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  • Open access
  • 115 Reads
Improving the Transparency, Credibility and Impact of Open Access Journals
From my perspective as Managing Director for the Directory of Open Access Journals, I will discuss the most important issues related to furthering the momentum of Gold Open Access Publishing. The issues I will discuss will be improving the transparency and credibility of Open Access Publishing and what a service like DOAJ tries to contribute in that regard. I will discuss the problems related to Hybrid Open Access publishing especially in relation to the way that the open access mandate United Kingdom has adopted, which has led to huge support to Hybrid OA-publishing at the expense of pure OA-publishing, which has given OA-publishing a bad name in the UK. As well I will discuss the need for marginalizing and eliminating the problem of unethical, questionable OA-publishers. Further I will discuss a number of future demands on Open Access journals in terms of providing more granular measures of impact (beyond the terrible Journal Impact Factor), the need for policies related to research data and related issues.
  • Open access
  • 101 Reads
1st Electronic Conference of MDPI Editors-in-Chief
Published: 12 January 2015 by MDPI in 1st Electronic Conference of MDPI Editors-in-Chief session Introduction
I am delighted to welcome you to the first electronic meeting of Editors-in-Chief. I have met and communicated with a number of you personally, and look forward to interacting with all of you further through this meeting. Our project at MDPI depends critically on the time you give to our journals. I want to say a big thank you to every one of you. At this conference we want to hear your feedback and ideas and help to introduce you to some of the current issues around publishing. We are very happy to have the participation of several experts from key organizations, and look forward to what they have to contribute to our discussion of the current publishing landscape. This presentation details the development and some of the key milestones of MDPI since I started in 1996.
  • Open access
  • 70 Reads
STM and its Activities
STM—the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers—is the leading global trade association for scholarly publishers. STM has currently over 120 members from 21 countries who each year collectively publish nearly 66% of all journal articles and tens of thousands of monographs and reference works. STM represents the interests of its members to governments, wider industry bodies and funders while informing and influencing decision makers to produce better outcomes. STM has currently six different portfolios where all these activities are being pursued and coordinated. In the past years the topic of "access to scientific information" and the business model of Gold Open Access caught special attention in the activities of STM and a position was developed. However there are still many challenges in the implementation to overcome while other issues for consideration have not yet reached the final debate.
  • Open access
  • 129 Reads
Ranking the Leading Journals in Finance and Accounting Based on Quantity and Quality Citations
Published: 14 January 2015 by MDPI in 1st Electronic Conference of MDPI Editors-in-Chief session Measuring Research
The perceived quality and impact of academic journals are important in evaluating the perceived research performance of individual researchers for hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.Rightly or wrongly, such perceived journal quality and impact are typically used as a proxy for the quality of an academic paper, as publication in a highly regarded journal is seen as imparting an important signal regarding the purported quality of the published paper. This presentation is based on Chang, C.-L and M. McAleer (2014),"Just how good are the top three journals in finance? An assessment based on quantity and quality citations", Annals of Financial Economics, 9(1), 2014, 1-31.
  • Open access
  • 63 Reads
Altmetrics in Practice
Published: 19 January 2015 by MDPI in 1st Electronic Conference of MDPI Editors-in-Chief session Measuring Research
How is altmetrics data, both qualitative and quantitative, being used by publishers, researchers, funders and institutions? Who is using the data and for what purpose? I'll be looking at where altmetrics in the broadest sense of the word have been working in practice and where they haven't.
  • Open access
  • 74 Reads
Impact Factors and Ratings of Open Access and Online Journals
Published: 20 January 2015 by MDPI in 1st Electronic Conference of MDPI Editors-in-Chief session Measuring Research
It is well known that the world of publishing is divided into what can be described as a class system. There are A journals, B journals and C journals depending on acceptance rates. According to Cabell's International ratings are calculated primarily using the acceptance rates. The harder it is to get published in a journal the higher the ranking. I have edited special issues for such journals and published articles in a few of them and relate to this process.It seems that MDPI Journals among other open access journals that have higher relatively acceptance rates do not earn the rankings and thus the respect of the publishing community. The following discussion compares and contrasts the various rubrics used by journals that are classified top journals in the management sciences that includes entrepreneurship journals.
