Wednesday 4 July 2007

New tool to support researchers in their choice of journal publication

As a researcher are you aware of your publication rights? Is the journal you just published in open-access? How is the journal ranked compared to other journals in the field? Lund University Libraries in Sweden has (with financial support from the National Library of Sweden), put together a new tool to support researchers in making an informed choice about journals they may be interested in getting their work published on.

The tool is called ”JournalInfo”. It gives fast and simple access to journal information through a webinterface, http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/. There are about 70 dentistry journals in the database. Click on the link above, then click on medicine, then click on dentistry. The information about each journal is divided up into sections: general, accessibility, cost and quality. Under each section are a number of relevant points. For example, you can find out 1) which databases a journal is indexed and 2) which alternative OA journals exists. A total of 18,000 journals are currently supported in the "journalinfo" database, which is designed to complement DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/, also produced in Lund. Check it out the new database and see what you can find out about a journal of your choice.