Quality Assessment Of Academic Open Access Journals

As an important carrier, a scholarly journal is essential in the exchange and transmission of scholarly information. But a scholarly journal crisis occurred in the end of1990s because of going up of the journal's price and the shortage of library's fee. To overcome the problem, an activity of free storage and take has been launched in the area of international science, scholarship, publication and library. It aims at founding a scholarly exchange system served for scientific research."Open access journals" is a new model of publication and scholarly exchange that has been developed in the surroundings of web. At present, the publication of OA covers two ways: OA storage and OA journal. OA journal is called a golden model that can make free storage and take become reality because it has a character of peer's comments. As the activity is developing in the world, OA journals have sprung up. Some of them were opened originally and some were transferred from traditional journals. By March2012, the number of OA journals accepted by DOAJ is7607among of which3726articles can be fully gotten. Including17subjects and covering all languages,784125articles are included. Qualified OA peer's reviewed journals are also available. Besides, the new one appears every day. All these facts show that OA journals have been an essential bridge in the process of scholarly exchange.The content and quality of OA journals are different because of the difference in the ideas and comments. As a result, facing so many OA materials, a person can not get the valuable information immediately and correctly. So it is a question to solve how we should decide the quality of OA journals and judge them scientifically. I hope that the quality problem of OA journals can be found by means of this judgment in order to put forward suggestions to improve the quality of journals. Traditional journals have been developed a method of judgment, including abstract method, citation method, network link analysis and so on."Open access journals" has not been developed fully on the quality comment of journals because it has been invented recently. Even though it has some characters that traditional scholarly journals have not.The background, boundary and way to achieve have been introduced in chapter one in this thesis. After that, the main issue that I intend to solve in the thesis—quality assessment of open access journals has been put forward. Analyzing the current situation at home and abroad, I have pointed out the shortage in this chapter.In chapter two, I have analyzed OA journals' situations in quantity, field distribution, geographical distribution, organizer, retrieval system. Comparing OA journals with traditional print journals, I have found some problems in the development of OA journals. For example: social awareness and recognition, copyright, quality control, operating cost, and so on.In chapter three, I have understood the current situation of LIS field and scholarly exchange about open access journals, by analyzing the publication form of OA journals adopted by DOAJ in LIS field and contents of theses.And the publication form includes:nation and area distribution, year of publication, languages, agency, frequency of publication,distribution of subjects etc. But I have only talked about journals in English, analyzing them in papers distribution, cooperative writing, reference citations, article citation frequency, impact factor, immediacy factor, H index, link popularity and web rmention.By analyzing publishing process of open access journals, I have summed up kinds of factors that may influence the quality of journals in chapter four. I have designed a comprehensive evaluation index system by using the qualitative and quantitative indicators combining method. By the end, I have concluded the thesis by foreseeing the development of OA journals.