engleski

Visibility and (alt)metrics of the Croatian Open Access (OA) journals

For a small research community from the so called scientific periphery it's important to publish in the well-established international journals as well as to make their papers published in local journals visible to the international audience. Journal quality metrics, such as impact factor, are increasingly being used as a measure of researchers’ prestige and the advancement in career in Croatia. Croatian researchers are under pressure to publish their papers in the journals with high impact factors, and the metrics at article level has been often neglected. Specially in the scientific disciplines like social sciences and humanities researchers are facing a dilemma to publish in the popular, often fee- based, international journals or in the local OA journals recognized by a professional audience. In this paper the visibility, popularity and impact of the Croatian Open Access (OA) journals and published articles is presented by the use of different indicators: journal impact factor (JIF), Eigenfactor Score, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and h-index at journal level, and number of citations and usage data at article level. Longitudinal shifts in journal content coverage and distribution among disciplines are observed. There are 340 scholarly, professional and popular OA journals included in the portal of the Croatian OA journals HRCAK at the present, among them 318 journals with available full-text articles. The majority of Croatian OA journals is from the social sciences and humanities (234 journals). All HRCAK journals are covered in Google Scholar (GS). From 57 Croatian journals indexed in the popular Thomson Reuter’s citation database Web of Science (WoS) in March 2013 only 5 are not OA journals. In April 2013 Elsevier’s Scopus database indexed 148 Croatian journals, 120 active and 28 inactive, including 14 non-OA journals. Different kind of journal and article level metrics have been analysed and compared for 45 HRCAK OA journals indexed in GS, Scopus and WoS databases. Traditional impact metrics such as citation analysis and download data both measure possible impact of research and usage. Detailed analysis is provided at article level examining the relationship between number of citations recorded in GS, WoS and Scopus and number of article downloads from HRCAK log files. The result shows that popularity of the journal article measured by the number of downloads doesn't correlate with the impact measured by the formal journal citations. We discuss the need to improve the criteria used by the Croatian National board for scholarly publishing responsible for subsidizing journal editorials, as well as the convenience to use several quality indicators for journals’ evaluation. Some desirable directions for the future development of the scholarly publishing in Croatia are indicated.

Open Access ; journals ; altmetrics

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