This is a question that I asked over at the Open Access Week forums. I felt like this was an appropriate place to ask as well:
We're all excited about Open Access – knowledge that is freely available is an amazing goal, and the internet lets us share research across the world quickly and efficiently. Scholastica is proud to support OA journals, and be part of the OA movement.
I'm curious to know what others think about scholarly indexes and the difficulty new journals find themselves in regarding getting into them.
For instance, imagine that there is a scholar who is really excited about starting a new journal in her subfield – let's call this scholar Dr. Sampson. Many indexes, even OA ones, require her journal to have multiple issues and go through a lengthy approval process before it can be indexed. This creates a chicken-and-the-egg problem of incentives: when Dr. Sampson approaches her colleagues to submit to the new journal, the lack of indexing disincentivizes these authors from wanting to publish in the new non-indexed journal. At the same time, Dr. Sampson needs to publish good content in order to be indexed.
I'm curious to know what others think about the value of scholarly indexes, and any thoughts on the difficulty new journals have becoming indexed?
