Thomson Releases Study on Open Access Journals

Thomson Releases Study on Open Access Journals

Thomson Scientific, a business of The Thomson Corporation, has released a new White Paper entitled: "Open Access Journals in the ISI Citation Databases: Analysis of Impact Factors and Citation Patterns." The findings indicate that journals published under the Open Access (OSA) model continue to gain impact in the world of scholarly research. Despite ranking lower as a group than those published under traditional models, the growth in the number of OA journals is impressive, and some OA journals rank near the top of their respective fields. Rankings are based on the Journal Impact Factor, as published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Thomson Scientific has updated its study of OA journals to include data from the 2003 JCR. Using citation metrics such as Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, and Cited Half Life, the study focuses on determining whether OA journals perform differently from other journals in their respective fields. The full paper is available at www.isinet.com/forms/whitepapers.