Ranking
In the natural sciences and in the "hard" social sciences, impact factor is a convenient proxy, measuring the number of later articles citing articles already published in the journal. There are other, possible quantitative factors, such as the overall number of citations, how quickly articles are cited, and the average "half-life" of articles, i.e. when they are no longer cited. There also is the question of whether or not any quantitative factor can reflect true prestige; natural science journals are categorized and ranked in the Science Citation Index, and social science journals in the Social Science Citation Index.
In the Anglo-American humanities, there is no tradition (as there is in the sciences) of giving impact-factors that could be used — however incorrectly — in establishing a journal's prestige. Recent moves have been made by the European Science Foundation to rectify the situation, resulting in the publication of preliminary lists for the ranking of academic journals in the Humanities.
In some disciplines such as KM/IC the lack of a well-established journal ranking system is perceived as "a major obstacle on the way to tenure, promotion and achievement recognition" (Bontis & Serenko 2009, pp. 17).
The categorization of journal prestige in some subjects has been attempted, typically using letters to rank their academic world importance.
We can distinguish two categories of techniques to assess journal quality and develop journal rankings (Lowry et al. 2007):
- stated preference
- revealed preference approaches.
[edit] Publishing
Many academic journals are subsidized by universities or professional organizations, and do not exist to make a profit, however, they often accept advertising, page and image charges from authors to pay for production costs. On the other hand, some journals are produced by commercial publishers who do make a profit by charging subscriptions to individuals and libraries. They may also sell all of their journals in discipline-specific collections or a variety of other packages.
Journal editors tend to have other professional responsibilities, most often as teaching professors. In the case of the very largest journals, there are paid staff assisting in the editing. The production of the journals is most always done by publisher-paid staff. Humanities and social science academic journals are usually subsidized by universities or professional organization
[edit] New developments
The Internet has revolutionized the production of, and access to, academic journals (Hendler 2007), with their contents available online via services subscribed to by academic libraries. Individual articles are subject-indexed in databases such as Google Scholar. Some of the smallest, most specialized journals are prepared in-house, by an academic department, and published only online — such form of publication has sometimes been in the blog format.
Currently, there is a movement in higher education encouraging open access, either via self archiving, whereby the author deposits his paper in a repository where it can be searched for and read, or via publishing it in a free open access journal, which does not charge for subscriptions, being either subsidized or financed with author page charges. However, to date, open access has affected science journals more than humanities journals. Commercial publishers are now experimenting with open access models, but are trying to protect their subscription revenues.
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