Scientific magazines

What is a scientific journal?

scientific journals are the most common and formal channel through which researchers in an area of ??knowledge communicate their discoveries with each other, with other scientists and with society in general .

Scientific journals are not usually aimed at the general public and are the usual means to refute or confirm the results and hypotheses of other scientists ; or to answer their advances or theories in their own language and level. Scientific journals tend to specialize by subjects or disciplines.

Who decides what is published in a scientific journal?

What is published in a scientific journal is decided by the editorial team in view of the works that come to it and of the report that the experts consulted by the journal make on their scientific relevance. What is published in a scientific journal is considered good , true or proven by the rest of the scientific community until otherwise published.

The journal certifies, in front of the community, the authorship of the results and discoveries published by the signatories of the work (authors). It is also responsible for certifying the date of a certain finding or result, since the publication marks the date from which the creation, ideation or discovery of something can be accredited.

Who is the author of a scientific article?

The author of a scientific article is the signer of the article. They can be one or more authors, and the order of appearance gives information on the relative contribution of each of the authors or the role played in the published work. The author of the discovery is considered to be the researcher or researchers who are the first in time to publish a result or discovery in a scientific journal recognized by their community. Normally, the signer of an article is considered the legitimate author of that discovery, this criterion prevailing over other proofs of authorship that may be alleged.

How do journals decide what works are published?

The journals determine which works to publish or not by virtue of the reports that are sent by a set of external referees to the journal (although appointed by it ) and experts in the discipline the work is about.

In very specific disciplines and with few researchers, it is common for most of them to know each other from the point of view of their scientific work and careers, so this evaluation methodology can generate conflicts. The same can happen in the case of highly competitive disciplines, where scientific prestige or important economic interests derived from possible applications, patents, or relationships with industry are at stake.

What are the most relevant scientific journals?

There is an internationally accepted stratification of journals that are tagged or classified according to the scientific relevance of their articles . This relevance is correlative to the difficulty that authors have for their work to be accepted in the journal.

As measured?

This relevance is quantitatively measured in terms of the impact of the articles published by the journal . With impact we would refer to the magnitude of consultations, acceptances and uses of a certain published research, on the part of your other scientific colleagues in subsequent works. And the latter is measured by counting the times that a certain work is mentioned ( cited ) by other researchers in the bibliography of new articles that describe works, after the publication of the first.

As every mention or citation also includes the date and journal in which the cited work can be found, it is relatively easy to calculate how much the set of articles in a journal are cited and, therefore, assess whether the The magazine as a whole is more or less cited, which is in correlation to whether it is more or less good choosing the articles it decides to publish.

Does the journal you publish influence the value of the scientific article?

Within the same subject or area of ??knowledge, the better the scientific result of an article, the more it will be read and used for further research. In this way, it will be more cited in future research and the journal that published it will gain positions as a selector of good articles.

The greater the relevance of the journal, the more authors will want to send their work to it and, therefore, the more difficult it will be for them to be accepted. This is why articles accepted by a relevant journal have a higher a priori value for the scientific community.

Types of scientific journals

Scientific journals can be:

1. Free to read , called "open access" since the Budapest declaration in 2002.
2. Reading by subscription , that is, requiring a license and payment for the reader to access the content.

Free scientific journals

There are two types of open case scientific journals, those of the golden way and the green way:

Via dorada open access journals

The gold-way open journals include those whose contents are available without any access restriction . They can be consulted from the first moment of their publication and permanently on the original site of the magazine. Since the publisher does not have income from the subscription for reading, the publishing costs are passed on to the authors who wish to publish, who do have to pay a stipulated price to the journal if it accepts the publication and they want it to be published.

Many commercial scientific journals offer hybrid publishing models : the author pays the publication costs in exchange for the reader not paying to access the article. Or on the contrary, the author does not pay the publication costs and the journal charges the reader for accessing the article.

Greenway open access journals

As an alternative to the golden way, the green way arises, whereby authors send their works to an institutional or thematic repository at no cost to the author and at no cost to the reader you want to access. The works that are sent to the repository may have been previously published in a subscription scientific journal, for which they have not paid to publish either, but in this case they must wait a time called "embargo" before depositing it in the repository.

Authors can submit their works to the repository, whether they have previously submitted them for publication to a subscription journal (postprints), or if they have not submitted them (preprint). Readers' access to the repository is free, but not immediate in the case of articles previously submitted to subscription publication. The lack of immediate access is due to the fact that only paid subscribers access the content on the subscription magazine's site from the first moment of publication , and the rest must wait for the period to end however to consult it in the repository

Garnishment periods are usually one or two years . Governments and science funding agencies promote, and in some cases oblige, that the research results obtained with their funds be published openly; as a mechanism to favor the universal diffusion of science and knowledge, especially when they have been financed with public funds.

Directory of scientific journals: REDIB Index

All journals indexed in REDIB are open access and most belong to public research institutions, universities or entities that bear the costs of managing the journals.

In addition to the economic model and access to documentation published by scientific journals, they can also be characterized by other attributes:

• Magazines usually specialize in subject areas or subjects . At REDIB we have more than two hundred scientific subjects or disciplines to which the indexed journals adhere. A journal can be assigned to more than one subject and there are more general or more specific ones.
• The language of publication is also an attribute of the journal. English is the most widely used language internationally, but in our Ibero-American environment REDIB collects the journals that are published in Spanish and Portuguese and encourages the dissemination of science in these languages ??by improving the quality of the journals that use them. It is common for parts of the articles such as the title and abstract to be translated into languages ??other than the journal.
• Other attributes are the periodicity in its publication:
  • Monthly
  • Bimonthly
  • Quarterly
  • Biannual
  • Annual
  • Etc
• The composition of the editorial panel, the formats in which it is published or the quality attributes.

Relevant scientific articles

Journals can have plagiarism controls and national or international recognition or accreditation of their editorial quality. All these attributes are shown on the page that REDIB dedicates to each indexed journal, and they also constitute elements and criteria for filtering and selecting journals when using the REDIB search engines.

How can a journal be included in the REDIB Index?

Scientific journals that want to be admitted to the REDIB platform to improve their visibility, must meet a series of mandatory criteria, among which the following stand out:

• Clearly identify the entity and editorial responsibility.
• Scientific objectives.
• Thematic coverage.
• Target audience.
• An editorial team responsible for the application of its policy and management (made up of a board of directors and collegiate bodies), individually identifying its members and including their institutional affiliation.
• It is required that at least 60% of the content of the publication has the character of original research within the scientific and academic field .
• That the journal declares its openness to the participation of non-authors to the publishing entity.
• Count on the collaboration of external reviewers outside your editorial team and the publishing institution.
• It is also mandatory that the journal has its own website that facilitates access to all its contents, with e-ISSN or ISSN-L.
• That it meets the periodicity that it declares.
• To provide information on the conditions of use and reuse of the contents (Creative Commons or other licenses).
• The fascicles of the journal must be presented consecutively, with an index and with access to each of the full-text documents, independently and in separate files.
• To be admitted to REDIB, the journal must have completed 12 months of activity, publishing content according to its declared periodicity.