Vnitr Lek 2019, 65(5):338-347 | DOI: 10.36290/vnl.2019.061

Compliance with ethical rules for scientific publishing in biomedical Open Access journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports

Jiří Kratochvíl^1,*, Lukáš Plch¹, Eva Koriťáková²

¹ University Campus Library, Masaryk University Brno

² Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Masaryk University Brno

This study examined compliance with the criteria of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing defined by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME in Biomedical Open Access journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR). 259 Open Access journals were drawn from the JCR database and on the basis of their websites their compliance with 14 criteria for transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing was verified. Journals received penalty points for each unfulfilled criterion when they failed to comply with the criteria defined by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME. The average number of obtained penalty points was 6, where 149 (57.5%) journals received ≤ 6 points and 110 (42.5%) journals ≥ 7 points. Only 4 journals met all criteria and did not receive any penalty points. Most of the journals did not comply with the criteria declaration of Creative Commons license (164 journals), affiliation of editorial board members (116), unambiguity of article processing charges (115), anti-plagiarism policy (113) and the number of editorial board members from developing countries (99). The research shows that JCR cannot be used as a whitelist of journals that comply with the criteria of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing.

Keywords: biomedical journals; ethical rules of scientific publishing; Journal Citation Reports; open access; predatory journals; Web of Science

Received: June 18, 2018; Accepted: August 28, 2018; Published: May 1, 2019  Show citation