[IRTalk] FW: ASSAf Scholarly Publishing Unit: June 2016 Communique

Ina Smith Ina at assaf.org.za
Wed Jun 15 08:17:46 SAST 2016


Dear Colleagues

Please scroll down for our report back on SA journal titles, and a comparison of indexes. Also find attached the list of DHET accredited journals for 2016. Hope you find it helpful.

Kind regards
Ina

From: Susan Veldsman [mailto:susan at assaf.org.za]
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2016 8:11 AM
To: Nsef <nsef at assaf.org.za>
Cc: Roseanne Diab <roseanne at assaf.org.za>; Robin Crewe <robin.crewe at up.ac.za>; wieland at telkomsa.net
Subject: ASSAf Scholarly Publishing Unit: June 2016 Communique

Dear Colleagues

Every time we start working on our newsletter, we are pleasantly surprised with how many things we want to share with you, from which journals can hopefully benefit! It also helps us to reflect on what we are busy with, and whether we are aligning ourselves with the scholarly publishing strategy. Please also don't hesitate to let us know should you learn something other journals and ASSAf can benefit from. We really appreciate input and feedback!

It is great to share the following brief snippets with you!

National Scholarly Editors Forum Meeting, 1 September 2016
Our planning is still well on track. Click here<http://journals.assaf.org.za/blog/nsef/nsef-2016/> for more information and regular updates.

Discipline-grouped Peer Review of South African Scholarly Journals
Reviews in the following three subject groups are currently being conducted:

·         Humanities II: Visual and Performing Arts (10 journals)

·         Communications and Information Science (14 journals)

·         Engineering and Architecture (15 journals)

The peer review panels for these groups met for the first time on the 11 March 2016.  Individual roles of the panel members were confirmed and a Chair and Vice-Chair were appointed for each panel. Conveners were appointed for each sub-group within the disciplinary groupings e.g. Humanities II: Visual and Performing Arts - sub-group: music. Each panel produced a consolidated list of reviewers. ASSAf's SPU carried out background checks on each reviewer and ensured that there are no conflicts of interest before appointing three reviewers to evaluate each journal.

The next cycle of peer review evaluations will include journals in the following disciplinary groups:

·         Education (16 journals)

·         Mathematics and Science (22 journals)

·         Politics, History and Philosophy (26 journals)

We ask journal editors who have not submitted the questionnaire for the peer review to please submit it as soon as possible. Panel members and reviewers will require access to the last three volumes of the journal.

Please contact us for any queries relating to the peer reviews:
Desré Stead, desre at assaf.org.za<mailto:desre at assaf.org.za>
Mmaphuthi Mashiachidi, mmaphuthi at assaf.org.za<mailto:mmaphuthi at assaf.org.za>

SciELO SA Growth
The SciELO SA-collection now contains 65 journal titles<http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_alphabetic&lng=en&nrm=iso>. The titles added so far this year are the following:

·         Scriptura

·         Stellenbosch Theological Journal

·         Law, Democracy and Development

·         Literator

·         South African Journal of Communication Disorders

·         Education as Change

·         Educational Research for Social Change

Queries about inclusion can be sent to Louise van Heerden: louise at assaf.org.za<mailto:louise at assaf.org.za>

SciELO SA Advisory Committee
The Committee for Scholarly Publishing in South Africa (CSPiSA) has approved the creation of a SciELO SA Advisory Committee. The committee will in future decide on the criteria to admit and retain journal titles in the collection. An invitation was sent to the SciELO Listserv requesting nominations for a committee member from the SciELO SA users group. Three nominations were received and the SciELO SA User's Group was asked to vote for their choice of candidate. The voting results were very close. Prof Elbie Henning from UJ was the candidate that received the most votes. She will now be part of this Committee which is made up as follows:

-       The chairperson of the CSPiSA (Chair - Prof Robin Crewe)

-       Two members of the CSPiSA committee nominated by the members of CSPiSA (Profs Tania Douglas and Wian Erlank were nominated by the CSPiSA)

-       Members co-opted onto the committee from the disciplines reflected in the journals that are being assessed

-       One member nominated by the SciELO SA user group (Prof Elbie Henning)

ScienceOpen/SciELO Partnership
[cid:image001.jpg at 01D1C593.3BC585C0]
On 1 June 2016 SciELO and ScienceOpen announced their partnership to generate increased visibility for content from emerging countries and to provide an enhanced global perspective on research and increased collaboration. ScienceOpen will include all SciELO articles in their platform. CEO of ScienceOpen Stephanie Dawson says: "This makes ScienceOpen one of the first platforms to recognize the importance of integrating research from across Latin America" (and South Africa).  This will provide an extra layer of search functionality. This integration offers additional discovery and filter options as well as functions for sharing, recommending and commenting. Read the full article by clicking here<http://blog.scienceopen.com/2016/06/scienceopen-helps-to-put-scientific-research-in-a-global-context-with-more-than-15-million-article-records/>.

