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Monday, July 17, 2017

Information Regarding Peer Reviewed Open Access Journals

By Stephen Bennett


Academic journals are published periodically containing review articles, original research, and book reviews. Their purpose is to have somewhere that researchers can impart what they know to others, contribute on the improvement of natural knowledge and in perfecting every Sciences and Philosophical Arts. Articles are refereed usually or peer reviewed in preventing the publication of those with fraudulent data.

These articles are written by researchers with the funds received from institutions, government agencies and universities, and then donated to journal publications. Institutions, government agencies and universities then buys them from them, even those who provided funds for the research, through subscription usually. This is why the peer reviewed open access journals slowly become more popular because reading them cost virtually nothing.

They receive their funding from the same entities though and anyone that has access to an internet connection can read them without paying a subscription fee. Legal and permission barriers are also removed such as licensing and copyright restrictions. Authors of these articles sometimes pay for them to get published by using the money of those who funded them.

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 a journal is refereed or not could be done with many different ways and the first is to limit search criteria when searching databases. Some search screens offer this option readily and others need you to click the expert option or advance one. But some databases do not have an option like this available to limit search criteria.

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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