There have been blog posts about altmetrics, impact of open access published research, research data and negative results. Maybe it is time to present some good examples on quality open access journals or at least how to find them.
There are some given examples as PLoS with its many journals, BioMed Centrals journals och PEER J. De första är megatidskrifter och alla inom medicin, life-sciences, biomedicin och liknande. arXiv.org is a preprint archive for physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science etc.
Web of Science has listed open access journals. Here you can browse the journal title or search for a specific title.
ITC library has created a list on open access journals with impact factor. There are over eight hundred journals from all areas of research on the list. Unfortunately there is no year as to when the list was made so some of the impact factors might have gone up, some down.
University of Oregon has also created a ranking list with the help of Scopus and SJR. All 2014 open access journals which are included in SCImago Journal & Country Rank. They have also created a list where open access journals are ranked according to eigenfactor.org. Eigenfactor is bild so that it takes into consideration the different citation practices in research areas and data for the past five years are included. Citations from important journals are weighed higher than citations from lower ranking journal.
There is also a list on open access journals which have an impact factor from Web of Science from 2009, but due to copyright only ScimagoJR-indicator and Scopus SNIP-indicator are shown. SJR and SNIP are available on the open web. 619 journals are on the list. You can check a journal’s SJR and SNIP at SCImago Journal & Country Rank.
ScimagoJR and SNIP-indicator are measurements on a journals scientific prestige respective a kind of normalized value per article. E.g. SJR values citations from related journals higher and compensates for the number of issues a journal has. SNIP aims to make comparisons between different research areas possible, e.g. citations in medicine could be compared with humanities. This has its problems which are not discussed here.
Check our a youtube film on SJR & SNIP vs impact factor if you are interested.
You might have noticed that is is quite easy to find open access journals in medicine, biology and other sciences. It is more difficult to find open access journals in other areas, especially with impact factor. This is partly due to the fact that other areas are not represented in Web of Science as well.
DOAJ, Directory of Open Access journals is a good place to look for journals. You can search for a journal, browse according to a couple of categories such as new journals, subject, country of origin, license (one of creative common licenses) and APC, article processing charge. You can find journals within e.g. Arts & architecture, history & archaeology and social sciences.
Pieta Eklund