What about prestige in gold Open Access publishing – a survey investigating publication patterns of researchers at Swedish universities

Abstract

Fully gold Open Access (OA) publication channels are still hold to be of inferior quality compared to channels offered by publishers with traditional subscription business models, albeit less and less so. The threat of predatory publishers looms on one side, and on the other most OA publishers haven’t been around to gather prestige for so long. Still, there seems to be a steady advance. For example, OA publication channels may now be found at level two (indexing the channels perceived as having most academic prestige in a certain subject) of the Norwegian Publication Model (NPM).

In an earlier survey, I investigated the publication patterns of researchers at Swedish universities with focus on their gold OA publishing in journals. The publication patterns were contrasted with the occurrence of OA journals in NPM. 29 % of the DOAJ journals were present as approved channels in NPM. DOAJ is frequently mentioned as the most comprehensive OA journal indexing service in the world. At level one, 14 % of the listed journals were OA, whereas only 2 % of level two journals were OA. Out of the DOAJ-journals included in NPM, only 1 % made it to level two. This is probably explained by the situation described above; OA journals are often new to the scientific publishing market, and therefore they haven’t had the time to gather academic prestige.

The OA journals that researchers at Swedish universities published were almost all of them present in DOAJ. 7 % of these were at level two. This pattern seems to imply that researchers are trying to fulfil demands of OA publishing from funders, while at the same time trying to gather prestige for their own researcher career. This poster aims to further explore these results, with focus on the 7 % journals at level 2. Which journals can be found here, and what is the distribution? Which research subjects are involved?