Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, June 29, 2008

Two letters to The Lancet

The Lancet has published two letters to the editor in response to its (remarkably pro-OA) editorial from March 8, 2008.  Free online access after free registration. 

From Matthew J. Cockerill and Melissa Norton, Open-access journals are delivering high impact, and more, June 21, 2008:

We welcome The Lancet's Editorial on open-access publishing (March 8, p 785), but question the claim that “Although BioMed Central has grown substantially during the past 3 years, it has yet to capture the quality end of the research sector”.

Impact factors are the most commonly used journal quality metric, and Malaria Journal (ranked number 1 in tropical medicine) is one of many examples of BioMed Central journals with impressive impact factors.

Unfortunately, however, Thomson Scientific's failure to track many new open-access journals means that these impact factors still do not provide the full picture.

The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is an alternative citation metric based on data from Elsevier's more comprehensive Scopus service, which covers more than 13000 journals. In the most recent SCImago rankings, two BioMed Central journals, Journal of Biology and Genome Biology, are ranked in the top 0·5% of all journals listed, ahead of all five PLoS titles. More than half of ranked BioMed Central journals are in the top 15% of the SJR listings, indicating that a typical BioMed Central title is substantially more highly cited than the average traditional journal....

From Dr. Sudarshan Kumari, Open access journals are a boon, June 23, 2008:

Open access journals are a boon to practitioners and research personnel both, irrespective of the impact factor. They not only provide updated information on the topics we want to find out, also save time and money both....I feel if the publishers find it practical, more journals should as open access journal to help the medical community specially for keeping professional updated in their field , in this era of advances fast growing advances in medical field.