王应宽编译

Wang Yingkuan

Beijing, China

2015-08-10

开放存取期刊中高价未必总能买到高声望

Nautre刊载文章，报道了Zoë Corbyn利用名为“Cost Effectiveness for Open Access Journals,”的评价工具，对汤姆孙路透收录的657种开放存取期刊（其中356种OA期刊不收取任何费用）的收费价格与声望信息进行分析，通过计算论文影响值赋分与成本收益比，然后进行排序，得到性价比最高的10种OA期刊和性价比最低的10种OA期刊。可见，高收费的OA期刊未必影响力大，收费低或不收的OA期刊未必就影响力小。主要还要看论文本身的选题和质量以及传播的平台。

详情参见刊载在Nature网站的原文。

文章来源：

http://www.nature.com/news/price-doesn-t-always-buy-prestige-in-open-access-1.12259

Price doesn't always buy prestige in open access

Online comparison tool reveals which journals provide the biggest bang forthe buck.

• Zoë Corbyn

22 January 2013

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The open-access journals that charge the most aren't necessarily the mostinfluential, an online interactive tool suggests. The freely accessible tool,launched earlier this month, shows that a journal's fees do not correlateparticularly strongly with its influence, as measured by a citation-basedindex.

“We have brought together a way of measuring prestige and price and comeup with a metric that can be used by authors to help them decide between thedifferent venues they could publish in,” says Jevin West, a network-science andbibliometrics researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. West ledthe development of the online tool as part of the Eigenfactor Project, whichseeks alternative ways to rank and map science.

The “real goal”, West says, is to help to create a transparent market inopen-access publishing. “We hope to clean up a little of the predatorypublishing, where publishers might be charging more than their value merits.”

The tool, called Cost Effectiveness for Open Access Journals,incorporates pricing and prestige information for 657 open-access journalsindexed by Thomson Reuters, including 356 that do not charge any fees.

The data are plotted to show a journal's Article Influence (AI) scoreagainst the fee it charges per article. (Where charges are on a per-page basis,an article length of 15 pages is assumed, based on what the authors judge is atypical article length.) The AI score is calculated by dividing the EigenfactorScore¹ of the journal by the number of articlesin the journal, normalized so that the average journal has an AI equal to 1.Eigenfactor Scores are like impact factors in that they are based on citations,but they also take into account the source of the citations.

Field data

The plot can be filtered to look at any one of 35 subject fields. Doing soshows that some fields have a stronger correlation between the AI score and thefee charged, while others show very weak correlation. Journals covering thefield of molecular and cell biology, for example, seem to have a strongercorrelation than do those from physics or mathematics.

But the tool also ranks journals' bang for the buck, with a table of cost-effectivenessvalues — which are calculated by dividing the journal's AI score by the priceto publish.

Of the 301 fee-based open-access journals considered, the mostcost-effective was the Publication of the Astronomical Society of Japan (seeBest-value journals); the least cost-effectivewas the Journal of Physical Therapy Science (see Least-value journals). Among the largestopen-access publishers, the Public Library of Science had three journals — PLoSBiology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Medicine — ranked within thetop 15 journals for cost effectiveness. A BioMedCentral journal, the IrishVeterinary Journal, ranked among the lowest.

Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project in Cambridge,Massachusetts, welcomes the tool as a way to drive competition into the market.He adds, however, that he is sceptical about using a metric based solely oncitations to judge prestige.

Bo-Christer Björk, an open-access researcher at the Hanken School ofEconomics in Helsinki, says that factors other than prestige — from the speedof the review process to layout — also could influence researchers' decisionsabout where to publish. But he agrees that the tool will be useful.

Future improvements planned for the tool include incorporating journalsthat are only partly open-access; adding open-access journals outside thoseindexed by Thomson Reuters; and further refining subject categories. “We intendto include any journal that has some open-access ability,” says West.

Best-value journals

*Journals charge per page. Fee assumes 15-page articles.

Least-value journals

*Journals that charge per page. Fee assumes 15-page articles.

Nature：doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12259

References

1. West, J. D., Bergstrom,     T. C. & Bergstrom C. T. Coll. Res. Libr. 71, 236–244 (2010).

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