---
title: PKP - Journal Quality Indicators
autor: PKP
tags: PKP, Quality, Indicators
---

# Journal Quality Indicators

The goal of this is creating a tools to aid the editors to recognize the strength and the weekness of their journals.

The aim is not creating a ranking or a way to classify the journals between good and bad. The quality of the journal could not be automatically checked and depend on too much factors.

This is a prelimary list of items that show some kind of formal quality in a journal:

- **Periodicity:** How regular is the journal.
- Comments:
- Marc: We need a formula for this. What librarians say? Normal distribution? +2/-2 days is still fine? How it falls?
- **% endogamy of the board:** Percentatge of the board in same institution/country. Less is better.
- Comments:
- Marc: By country or institutions?
- **% endogamy of the articles:** Percentage of the artices from same author/institution/country. Less is better.
- Comments:
- Marc: By country or institutions?
- **Indexes:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: Not only how many, also which ones. A ponderated sum of elements could work? Need the help of a bibliometrc expert. We will also need a "indexes" plugin to let the journal indicate where is indexed and in what quartile.
- **DOIs:** % articles covered with DOIs?
- Comments:
- Marc: Still with doubts if DOI is something mandatory (at the end, a permalink can do the same), but if we add this, need to be genera (not only thinking in CrossRef)
- **DOAJ:** Registered in DOAJ?
- Comments:
- Marc: Points to DOAJ.
- **Peer review dates:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: Time till the review is done?
- **Reviewers:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: Number of reviewers?
- **ORCID:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: Still unconfortable participating in making ORCID an researcher's authority (as far it's not a public instituion, and their high payment requirements).
- Marc: If we go with this, the item need to be defined clearly. Example: % of authors/board with an ORCID?
- **Rejection rates:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: It's said that "the higher the rejection rate, the higher the journal quality"... but I'm still unsure about the side effects that showing this item could have in journals and science.
- **%of the Archive:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: Some jurnals start on OJS but never upload the historical. Others do the job, but is not complete. A full Archive could be an indicator. High percentage is better.
- **%of workflowed articles:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: Some journals work outside OJS, and upload the article when it's finished, as manager (jumping stages) or with quick submit. This is not a good practice because task will be easier inside the platform and everything you do outside OJS will not logged so you won't be able to prove you made a peer-review process or easily check what happens with each article. Workflowed articles will have multiple users involved (author upload, reviewers, editor...). High percentage is better.
- **Enable public statistics:** TBD.
- Comments:
- Marc: As a sign of transparency and to help authors decide if they like to publish in your journal. Here we are talking about OJS statistics, ALT metrics statistics, etc.

## Public or private

| Indicator | Visibility |
|-------------------|------------|
| Periodicity | Public |
| % board's endogay | Public |
| DOIs | Private |
| ... | ... |

## Where to gather more items?

Review the criterias of:
- COPE / OASPA.
- DOAJ: https://doaj.org/bestpractice
- Main indexers (Scielo, Redalyc...)
- Plan S
- Amelica
- ...

More resources:
- Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zEPR9njly8x2Hq9fts6XdqZGcgi9Mdue/view
- dimensions.ia: https://plus.dimensions.ai/support/home
- COPE: https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing

## List of Plan S criteria [^1]:

| **1.1 Common requirements for all publishing environments** |
|---|
| **Basic mandatory conditions** |
| 1.1.1 Quality review standards following the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and others |
| 1.1.2 Detailed description of editorial policies, with annual statistics |
| 1.1.3 Author retention of copyright
| 1.1.4 Allowing immediate publication under an open license and allowing repository deposit |
| **Mandatory technical conditions** |
| 1.1.5 Use of persistent identifiers such as DOI (digital object identifier), URN (uniform resource name), or Handle |
| 1.1.6 Deposit of content in digital preservation environments |
| 1.1.7 High-quality article metadata, in interoperable, non-proprietary formats, including funding |
| 1.1.8 Computer-readable information from the OA state and the license in the article |
| **Highly recommended additional criteria** |
| 1.1.9 Support for persistent identifiers for authors and entities such as Orcid |
| 1.1.10Serpa/Romeo registration of self-archiving policy |
| 1.1.11 Allowing download of full text in standard computer-readable formats such as JATS XML |
| 1.1.12 Direct deposit of publication by publisher to an OA Plan repository |
| 1.1.13 OpenAIRE-compliant metadata |
| 1.1.14 Links to data, code, and other outputs in external repositories |
| 1.1.15 Open citation data according to Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) standards |
| **1.2 Specific conditions required for open access journals and platforms** |
| 1.2.1 Journal/platform must be part of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or in the process of being registered |
| 1.2.2 No parallel paid replicas |
| 1.2.3 Cost and transparent pricing |
| 1.2.4 Exemptions and discounts for low income economy authors (edited) |

## References

- https://www.une.edu.au/library/support/eskills-plus/mastering-the-academic-literature/journal-quality
- https://www.enago.com/academy/how-to-assess-the-quality-of-journals/
- http://www.elprofesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/2020/mar/lopez-olle-garcia-abadal.pdf

[^1]: http://www.elprofesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/2020/mar/lopez-olle-garcia-abadal.pdf