Studies On Quality Control Of Open Access Journals

At the end of 20th century, with the development of digital publishing, open access (OA) journals swept the globe. However, after 20 years’development, some drawbacks of OA journals also appear gradually. Some OA journals without peer-review and edit processing become popular, which greatly affected the quality and reputation of academic journals. Many researchers have expressed their concerns about this phenomenon. Therefore, the trend of research on OA journal switched from the initial "what is what", "do it or not" and "how to do" to the "how to do it properly" direction. Currently, the OA journals’academic quality control has become the advanced and hot topics in the field of Library and Information Science.This study carried out mainly in four areas:①Research on OA journals’ quality evaluationThe Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), co-founded by Lund University Library and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in Sweden, and the Open J-Gate, created by India Informatics (India) Ltd are currently the world’s most influential and comprehensive resource platforms for OA journals. First of all, by comparing these two, we present an initial understanding of the scale of OA journals:the number has reached 7736 kinds. Then, through surveys on the OA journals in the internationally renowned Web of Science Database, we found that high-quality OA journals have begun to take shape. Finally, by comparing the three indexes of OA journals and non-OA journals in JCR, we found that, the total cites from OA journals is lower than that from non-OA journals generally; the impact factor of OA journals is slightly lower than that of non-OA journals, but some specific OA journals are with sky-high impact which is over all the other non-OA journals; OA journals’performance of real-time index is good, almost comparable with non-OA journals.②Research on the impact of OA journals’publishing process and editing system on the academic qualityThe manuscript editing and review process have long been regarded as the decisive factors which affect the academic quality of journals. However, after our research, we found that for OA journals, the former editing phase and release part have the same important impact on the quality of OA journals. The promotion of OA journals by using Internet marketing means such as search engine optimization, increasing the number of external links and e-mail lists can improve the academic of OA journals effectively. The Internet marketing means boosted the extension from OA journals’editing part to releasing part, in addition to the traditional "editing before publication " assessment method, they can also use "publication before editing" assessment method. What’s more, OA journals can take on a flexible publication period to shorten the publication lag, only publish it when it’s fully done.③Research on the impact of OA journals’publishing elements on the academic qualityOA journals’ publishing elements can be divided into five major sections: manuscript, author, editor, reviewer and reader. The quality control of manuscript is reflected in setting up assessment standards for scientific manuscript that based on the principles of sticking to innovation, reliability and technicality. The quality control of author requires to fully play the role of current authors according to their characteristics and roles in academic exchanges, to create high-quality author teams from the perspective of the multi-role researchers. Web publishing model put forward a new practice requirement which is different from the traditional one, quality control of OA journal editors was mainly done by adding new editor’s quality appraisal standards such as computer capabilities, information processing capabilities, communication skills, academic ability and foreign language ability. Improving reviewer’s academic standards, scale and editing capabilities are effective channels to improve the review quality. OA journals’reader can take part in OA journals’publishing and assessment process by information feedback means such as click, download, transshipment, comment and add content, turning from the traditional publishing model into active publishers. Therefore, OA journals’reader control is to establish the core reader concept, to expand the scale of the core reader, and to improve the quality of reader’s feedback. Research on technique that affect OA journals’academic quality。Every step of OA journals publication can not do without the support of technology, advanced technology can not only help OA journal to be published smoothly, but also help to realize its academic quality control from 4 aspects:improving content quality, review quality and transmission quality, and shortening the publication lag. Therefore, in the follow-up development of OA journals, we must continue to focus on the development and application of newly emerged technologies, and further achieve the academic quality control by using technical means.In summary, we believe that in order to improve the academic quality of OA journals, we should start with the two approaches above, to establish a comprehensive, three-dimensional academic quality control mechanism.