Open Access News

This is a preprint of a paper submitted to the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. The well-documented limitations of journal impact factor rankings and perceptual ratings, the evolving scholarly communication system, the open access movement, and increasing globalization are some reasons that prompted an examination of journal value rather than just impact. Using a single specialized journal established in 1960, about education for the Information professions, this paper discusses the fall from citation grace of the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (JELIS) in terms of impact factor and declining subscriptions. Journal evaluation studies in Library and Information Science based on subjective ratings are used to show the high rank of JELIS during the same period (1984-2004) and explain why impact factors and perceptual ratings either singly or jointly are inadequate measures for understanding the value of specialized, scholarly journals such as JELIS. This case study was also a search for bibliometric measures of journal value. Three measures, namely journal attraction power, author associativity, and journal consumption power, were selected; two of them were re-defined as journal measures of affinity (the proportion of foreign authors), associativity (the amount of collaboration), and calculated as objective indicators of journal value. Affinity and associativity for JELIS calculated for 1984, 1994, 2004 and consumption calculated for 1985 and 1994 show a holding pattern but also reveal interesting dimensions for future study. A multi-dimensional concept of value should be further investigated wherein costs, benefits, and measures for informative and scientific value are clearly distinguished for the development of a fuller model of journal value.

From the body of the paper:

[O]pen access to the literature is changing scholarly communication in many ways. Digital repositories, for example, are tools to innovate scholarly communication by supplementing publishing; however, they are also increasing information overload since not all papers that are relevant to the topic can be cited. Familiarly known as the citation bias phenomenon, the extent to which the citation measures impact becomes even more debatable and ambiguous. Did the author really read all the articles and choose the best one? Impacts studies of open access databases and services such as Citeseer (Opcit, 2005) demonstrate the validity of newer measures for impact as well but further call into question the function and role of journals in the scholarly communication system of a discipline and add to the need for holistic measures of various aspects of a journal. An examination of scholarly journal value rather than performance or quality is thus timely.