王应宽

Beijing, China

2014-03-02

IJABE Editorial

OpenAccess Leads to Success

WangYingkuan

(Chinese Academyof Agricultural Engineering, Beijing100125,China)

Wang Y K.  IJABE Editorial: Open access leads to success. Int. J. Agric. & Biol. Eng, 2014;7(1): 01-02.  DOI: 10.3965/j.ijabe. 20140701.000

International Journal of Agricultural andBiological Engineering (IJABE, www.ijabe.org) is a peer reviewed open accessinternational journal, launched in 2008. Open access (OA) means unrestricted online access to peer-reviewedscholarly research. OA literature is free, digital, and available to anyoneonline.  An open-access article haslimited copyright and licensing restrictions which means anyone, anywhere, withaccess to the Internet may read, download, copy, and distribute that article.  As an OA journal, the papers published inIJABE are freely accessible online immediately upon publication via the IJABE website.  With the OA strategy, IJABE can reach abroader spectrum of readership by removing price barriers (subscriptions,licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) that some individual readers may experience.

Because open access provides barrier-freeaccess to information, readers and researchers anywhere in the world can readscholarly output that has been made available in an open-access journal.  A wider audience, in turn, has the potentialto increase the impact of the research presented in an open-access article;i.e., the more readers, the greater the impact.  Many studies indicate that open-accessarticles are more immediately and more frequently cited than non- open-accessarticles.  For example, a 2006 study by aUniversity of Southamptonresearcher in the United  Kingdom found that authors of OA articlesreceive 50% to 250% more citations.  Morerecent research shows that there are different levels of OA citation advantagefor different disciplines: 170% to 580% increase for Physics/Astronomy, 300% to450% increase for Medicine, and 200% to 600% increase for Agriculture.  Increased citation rates lead to greaterresearch impact.  Therefore, the way tomaximize the impact of your research findings is to maximize the exposure toyour work. Publishing in OA journals is generally recognized as the mostefficient way to maximize your impact.

Meanwhile, in order to help to shareknowledge and creativity with the global scientific community and to protectauthors’ intellectual property (as with any scholarly article, traditional orotherwise), authors of an OA article should be properly acknowledged and cited. IJABE adopts the Creative CommonsAttribution 3.0 License (CC-BY3.0) to support these goals.

IJABE provides a platform for sharing thelatest high-quality research concerning agricultural, food and biologicalengineering and the application of these engineering techniques in all areas ofagriculture.  The journal features worksof great significance, originality, and relevance in all of the primaryareas.  Our readers are from theinternational scientific community and include educators, policy makers,agricultural engineers and scientists, and interested members of the publicaround the world.  IJABE has establishedstrong quality control in the overall publication process, with the help of aninternational editorial board including over 300 renowned experts from about 50countries and a high-quality editorial team, by performing rigorous peerreview, repeated revision for improvement, professional editing andproofreading, academic misconduct checking such as multiple contributionsof the same manuscript, and checks for fabricated data, falsified results,pleonasm or plagiarizing, and unwarrantable authorship and signature.

IJABE has gained great success based onthe above joint efforts.  Up to February22, 2014, over 1100 submissions were received from over 20 countries, and sixvolumes with 22 issues and over 220 papers were published.  The IJABE website has attracted over 500,000visits from more than 90 countries around the world.  Many papers published in IJABE were cited byother prestigious journals including Web of Science™ Core Collection-indexedjournals.  To date, the total registeredusers in IJABE database has reached over 10,000.

So far, online and print IJABE has beencovered and indexed by over 20 world-renowned indexing databases including EiCompendex, CA, INSPEC, Abstract Journals (VINITI RAN), Agricola, AGRIS, Scopus,CSA, OCLC, ProQuest, Index Copernicus, Google scholar, CAB International, CABABSTRACTS Full Text Select, Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries-Open AccessDigital Library, EBSCOhost---Academic Search Complete, Academic Search R&D,Academic Source Complete, and Food Science Source, Socolar, China EducationalPublications Import & Export Corporation. All the papers published in IJABE can be searched in the ThomsonReuter’s Web of Science All Databases category. IJABE papers are also indexed in the Abstracting & Indexing Sourcesfor AgBiotech News and Information (Active) (Print), Genetics Abstracts(Active) (Print), Index Veterinarius (Active) (Print), Pig News &Information (Active) (Print), Pollution Abstracts (Active) (Print), PostharvestNews and Information (Active) (Print), Review of Aromatic and Medicinal Plants(Active) (Print), Virology and AIDS Abstracts (Active) (Print), Wheat, Barleyand Triticale Abstracts (Active) (Print), and Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory(Active) (Print).  And IJABE has beenlisted on the world’s biggest online OA journals platforms: Directory of OpenAccess Journals (DOAJ) and Open J-Gate.  

Most importantly, up to February 25, 2014,207 papers published prior to the fourth IJABE issue of 2013 were indexed in ThomsonReuter’s Web of Science™ All Databases category, which were cited 343 timesincluding the top-cited paper which was cited 98 times (which was published inIJABE in 2009).  IJABE’s average citationper item was 1.66 and the corresponding h-index was 7.  According to the google scholar citations, asof February 23, 2014, the total number of times that IJABE papers were citedreached 938 for the 221 papers published in IJABE (through issue 4 of 2103),with an average citation per item of 4.2.  It is especially noteworthy that all the 50papers published in IJABE in 2013 have been indexed by Ei Compendex, with theCompendex abstracted and indexed records uploaded on IJABE website.  

Let’s look at other indicators.  The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is aportal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developedfrom the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).  These indicators can be used to assess andanalyze scientific domains. The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, developedby SCImago from the widely known algorithm Google PageRank™, shows thevisibility and impact of the journals contained in the Scopus® database.  IJABE has been included in Scopus since 2009.  According to the latest Journal Rankings bySJR in 2012, IJABE ranked in the second quartile (Q2, 25%-50%) among all thecovered journals in the subject category of both “Engineering (miscellaneous)”and “Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous)”.  IJABE ranks second and fifth among theScopus-covered journals in the subject categories of “Agricultural andBiological Sciences (miscellaneous)” and “Engineering (miscellaneous)”published in China,respectively.

We welcome you to submit your research toIJABE, since publishing papers in OA-based IJABE can maximize your impact.  OA research publications can provide widersharing of knowledge and the acceleration of discovery and innovation, leadingto increased open science, and web-based interactive and collaborative research.

Executive Editor-in-chief of the IJABE