About the Ratings

In a series of posts over the next several days, I will be releasing the long-awaited(?) rankings of open access journals. This post will provide some background on the journals, the ratings, and my methodology.

What Are Open Access Journals?
If you are not familiar with the concept of open access publication, I recommend checking out my post, "Open Access Publishing and the Paleontologist."

Why Rate Journals?
Lots of open access journals are out there now--but not all are made equally. Some are widely read, others are ignored. Some publish high impact articles of general interest, and others are more focused in their scope. How is one to decide which publication to follow or submit research to? I've developed these ratings primarily as a service to those of us who are looking for open access journals in which to publish. Rankings that incorporate citation counts, numbers of articles published, and community opinion may be useful as one part of this decision-making progress.

How Were the Journals Chosen?
Basically, I combed the internet, dredged up my own knowledge of the literature, used the list on SV-POW!, and incorporated comments from readers. I have quite probably omitted one or two journals by accident, and I can assure you that this was unintentional. I adopted four criteria for selecting journals:

1. The journal must regularly publish articles on the topic of paleontology (a single article every two years is not sufficient).
2. Entire issues must be open access, not just selected articles.
3. The journal must be active, with at least one issue in 2008 (exceptions may be made for irregular museum publications that are not intended to be released on a set schedule).
4. The journal may have either immediate or delayed open access (a year is the cut-off point).

How Were the Journals Rated?
Journals were evaluated in five general areas:

1. Number of journal hits. This was calculated by searching for all articles within a given journal on Google Scholar, and recording the number of hits. [example]
   
2. Number of paleontology hits. This was calculated by searching for all articles within a given journal on Google Scholar that included the words "paleontology" or "fossil," and recording the number of hits. [example]
   
3. Number of article citations. This was calculated by searching for all articles within a given journal on Google Scholar that included the words "paleontology" or "fossil," and recording the number of citations for the top 10 search results. [example]
4. Number of citations of recent articles. This was calculated by searching for all articles within a given journal on Google Scholar that included the words "paleontology" or "fossil," published in 2007 or 2008, and recording the number of citations for the top 10 search results. [example]
   
5. Community rating. A survey was posted with a list of all journals, and respondents were invited to rate each journal as "excellent," "good," "fair," "poor," or "never heard of it." A notice of the survey was posted on this blog, Facebook, the Dinosaur Mailing List, VRTPALEO Mailing List, and Laelaps. Each journal was then given an overall rating, by weighting the number of responses in each category.
   

The journals were ranked in each category, and then an overall ranking incorporating all categories was calculated.

A Disclaimer
These are informal ratings, compiled in a manner that is probably non-scientific and flawed in one or more ways. No ranking system is perfect! Regardless of any imperfections, I think that these rankings may provide some useful information. Just take it with a grain of salt.

Coming up next. . .rankings for Immediate Open Access Only Journals.