| In the late of 1990s, there arose a crisis in academic journals resulted from the rising subscription fees, and the crisis spung up an movement advocating the information-sharing for the common good, which known as the open access movement. OA journal is one of the two main ways to achieve open access. Unlike the traditional journal which has a subscription-based business model, an OA journal is free for the use online and charges author-side fees(usally paid by author-sponsors) or receive financial assistance to make up the processing and publication fees. In the joint efforts of international academic community, publishing session and libraries, open access and OA journals have obtained a rapid development. Not only a number of new OA journals were founded, some of the traditional journals also began to transition to OA journals. By the end of Oct.2010, DOAJ has indexed more than 5500 kinds of OA journals, which covers all major countries around the world and almost all subject areas, suggesting that OA journals have become an important way to disseminate academic information.Different OA journals may pursue diffrerent purposes and carry out very strict or not so strict review policy, thus generated high-qulity and low-quality academic information mixed. In addition, OA journals are published quickly, and within a certain period of time, more number of papers accumulated than before, so valuable information easily submerged. Therefore, in order to provide guideance for researchers accessing information, for libraries choosing resouces and for research administration evaluating the researchers'academic performance, OA jouranls need to be evaluated scientifically and objectively. Through the evaluation OA journals'inherent quality problems can also be found, which may provide useful reference for the jouranls' future development, and help them target to solve problems and improve quality.For the traditional journals there have formed a series of sophisticated evaluation methods, including caculating the number of subject-related articles and the ratio of certain kind of articles contained in an journal, determining whether it is indexed by important databases, implementing a utilization statistics, and conducting a citation analysis etc.. Along with the emergence of e-journals and the progress of cybermetrics, link analysis has begun to be used for e-journals'evaluation. Since OA journals as a new kind of journal came into being lately, and also differed from traditonal journals in many aspects,there has not developed mature, specialized criteria for evaluationg them. Considering that OA journals is still academic journals essentially, this paper studied the evaluation methods of traditional journals and access their suitability for evaluating OAjournals, then investigated the features of OA journals, and based on these, designed a comprehensive OA journals evaluation index system.This system included five criteria:academic information contented, the ratio indexed in the best known databases, quality of information dissemination, copyright policy and academic impact. And the five criteria were subdivided into 12 indicators:the number of scholarly articles first published, the number of other articles, the ratio of international papers, the ratio indexed by the best known databases, the access performance of the journal's website, the website's navigation and search functions, metadata, copyright policy, substantive-link impact factor, impact factor in WoS, average citations per item in GS and H index in GS. In determining the original evaluation index system, the relative weight of the 12 indicators were caculated based on 5 experts'opinions, and established the final comprehensive evaluation index system. Finally,44 LIS OA journals were choosed to carry out an empirical study. |
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