Commercial journals and prestigious journals are not inclusive of one another.
Commercial journals use a number of strategies to inflate their initial impact ratings. These strategies are not available to most non-commercial outlets. For example, most societies publish 1-2 journals. Most commercial outlets publish many, many more journals. A commercial outlet can "encourage" folks to cite articles from other related journals in their fold. IF a commercial outlet had 10 journals, and it gets one author in each journal to cite a paper from the new #11 journal, it will greatly inflate the impact rating of the new journal. However, if a society pub that is not commercially run tries this, it only has one other journal to cite it. THis is important because JCR has guidelines that can exclude a journal for over 10% (at least that is what the number was a couple years ago) self citation rate. By self citation rate, we are talking articles published in Journal A that are also cited in Journal A. Are commercial outlets convenient for socieities? Yes. Are they necessary? No. I am one of the co-founders of Herpetological Conservation and Biology. It is an international journal. The journal will get its first impact rating this summer after six years of operations. We have no commercial publisher, no fees, no costs to authors. How do we do this? Because we are running the journal as a service to society rather than as an income generating venue. The out-of-pocket cost is around $150/yr and all page layouts, designs, webpages, etc are handled by editorial staff. Herpetology Notes, is another journal along this same thread. It is now in its 5th year of operations and accepts a wide range of articles from notes to monographs. (HCB however does not accept notes). Herpetology Notes is published on the SEH's website. Web publishing is not exactly rocket science, it is not all that difficult and frankly it is not that much more work than a normal editorial activity. We could transfer page layouts to the author, but have not done that so far. It should also be noted that online open access and quality are not exclusive of one another. The first Impact rating will probably be lower than we would like (less than 1), because the journal is growing so rapidly (we recently changed from a single editor to 5 editor system to handle volume! Despite this, we maintain reasonable standards, not excessively selective (as we don't have to be without major printing costs), but we don't publish junk. I also contend that our editorial process is more "effective' than many others because of our philosophy that we have a lot of editors handling a few papers rather than few editors handling a ton of papers and getting stressed out or overlooking the obvious. I will not pretend we have not made mistakes, sure we have! Why more of these outlets have not appeared is subject to conjecture. We have been successful enough to attract the attention of the staff at the Chronicle of Higher Education last year. My only real point to all of this is that this unusual way of publishing requires some dedication from the community, but it is not especially hard. If a group is unhappy with the current publication process in their discipline, then do something to fix it rather than just complaining about it. This was how HCB came to be. We saw a problem, and sought to fix it, and our activities did elicit change to many areas in several of the herp society publications, websites, and general activities. Anytime you do something, you are more likely to be successful than if you just talk about it. On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 11:54 PM, Wayne Tyson <landr...@cox.net> wrote: > Honorable Forum: > >> From > > http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html?_r=1 > > "Researchers should cut off commercial journals' supply of papers by > publishing exclusively in one of the many "open-access" journals that are > perfectly capable of managing peer review . . ." > > That is, AVOID the "prestigious" journals and concentrate on the work rather > than the buck. Be on the leading edge of advancing science in all directions > rather than depriving the "lay" public of the fruits of your talent and > effort. > > WT > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Inouye" <ino...@umd.edu> > To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU> > Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 3:32 PM > Subject: [ECOLOG-L] NYT OP-ED piece about public access to research > publications > > >> >> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html >> >> >> ----- >> No virus found in this message. >> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com >> Version: 10.0.1416 / Virus Database: 2109/4136 - Release Date: 01/11/12 >> > -- Malcolm L. McCallum Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry School of Biological Sciences University of Missouri at Kansas City Managing Editor, Herpetological Conservation and Biology "Peer pressure is designed to contain anyone with a sense of drive" - Allan Nation 1880's: "There's lots of good fish in the sea" W.S. 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