Saturday, 22 July 2017

Details About Peer Reviewed Open Access Journals

By Stephen Bennett


Scholastic journals are publications released periodically containing original research, book reviews and review articles. Their purpose is in having a place for researchers in imparting their knowledge to other people, contributing to improve natural knowledge and perfecting all Philosophical Arts as well as Sciences. Articles are peer reviewed or refereed usually to prevent those with fraudulent data from getting published.

These articles are done by researchers with funding from universities, institutions and government agencies and donate them to journal publications. These are then sold to universities, institutions and government agencies, even the same ones who funded the research usually through subscription. This is why peer reviewed open access journals are getting popular because it virtually costs nothing to read them.

They receive their funding from the same entities though and anyone that has access to an internet connection can read them without paying a subscription fee. Legal and permission barriers are also removed such as licensing and copyright restrictions. Authors of these articles sometimes pay for them to get published by using the money of those who funded them.

Several varieties of OA journals are there such as full where every content can be accessed freely. Hybrid ones have only some contents openly accessible and delayed where access is granted after twelve or twenty four months. These works could either be solicited, where individuals were asked to submit their work or unsolicited where they just submit it without being asked to.

These are peer reviewed, same with traditional publications, or evaluated by people that have similar competence with the authors. They review the works and were chosen by publishers anonymously to prevent being influenced. This method is done for providing credibility, improving performance and maintaining standards of quality.

They help in determining if the work will get accepted, rejected or even acceptable but with revisions to be done. A community of experts on a specific field with qualifications and ability to do impartial review reasonably is needed. Being impartial is difficult to accomplish specially in fields that are less narrowly defined and inter disciplinary.

Widely accepting among their contemporaries the significance of an idea, either bad or good, is harder because of this. But refereeing is still considered essential to academic quality though all invalid research is impossible to be prevented from being published. Although it was anonymously done traditionally, giving comments now publicly is possible, allowing anyone to read them as well as know who had written them.

Identifying which of them were refereed could be done in several ways with first by limiting your database search. Some search screens have this option available there by default and others have to let you click an expert or advanced option. But some databases does not have this option of limiting your search using this way.

You could also examine the published journal physically or online by looking at the masthead at its cover where all information about them which includes if they were refereed. Another way is by looking at the ways its written and includes references using footnotes and bibliography. And finding their official would help in determining this but sometimes it is inaccurate still.




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