Judging Journals

By Barbara Fister. Some valuable commentary has come out since John Bohannon’s article on dubious open access journals was published in Science. The Library Loon has written several useful posts reflecting on what the sting failed to accomplish, pointing out that “the usual means that academic stakeholders, from tenure-and-promotion committees to collection-development librarians, use to judge journal quality are rapidly proving untrustworthy and gaming-prone.” Yet scaling up the kind of work Bohannon did would overtax everyone involved in scholarly publishing. She asks us to think about alternative ways to figure out which publishers and publications have credibility. That attracted a promising proposal from the Digital Drake, to create a well-edited crowd-sourced scholarly answer to Writer Beware, a volunteer project that operates under the aegis of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Read more...