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.

Researchers in this method receive funding the same way but their works are accessible to anyone that has an internet connection allowing them to read without subscription fee. Barriers like legal and permission ones are removed also such as restrictions in licensing and copyright. Authors though sometimes pay them for their articles to get published.

OA journals have several varieties with one of them being full where all content can be freely accessed. Hybrid ones only have some contents accessible openly and delayed are those access will be granted after some months or years. These works could be either solicited which individuals were requested in submitting their work, and unsolicited which they submit even without a request.

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 to determine if the work would get rejected, accepted, or even acceptable though needing revisions done to it. Community of experts regarding a specific field which has the ability and qualifications is needed to perform impartial review reasonably. Being impartial is hard to accomplish particularly in inter disciplinary or less narrowly defined fields.

This makes it harder to appreciate the significance, good or bad, of an idea widely within their contemporaries. But refereeing is considered important for academic quality though preventing every invalid research to get published is impossible. Some can give their comments openly right now although it was traditionally done anonymously which allows everyone to read them and who wrote them.

Identifying if that journals was refereed or not can be done in numerous ways with one being limiting your search criteria when using databases. This option is offered readily by some search screens while others require you to click the advance or expert option. Although some databases have no option for limiting their search criteria like this.

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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