Bringing out indicators for open scientific journals

Abstract

Editorial teams usually engage in constant efforts to meet the qualitative and quantitative requirements demanded by indexing agencies. Those journals which, due to the fact that they have not been consolidated in the areas of interest for publication - and consequent non-insertion in indexing databases - usually don't apply procedures to collect, compute and analyze data that could help managers in the decision making process. Under this assumption, a question has been raised concerning the feasibility (and conditions) in which the use of data present in the Open Journal Systems platform - as an environment for publishing scientific journals - along with other sources under the domain/scope of the journal managers could generate performance indicators. The objective of this study was, therefore, to explore a methodology for the generation of such indicators, which integrates the creation and use of an article reference base; evaluation criteria for scientific journals derived from literature; and a process of metadata extraction. This methodology, applied to nine issues of the journal“AtoZ: novas práticas em informação e conhecimento”, gave rise to the exploration of a corpus of references in BibTeX and existing metadata. The results helped to design, create and analyze ten indicators which can, potentially, assist the editorial team in reviewing the strategic vision of the journal. The gathered data, followed by controlled tests of the proposed indicators, reinforces the need for a constant filling of metadata, as well as, stress the benefits of using the BibTeX format. The research offered some basis for a following investigation, which aims for a comparison between the AtoZ journal performance and other concurrent titles available.