It is important to evaluate the quality of the publication channel. ARENE ry recommends that teachers and researchers working in universities of applied sciences prefer publishing channels that follow an open publishing policy, such as the Open Access journals.
Predatory publishers market their publications using attractive e-mail messages. Their main aim is only to collect author fees. They do not take care of the peer evaluation of articles or assign resources to editorial work. The editors, editorial boards and effectiveness indicators indicated by the journal are often false. In addition, the names of predators often mimic and closely resemble the names of recognised journals and publishers.
Examples of the characteristics of a reliable publishing channel:
The predator misleads the author into believing that it is a trustworthy publisher or journal. “Send your manuscript to us and pay the APC, we publish your article rapidly.” In reality the predator only wants to defraud money under cover of the APC. The manuscript may not be published at all. If it is published, peer review may be imperfect or it is not performed at all. This kind of publication is worthless, and it is too bad to lose money.
(Source: Laitinen, H. 2020. Varo saalistajia! Beware of predators. UEF Library 17.1.2020. https://blogs.uef.fi/ueflibrary/varo-saalistajia-beware-of-predators/)
Publication Forum (in Finnish often referred to as JUFO) is a rating and classification system to support the quality assessment of research output. To account for the different publication cultures characteristic of various disciplines, the classification includes academic journals, book series, conferences as well as book publishers.
The Impact Factor (IF) indicates the significance of a scientific publication. It shows how many references on the average the publication has had to the articles published in it during the past two years. The Impact Factor is usually indicated on the journal website. Impact Factors can also be searched from databases, such as Journal Citation Reports (JCR).
It should be noted, however, that the impact factor of a newly established publication, even if it is a high-quality one, is at first low. In addition, high-quality national scientific publications will never receive a very high Impact Factor when published in Finnish.
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