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© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 6 A plethora of open-access journals now exists; like subscriptionbased journals, open-access journals vary in quality, so authors should carefully consider their benefits and drawbacks before targeting them. Many open-access journals are highly reputable, with strong editorial oversight, rigorous peer review, and editorial boards composed of recognized experts. Others, termed “predatory journals”, exploit the model by exacting high fees without having legitimate peer-review processes, editorial boards, or publishing services. Authors should be aware of predatory journals and investigate the reputation of the publisher and the quality of a journal in advance of submitting a manuscript. Quality and Prestige What are the “must-read” journals in your field? The quality of a journal depends on the quality of its scientific articles and authors, the quality of the journal’s editorial board and policies, the rigor and quality of its peer-review process, and the quality of the print and online publication itself, including text, tables, and images. Quality is not easy to quantify, as noted below in the section on metrics. Experienced mentors are often the best source of information regarding the quality and prestige of a journal in your field. Metrics and Ranking Journal metrics are intended to quantify the quality and impact of a scientific journal based on how often its articles are cited by other articles. The impact factor was originally developed to aid librarians in selecting journals for their collections, with citations acting as a surrogate for how often articles in that journal are read and used. However, the impact factor is now widely used to indicate the quality of individual scientific articles in a journal and to establish discipline-based journal rankings, leading some authors to select a target journal based primarily on its impact factor. We encourage you to consider journal metrics as only one factor among many when deciding where to publish a manuscript. The impact factor is calculated each year by measuring the average frequency of citations to articles published by a journal in the previous two years. Impact factors are calculated for journals indexed in the Thomson-Reuters ISI database and are published in Journal Citation Reports (http://thomsonreuters. com/products_services/science/free/essays/impact_factor). Impact factors vary widely by discipline and reflect the citation practices, size, and interdisciplinary connections of its research community. Citation rates also are affected by article type, selfcitations, and other variables; most journals acquire the majority of their citations from just a few articles. Impact factors also are easily manipulated, mostly by self-citation, and Thomson Reuters recently banned several journals from receiving an impact factor because of excessive self-citation. Other journal metrics include the EigenFactor, which uses the same data as the impact factor but over a longer (5-year) window of time and which, unlike the impact factor, does not include self-citations; the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), which measures citations per article using Elsevier’s SCOPUS database; and SNIP, or Source-Normalized Impact per Paper, which measures the journal’s citation impact in context (it corrects for how frequently citations occur across research fields). SJR and SNIP lay claim to increased transparency, as the database used in their calculation is available to librarians and researchers. Metrics can measure the overall influence of a journal, but don’t necessarily correlate with journal quality or the quality of individual articles or authors. In 2012, a group of editors and publishers drafted the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment: Putting Science into the Assessment of Research (http://am.ascb. org/dora/). Among the recommendations was “the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations.” Thomson Reuters is now unveiling a new set of metrics (InCites) that links impact factors with article-level data. Article-level metrics along with “altmetrics” (alternative metrics) based on social media and other web-based environments are growing rapidly as potential benchmarks of research quality and impact. Practical Aspects Journals differ in their submission and review processes, time to publication, publication costs, and publication services, information that often is available on a journal’s website. For authors who want their work to be available to readers as soon as possible, the time it takes for peer review and the time from acceptance to publication may be important factors in selecting a journal. Some journals publish the date a manuscript was received and accepted on the title page of an article, which gives you an idea of the time it takes for peer review. Many journals limit the time authors can take to respond to peer- review comments and revise their manuscript; authors who do so expeditiously can help shorten the time to publication. Online publication preceding print publication also significantly reduces the time from acceptance to publication. Although not a feature of most veterinary journals, accelerated review and rapid publication are offered by journals in highly competitive fields. Some journals also offer fast-track publication for articles that have been accepted and are well written, thus requiring minimal editing by the journal’s editorial staff. Conversely, publication may be delayed owing to poor writing and the need for extensive editing. Publishing a peer-reviewed, edited, formatted article in print and online is an expensive process. Not all journals have publication charges, as costs are included in subscription fees. However, some veterinary journals recoup publication costs by charging a handling fee when a manuscript is submitted; others have page charges or charge for color plates. Some journals offer the option of publishing color only online, without cost. Journals such as the Journal of Wildlife Diseases offer lower publication costs to members in their affiliated society. For open-access journals (and articles), authors usually are required to pay publication fees that support the cost of publishing an article; these fees can be substantial, but may be waived for authors in low-income countries.


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