  • Open access
  • 62 Reads
Research Evaluation
Published: 21 January 2015 by MDPI in 1st Electronic Conference of MDPI Editors-in-Chief session Measuring Research
Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.

The evaluation of 'research' is now a common-place activity and understandably so. Things have moved on from previously vague ideas about 'value of research' in terms of 'dissemination'; usually thought of as encompassing a range of products or outputs in the form of reports, papers, and presentations. The problem, however, is that such initiatives all too often lead to ROI/CBA type calculations, a form of 'research accounting' that is yet another aspect of what Strathern has termed 'audit culture'. The result is that we measure what is easiest to measure, rather than trying to develop meaningful and indicative measures. Moreover any form of measure quickly becomes discredited as people find ways of 'juking the stats'. Or in terms of Goodhart's Law 'When a measure that becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure' In the UK this was embodied in The Research Assessment Exercise, now termed The Research Excellence Framework, due to be published in mid‐ December. In the early years this was based in part of the number of publications/outputs for each person submitted, but this was soon discontinued in favour of maximum of 4 outputs per person, which also became a de facto minimum. Many other countries have similar forms of assessment. Different disciplines or subject areas have different ideas about what counts as an output, or have different weightings for outputs such as books/monographs, journal papers, conference papers, and so on. Furthermore not all outputs in the same category are considered to be of equal merit, based not simply on the contents but also on the reputation of the journal or publisher. Consequently there now exist examples of journal rankings, a component of bibliometrics, which indicate the standing of specific journals within specific fields of study. There are various forms of measure, all now greatly facilitated by the existence of the internet, whereas previously people had to rely on citation indices which were often out of date and required significant labour to compile and maintain. There is a wide range of current options for these rankings, including citation reports and impact factors, as well as a range of organizations that assemble and supply these, including Thomson, Scopus, SCImago, and Eigenfactor. The result is that researchers aim at those journals with the highest ranking, and editors and publishers strive to attain high ranking. Both of these goals have various ramifications, and in some cases this has led to questionable practices on both sides. In addition, with the development of open access policies, the traditional business models for journals have been brought to the fore, with new models being developed that rely less on revenue from institutional subscriptions and more on article processing fees from authors. The result is that journal publication is a fraught issue for all parties. Potential authors now may have to find significant funds to get published, editorial policies are under pressure to ensure a high ranking for the journal, and publishers are having to adapt to a new climate of funding and ranking, leading to some critics to point to what they see as 'predatory practices' by some. Issues of licencing and copyright are also more fraught and complex. The necessity now is for journals to establish and maintain high levels of trust and reputation, but this is always going to be a challenge for publishers, editors, editorial boards, reviewers, and authors.

Accompanying this presentation is the article published in the Software Practitioner, available at
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/608183/Bryant%20SP%20March%20Issue2.pdf
  • Open access
  • 61 Reads
How to Edit a Journal Single-Handedly, Effectively?
Published: 26 January 2015 by MDPI in 1st Electronic Conference of MDPI Editors-in-Chief session Running a Journal
A couple of years ago I was asked to step up from being assistant editor to editor-in-chief of the international journal Mediaevistik. In its print format, it is a traditional scholarly journal, and the previous editor had done much of the leg-work all by himself. He received the books for review and sent them out by going to the post office, often traveling ca. 50-80 miles across the border from Austria to Germany to get cheaper postal rates. Being located in Tucson, Arizona, I knew that I had to transform the entire process of editing this journal, which normally publishes ca. 5-8 articles and ca. 160 book reviews per issue. I have relied mostly on the technological means available through the web and continue to transform the way how I can handle all the work as an editor. I will here present what I achieved and how I operate now single-handedly. Our journal is on the threshold of being published only digitally, but this is something handled by the publisher. My presentation will focus on the practical steps that I took to edit both articles and book reviews.
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