SciELO SA added to the OCLC Collection

The SciELO SA collection has been added to the OCLC WorldShare Platform, which now also makes the collection available to the WorldCat Discovery community. This was done with the help of Sabinet. Read more<https://www.oclc.org/worldcat-discovery.en.html> about the OCLC WorldShare Discovery Service.

ASSAf now an Ambassador for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
ASSAf takes pride in the fact that we will be representing DOAJ as an ambassador in the southern African region. During the next ten months, we will work with DOAJ to identify Open Access publishers, work with journals and encourage them to apply best practice, and evaluate Open Access journals for possible inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

So far, only 58 SA titles have been added to DOAJ, and we expect many more to follow (following July). Open Access has demonstrated positive growth in South Africa, and more than 50% of scholarly journals are already publishing as Open Access.

Academy of Science of South Africa preserving e-journals with Portico
The following announcement from the Portico Newsletter<http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/news-events/news/academy-of-science-of-south-africa-preserving-e-journals-with-portico>:

"The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF) is preserving more than 60 Open Access journals from The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) South Africa with Portico, ensuring that they will be secure and available into the future. SciELO SA is South Africa's premier open-access searchable full-text journal database in service of the South African research community.

Inaugurated in 1996, and celebrating its 20th year anniversary, ASSAf is the only national science academy officially recognized by the South African government. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific advice on issues of public interest to government and other stakeholders. Through SciELO SA, ASSAF's Scholarly Publishing Unit takes responsibility for ensuring that Open Access initiatives are promoted to enhance the visibility, indexability, and quality of all South African research articles and to make them accessible to the entire international research community.

For more information, please visit the publisher's page<http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/who-participates-in-portico/participating-publishers/assaf/> on the Portico website."

ORCID Workshop & User Group Meeting, 19 July 2016
ASSAf - as an ORCID Ambassador<http://orcid.org/content/orcid-ambassadors> - would like to invite all editors to a workshop presented in collaboration with ORCID and the NRF. An ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes a researcher from every other researcher in the world, similar to a national identity document. It integrates key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, and supports automated linkages between researchers and scholarly activities - all to make sure the researcher and his/her work are associated correctly. It also helps to address challenges in terms of name ambiguity. Researchers are welcome to register an ORCID free of charge<https://orcid.org/register>. ASSAf is in the process of widely implementing ORCIDs across all projects and workflows, for example all Open Access journals are required to enter ORCIDs as part of article level metadata.

More about the workshop and to register to attend - click here<https://orcid.org/content/2016-orcid-south-africa-workshop>.

Register your Journal Titles with the following Indexes
Rigorous scrutiny help inform journals to improve quality, and reviews provide important direction to journals on issues that need to be addressed in line with international criteria for best practice. During the first half of this year, ASSAf conducted an analysis of criteria to which high quality scholarly journals should adhere, to be considered for inclusion in any of the indexes (not guaranteed). The criteria from various indexes were compared and collected, and we compiled one single check list against which you can verify your journal, should you want to. Criteria from the following were taken into account: DHET, IBSS, WoS, Norwegian List, DOAJ, SciELO SA and Scopus. Click here<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DPS67KwPjol7jqTWkF23qrtZ3xeS6ak7Y7HuMkFGsq0/edit?usp=sharing> to view the check list.

We also would like to encourage journals to apply for inclusion in the following indexes, should they want to. It is completely voluntary.


·         DHET Lists<http://academyofsciencesa.wikispaces.com/file/view/Copy%20of%20DHET%20Accredited%20journal%20lists%20for%20publications%20to%20be%20made%20in%202016%20%28003%29.xls/584173625/Copy%20of%20DHET%20Accredited%20journal%20lists%20for%20publications%20to%20be%20made%20in%202016%20%28003%29.xls>
DHET Criteria<http://academyofsciencesa.wikispaces.com/file/view/Procedure%20for%20Inclusion%20into%20the%20DHET%20List.pdf/574489907/Procedure%20for%20Inclusion%20into%20the%20DHET%20List.pdf> - DHET Application<mailto:Ntuli.W at dhet.gov.za> (by 15 June each year)

