Publishing in high-impact journals is compatible with publishing in open-access journals. The UOC presents the third edition of the Observatory of High-Impact Open-Access Journals.
The Observatory of High-Impact Open-Access Journals is the instrument that diagnoses and determines the reach of open-access journals accessible throughout the world. It collects and analyses the information from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in relation to the two main international indexes that assess the quality of journals: the Journal Citation Report (Web of Science) and the SCImago Journal Rank (Scopus).
This resource created by the UOC is used to compare journals and evaluate the relative importance of a journal within the same field of science in order to help researchers and academics to publish with greater impact while maintaining their commitment to open-access policies.
This third edition of the Observatory identifies more relevant information about each journal: the lists of the Journal Citation Report feature the impact factor and quartile of the journal; that is, the frequency with which a journal has been cited in the last two years and the position on a scale from 1 to 4. Moreover, the SCImago Journal Rank list also includes the H index of each journal, which quantifies the scientific productivity and impact of the articles in a journal. In this way, the title, publisher, ISSN, impact factor, quartile, H index, number of documents, categories, keywords, and country of publication of each journal are indicated.
In this new edition of the Observatory, the SCImago Journal Rank contains 7.72% of open-access journals (1,772 science journals), while for the Journal Citation Report in its Social Science edition the percentage amounts to 3.97% open-access journals (166 journals), and in the Science edition it is 6.86% (915 journals).
According to data provided by the Observatory the best ranked open-access journals are Molecular Systems Biology, Epigenetics & Chromatin i Statistics Surveys. Of those published in Spain head the system International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, Revista de Psicodidáctica i Materiales de Construccion.
With this new edition of the Observatory, the UOC Library supports researchers from the University when identifying the most suitable place to publish their works and makes this instrument available to the world academic and research community to contribute to the open-access movement.