“Data on decision times and acceptance rates would greatly aid authors in their choice of journals... Making this information routinely available might have the salutary effect of improving review times and standardizing other practices that vary significantly across journals and between successive editors of the same publication,” writes Prof Jerry A. Jacobs in a recent Scholarly Kitchen post on author-friendly websites.
We firmly believe that acceptance rates and turnaround times should be transparent and easily available as this helps researchers to select the right journal for their research. We also believe that selecting an appropriate journal is of paramount importance to researchers to ensure their published work reaches the right audience after peer review and that this can’t be decided by one specific metric but also takes into account the dissemination of content into the research community.
Hindawi already provides key journal statistics in a standardized format for all of our journals that are openly available on our journal homepages for authors - and anyone - to access.
We also assist authors in navigating through our wide selection of titles and we provide additional guidance on our website to help authors find the right publication for their work.
We also provide more in-depth, monthly journal reports that summarize key information around our titles for the last three years, including most viewed articles and submission trends.
As signatories of DORA, we do appreciate that whilst the Impact Factor is an important metric to many of our authors when choosing where to submit, we do not believe that the Impact Factor alone should be used as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, or to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. We firmly believe that journals should be judged on the reach of their content alongside other factors such as journal- and article-level metrics (such as usage and citations).
Based on feedback from our authors and readers, we are keen to expand our monthly reports to incorporate even more granular and relevant data, including but not limited to, geographical breakdown of authors, editors and readers, number of reviewers invited per reviewer report received, and links to Plan S compliance data, including price transparency.
We are proud to be PlanS compliant and recently took part in a nine-month price transparency project on behalf of cOAlition S, which we believe is a great first step towards establishing a fair and transparent framework for open access pricing.
Our Open Science policies aim to drive greater openness in research communication, which includes making our journal-level reporting open to everyone. Openness and transparency are core business values that we rely upon when making decisions about how we connect with researchers and assist them in disseminating their research.
Mathias Astell
Chief Journal Development & Marketing Officer, Hindawi Limited
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The illustration is by Hindawi and is also CC-BY.