·         International Bibliography of the Social Sciences<http://www.proquest.com/documents/Title_List_-_International_Bibliography_of_the_Social_Sciences.html> (ProQuest IBSS)
Criteria<http://media2.proquest.com/documents/IBSS+Editorial+Policies+and+Principles.pdf> - Apply<mailto:IBSS.editors at proquest.com%20>

·         Norwegian Registry for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers<https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/Forside.action?request_locale=en> (Norwegian List)
Criteria<https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/OmKriterier?request_locale=en> - Apply<https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/OmProsedyrer?request_locale=en>

·         SciELO SA journals<http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_alphabetic&lng=en&nrm=iso> indexed by the Web of Science<http://wokinfo.com/webtools/searchbox/> (Thomson Reuters WoS/SciELO Citation Index)
Criteria<http://www.scielo.org.za/avaliacao/avaliacao_en.htm> - Apply<mailto:scielo at assaf.org.za>

·         Scopus<http://www.elsevier.com/journals/title/a> (Elsevier)

·         Web of Science<http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/> (Thomson Reuters WoS)
Criteria<http://wokinfo.com/essays/journal-selection-process/> - Apply<http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/info/journalsubmission-front/>

Online Journal Management Workshops
More and more journal editors are realising that the costs of publishing can be reduced quite a bit, and the work associated with journal publishing can be streamlined and automated quite easily, using an online journal management system such as OJS. What started as a once-off workshop in collaboration with Eastern Cape universities, has now grown to a whole series of workshops in five different provinces! You are most welcome to attend any of the remaining workshops, and to contact us for any additional workshops. The aim of each workshop is to introduce various role players to good practice in terms of journal management and publishing, and to give them the opportunity to create a test online journal. Once Editors are better informed about OJS they can then discuss it with their editorial boards, and once they have made the decision to switch to OA and online, we encourage them to work with the VC Research at their institutions to fully implement it.

Click on the links for more information about the workshops:

·         27 May - Eastern Cape<http://journals.assaf.org.za/blog/2016/04/09/eastern-cape-workshop/> (completed)

·         14 June - KwaZulu Natal<http://journals.assaf.org.za/blog/2016/06/07/kwazulu-natal-workshop-on-online-journal-management/>

·         30 June - Western Cape<http://journals.assaf.org.za/blog/2016/06/09/western-cape-workshop-on-managing-and-publishing-scholarly-online-journals-using-ojs/>

·         8 July - Gauteng (more information to follow)

·         October - Free State (more information to follow)


A-Z List of Accredited SA Scholarly Journal Titles, incl. Indexes
The Scholarly Publication Unit (ASSAf) would like to share some preliminary findings from the annual environmental scan of the SA scholarly journal landscape. The six lists approved by the DHET were compared, and the final ASSAf alphabetical list<http://academyofsciencesa.wikispaces.com/file/view/indexes2016.pdf/585259063/indexes2016.pdf> (also attached) contains a single entry for each journal, with an indication of where the journal title is listed/indexed. The six lists approved by the DHET are available online via the ASSAf SPU wiki<http://academyofsciencesa.wikispaces.com/file/view/Copy%20of%20DHET%20Accredited%20journal%20lists%20for%20publications%20to%20be%20made%20in%202016%20%28003%29.xls/584173625/Copy%20of%20DHET%20Accredited%20journal%20lists%20for%20publications%20to%20be%20made%20in%202016%20%28003%29.xls>.

We would like to invite you to confirm that the details on the list are correct. Should you want to communicate a correction, please email ina at assaf.org.za<mailto:ina at assaf.org.za>.

In brief, some trends when compared to the same lists during 2015:


·         396 scholarly journal titles are published in/with/by SA.

·         In total, from the 6 DHET approved lists, 329 SA titles qualify for funding (DHET accredited).

Data collected during:

2015

2016

Comments

DHET

271

273

2 titles added (green text)

Web of Science

66

63

3 titles removed
Decline in IF: 28 titles (red text)
Increase in IF: 25 titles (green text)
10 titles without IF (from the DHET WoS list)

Scopus

131

133

2 titles added (green text)

IBSS

39

41

2 titles added (green text)

Norwegian List

-----

135

Only 0s and 1s; No 2s

SciELO SA

56

65

9 titles added (green text)


Where the cells are coloured green, it indicates that the journal content is available as Open Access.

Open Access Week 2016
Open Access Week is internationally celebrated from 24 - 30 October this year. The theme: "Open in Action". More information to follow ....

With kind regards
Susan


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