Open Access increases the “Superstar effect”

New Analysis on the impact of Open Access availability on citations finds out, that Open access increases cites to the top-ranked journals but reduces cites to lower-ranked journals.

Two Economists, Mark McCabe (University of Michigan School of Information) and Christopher Snyder (Dartmouth College), have published a new study of the impact of open access on citation rates for science journal content. McCabe and Snyder found that open access increases citation rates for high-quality content, while reducing citations to lower-quality content. In their paper, “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer: The Effect of Open Access on Cites to Science Journals Across the Quality Spectrum,” McCabe and Snyder construct a model to explain their findings, which was based on an analysis of 100 journals in ecology, botany, and general science. The authors document what they call a “superstar effect,” in which the benefits of open access (namely, increased citations) accrue to higher quality content and journals, while lower-tier content does not receive such benefits.

IZA launches 5 new Open Access Journals

The number of interesting new Open Access Journals in Economics increases, as IZA launches five new field journals

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) is a private research institute, based in Germany, with the focus on labour market research. They are already editing a prominent Discussion Paper Series (also available on EconStor), which belongs to to the TOP 20 Working Paper Series in RePEc.

On top of that IZA has now started five new Open Access Journals, which focus on the different aspects of Labour Markets:

• IZA Journal of Labor Economics
• IZA Journal of Labor Policy
• IZA Journal of Migration
• IZA Journal of Labor & Development
• IZA Journal of European Labor Studies

All Journals are published with SpringerOpen and do not charge any author fees. Each journal involves peer reviewing, with the focus on a fast decision making and publication process:

Acceptance/rejection decisions are expected to be made “within one month; publication is expected “within two months after submission of the final manuscript.The fast process from the submission to the acceptance/rejection decision is guaranteed by (i) an advanced desk rejection policy and (ii) the fact that only those papers refereed that require minor revisions are accepted while those not accepted are rejected without a detailed referee report. This requires the submission of manuscripts that are considered ready by the author/s for direct publication if found suitable by the editorial team.

With the reputation of the Discussion Paper Series already established, there might be a good chance also for the Journals to enter the ranking lists.

Behind the scenes of the European Economic Review

One of the recent additions to the EconStor collection was a working paper from CESifo called “A Decade of Editing the European Economic Review”.  In this paper the authors describe their experiences as editors and also present some interesting insights.

As one the leading journals in Economics, the European Economic Review (EER)  currently receives about 550 submissions per year, about 200 more than ten years ago. As the peer review duties are still mainly voluntary work, this implies long delays before a paper is published:

“Long delays between the submission of a paper and the time when an author receives an editorial decision are a problem in today’s culture of economics journals. From the start, we tried to work against this problem with various measures. One of the first we took was to introduce turbo rejects, i.e., rejections of papers without giving them to reviewers. The idea was to return to the authors immediately papers that we as editors thought had very small chances of making it through the reviewing process successfully (…)

With regard to the number of submissions, the increase from around 350 to 550 per year with a steady number of Associate Editors implied that we had to assume the role of AE’s on an increasingly bigger number of manuscripts. This meant identifying referees ourselves for a bigger share of submitted papers. Finally, in spite of incentives offered for timely reports, we encountered great difficulties with some reviewers. It was not uncommon for the editorial office to find it necessary to send second and third reminders to reviewers who promised reports but never delivered. “

Another interesting fact is the submission fee (currently 125 €) charged from the authors, even when the paper is rejected.  While author fees are quite common with Open Access Journals, it seems surprising for subscription-based like the EER, where the annual (institutional) subscription price for the journal is almost 2000 € per year.

Working Papers on RePEc are much more used than Journal Articles

RePEc, one of EconStor’s strong partners in disseminating and showcasing research output in Economics has released new figures on the usage of it’s papers. In their latest blog entry they say:

While a majority [of the papers] are from journals (61%), online working papers are much more popular. While an article is download on average once every two months, working papers are downloaded close to once a month.

http://blog.repec.org/2011/11/26/1-million-works-available-online-through-repec/

60% of Journals Allow Immediate Archiving of Peer-Reviewed Articles

Good news for Repository Managers:

According to new charts published on the SHERPA/RoMEO Blog 87% of journals allow some form of immediate self-archiving of articles, although in only 60% of cases is this a post-peer-reviewed version.
http://romeo.jiscinvolve.org/wp/?p=196
This rises impressively once embargo periods have expired and any other restrictions have been complied with, showing that 94% of journals permit peer-reviewed articles to be archived. Furthermore, nearly a quarter of journals allow the publisher’s version/PDF to be archived. Only 5% of journals do not permit any form of archiving.

The statistics were compiled from a snapshot of the RoMEO Journals database taken on the 15th Nov.2011, when it contained about 19,000 titles.