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Peer Reviewed Open Access Journals Information

By Stephen Bennett


Academic journals are periodical publications containing articles on book reviews, review articles and original research. Their purpose is for researchers to have a venue where they can impart their knowledge to others, contribute in improving natural knowledge and to perfect every Philosophical Arts and Sciences. Articles are usually refereed or peer reviewed to prevent those containing fraudulent data from being published.

Researchers write these articles with funds received from government agencies, universities and institutions, they would donate these to journal publication. Government agencies, universities and institutions then purchases these from them, even the ones that provided the research funds, usually via subscription. This is the reason that peer reviewed open access journals became popular because it cost virtually nothing in reading them.

They receive their funding from the same entities though and anyone that has access to an internet connection can read them without paying a subscription fee. Legal and permission barriers are also removed such as licensing and copyright restrictions. Authors of these articles sometimes pay for them to get published by using the money of those who funded them.

Several varieties of OA journals are there such as full where every content can be accessed freely. Hybrid ones have only some contents openly accessible and delayed where access is granted after twelve or twenty four months. These works could either be solicited, where individuals were asked to submit their work or unsolicited where they just submit it without being asked to.

These are peer reviewed, same with traditional publications, or evaluated by people that have similar competence with the authors. They review the works and were chosen by publishers anonymously to prevent being influenced. This method is done for providing credibility, improving performance and maintaining standards of quality.

They help in determining if the work will get accepted, rejected or even acceptable but with revisions to be done. A community of experts on a specific field with qualifications and ability to do impartial review reasonably is needed. Being impartial is difficult to accomplish specially in fields that are less narrowly defined and inter disciplinary.

This makes the significance that an idea has, either good or bad, harder to become appreciated widely among their contemporaries. Refereeing though is considered important to academic quality but preventing all invalid research from getting published is impossible. Although it is done anonymously by tradition, some can currently give their comments publicly which anyone can read.

Identifying if that journals was refereed or not can be done in numerous ways with one being limiting your search criteria when using databases. This option is offered readily by some search screens while others require you to click the advance or expert option. Although some databases have no option for limiting their search criteria like this.

You could also examine the published journal physically or online by looking at the masthead at its cover where all information about them which includes if they were refereed. Another way is by looking at the ways its written and includes references using footnotes and bibliography. And finding their official would help in determining this but sometimes it is inaccurate still.




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