Talk:ERIH PLUS

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Norway

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Minimalist?

In a recent edit summary, the inclusion criteria were described as "minimalist". According to this article/interview[1], the inclusion criteria are now determined by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services, and "there is every reason to believe that NSD will maintain the same strict criteria for ERIH PLUS as for the Norwegian Scientific Index." The Norwegian Scientific Index also divides journals into quality/impact categories based on reviews by the national expert committees in the given discipline, and has excluded (or rather, labeled as not scientific/scholarly) known predatory journals and publishers (such as VDM Verlag or even some MDPI journals). In the interview, Ole Petter Ottersen says: "It is very unfortunate that we now see journals that are only looking to make money on Open Access publishing. It is important that all involved parties work together to uncover this type of activity and ensure that these journals are excluded from the Scientific Index."

I would be interested in what "non-minimalist" criteria for humanities, law or social science journals would look like. Various automatic measurement systems used by private companies, such as the impact factor system, are obviously worthless for e.g. humanities, law (where publishing is often in the national language) or social science, and highly problematic and arbitrary even in medicine and natural sciences (the disciplines the system is grossly biased in favour of). It is getting increasingly difficult to make clear rules to exclude dubious and predatory journals, as seen when MDPI managed to get impact factors for several of its journals despite clearly being a non-reputable publisher in China pretending to be Swiss, motivated solely by profit and using spam as its business model.

As far as I can see, the current criteria for basic inclusion in ERIH PLUS are based on the current accepted standards in academic publishing, and I don't know of any other widely recognised criteria that work across disciplines (personally, I'd like to see all journals demanding money from authors excluded as predatory by definition, which would probably be a good way to distinguish between genuine open access and predatory journals (and to discourage this outrageous practice in general), but a lot of people currently seem to think this is an acceptable practice). Bjerrebæk (talk) 23:53, 2 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Databases like the Arts and Humanities Citation Index or the Social Sciences Citation Index, for example, have rather stringent quality criteria (but I agree that your MDPI example indicates that Thomson Reuters is not infallible - no surprise there, though, no system will be infallible). They have large editorial boards (they may use another name for that, no time to check) that evaluate the quality of the journals they include in their databases. The EIRH PLUS criteria are on their website and in essence, it's enough for a journal to be peer-reviewed and have an ISSN to be included. If that is not minimalist, then I don't know which criteria would be minimalist. In that sense, they remind me of the criteria used by DOAJ, which are pretty similar (just adding the requirement that a journal is OA). I think the ERIH criteria are marginally better, as they might be more effective in keeping out predatory journals. For law journals, there is a specialized ranking system for (mainly US) journals maintained by Washington and Lee University School of Law, using several criteria. One thing we sometimes use here to evaluate notability is whether articles in a law review have been used in major court decisions. So, yes, more stringent selection criteria are possible for journals in the humanities and social sciences than just having an ISSN and being peer-reviewed.

Asking authors to defray (part of) the cost of publishing their articles is a practice that predates OA by decades and is done by many very respected journals published by learned societies (just two examples: PNAS]] and The Journal of Neuroscience. As for the Norwegian classification, with all due respect for my Norwegian colleagues (I know several ones that are excellent scientists and basically none that are bad or even halfway bad), how large will the scientific community in a country of 5 million people be? Especially in the smaller fields. So by necessity, their ranking will be based on the opinions of very few people. --Randykitty (talk) 08:36, 3 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It is true that more stringent criteria are possible in specialized areas like e.g. US law, but the aim of this index (and of the Norwegian Scientific Index) is to make an index of all academic publication channels in all disciplines (eventually) in all parts of the world (and obviously particularly in Europe), that are considered scientific/scholarly (i.e. serious academic publication channels). Therefore, the criteria for basic inclusion would have to be of a very general nature, in the same way that the impact factor system is based on very general rules. The reason that the European Science Foundation's ERIH database was transferred to NSD is that NSD's database enjoys a solid reputation in Europe. As I understand it, ERIH PLUS will probably have a similar quality evaluation and different categories in the future, and there is a strong focus now on how to exclude predatory journals. Scandinavia combined (which is a more relevant context in this respect) has around 20 million inhabitants, some of the world's most highly educated populations and several very solid and established universities and research environments. I have never seen anyone claiming Norway and Sweden are too small to be able to award e.g. Nobel Prizes or the Abel Prize either. Bjerrebæk (talk) 09:16, 3 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Which is a fine description of minimalist criteria, because they are all-inclusive. Mind you, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that, on the contrary, having a database where all journals have been vetted to be reliable is a great resource. I was more thinking in terms of notability as defined in WP:NJournals, where inclusion in ERIH clearly does not contribute. As for population sizes, if the whole of Scandinavia is included, that's a different thing. I don't think you can compare these journals with the Nobel Prizes. How many people in Norway (or even in Scandinavia) will be working on, say, Korean studies? (Just picking a random field). --Randykitty (talk) 09:36, 3 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Scandinavia is for all practical purposes a common linguistic and cultural area, and researchers and research institutions in particular have extensive cooperation, not that different from the amount of cooperation you will find e.g. between various US states. This is especially true in fields that are "small" or "nationally oriented" in nature (law, many fields of history and so on). For example, basically all the premier law journals in Scandinavia are "Scandinavian" or "Nordic" in nature rather than just Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (e.g. Tidsskrift for Rettsvitenskap). I don't know anything about Korean studies; I suspect this is a very small field in most European countries, and that e.g. Belgium, Spain or Poland don't have that many experts within this field either. I'm not comparing journals with the Nobel Prizes, merely pointing out that Norway, and Scandinavia which Norway is a part of more broadly, has relatively robust and well-established research environments in most fields of some size (at least within Europe) which are perfectly competent of vetting journals in the way that is relevant here, at least when compared to the current alternatives. Bjerrebæk (talk) 19:10, 3 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I can add that the way the Norwegian Scientific Index works is that a higher ranking (level 2) is given to journals considered leading within broad categories such as "linguistics", "history", "literature studies", etc.; in order to qualify, a journal in Korean studies would have to be evaluated to be a top journal not only within its particular specialty, but also within e.g. linguistics or another relevant broader category by the relevant national expert committee, based on nominations from researchers, possibly also on advice from external experts. I don't think basic inclusion in either the Norwegian Scientific Index or ERIH PLUS confers automatic notability, although I would certainly hold the view that "level 2" status of the Norwegian Scientific Index (and any comparable ranking ERIH PLUS might adopt) does and is at least equal to having an impact factor, probably even better (MDPI has impact factors, but not level 2 status) (often these journals will have impact factors and other qualifying characteristics as well, mostly with the exception of some non-English journals in eg. law or history). Both the Norwegian Scientific Index and ERIH PLUS have better coverage of European, North American and other western journals than journals in Asia and Africa. Bjerrebæk (talk) 19:56, 3 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]