Identification and Evaluation of Quality of Open Access Journals Cited by Researchers of MIT, CIT and STANFORD

Abstract

The study focuses on the top 3 institutions of the USA as ranked by the Times Higher Education University rankings and was keen to identify the quality of fully Open Access (OA) journals cited by the researchers of these institutes in the field of physics. Quality evaluation of identified OA journals was done by applying performance indicators viz: 5-year IF, SNIP and Eigen factor. It was found that these fully identified OA journals have decent 5-year IF, SNIP factor and Eigen factor, which indicates that OA journals are evolving as qualitative channels of scholarly communications. The study implicates that researchers, R&D institutions, libraries and information dissemination centres or anyone should make use of OA resources, and a good chunk of OA journals are at par with journals which are Toll-Access journals. Besides, it also reveals that OA publishing should be strengthened by whatever means necessary.