholarly Open Access blog. But what if you are not just looking for which journals to avoid but actively seeking insight into which open-access titles to publish in or read? This is a question that the international ISSN network has increasingly found itself posed with. The network is made up of one international centre, created by UNESCO and the French government, and 88 national centres. Its role is to allocate unique ISO identifiers to serials to help people ensure that they are talking about the same publication. However, beyond rejecting some applications for ISSNs on very obvious factual grounds, it is not within the agency’s remit to assess journal quality ... Getting a clear picture of open-access resources and their quality is important as many national and international policies and initiatives increasingly favour open access. In addition, many tools are being developed that help journals and repositories to be produced more easily. Today there are over 3,600 institutional repositories registered in ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) and 9,700 listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), although this number is currently decreasing because of a more selective inclusion policy. ... UNESCO also requires better information about open access. The organisation promotes and supports open access to knowledge via various programmes and actions. It wanted to provide a global view of open access and also needed to gather statistics about OA resources worldwide.  Meanwhile, there are many resources that provide different pieces of information that provide useful insight to guide these enquiries. The ISSN team, with funding from UNESCO, saw an opportunity to help join up the dots.  The result, which launched in beta in December 2013 as a subset of the ISSN Register, is ROAD – the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources.  ROAD includes a range of OA resources, including journals, conferences proceedings, monographs, and institutional repositories. Content is chosen for inclusion in the directory based on the criteria that there is open access to the whole content of the resource (free registration is accepted); no moving wall; the resource comprises mainly research papers; and the audience is mostly researchers and scholars.  Currently hybrid journals are not part of the project ... The way that ROAD works is that ISSN records that describe OA resources are marked with a devoted code so that they can be published in ROAD. These ROAD codes are added by the ISSN National Centres when creating the records, or retrospectively by the ISSN International Centre. The ISSN records are then enriched with data taken from external sources such as journal indicators, indexing-abstracting services and registries. As of April 2014, the external sources used to enhance records in ROAD are: the DOAJ; Econlit; Catalogo (Latindex); Psych’INFO; Linguistic Abstracts; Scopus; SJR; SNIP; and The Keepers. The team also has an agreement in principle with the University of Washington's Eigen factor ..."