Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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Have you been thinking of publishing in one of the BioMed Central open access journals, but were concerned because they might not be construed as a quality journal? One measure of the quality of a journal is it's Impact Factor, a value calculated by ISI from journals that they track (index) in their citation indexes such as Science Citation Index (which is available to UIUC on the web as Web of Science.) The impact factors are reported in Journal Citation Reports. ISI does not track all journals, but rather relies on a board of scientists to select which journals to index. Thus, to be chosen as a journal that ISI will index is something of a coup.
BioMed Central, one of the largest publishers of open access journals, has created a site where they list the BMC titles that are being indexed by ISI. As reported elsewhere, one of the BMC journals, BMC Bioinformatics, recently received nearly the same impact factor as the most well established journal is this field, Bioinformatics. This suggests that open access journals are being widely read and cited by others...which, after all, is a goal of most researchers.
(Also posted to the Biotechnology Information Center Newsletter.)
Posted by Katie Newman at December 22, 2005 2:12 PM
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