Adding JOSS to Web of Science / Clarivate

[chadagreene]

[Creating a new issue from this discussion on PubMed indexing.]

JOSS is not currently included in the Web of Science / Clarivate master list of journals. This is a problem because my employer's annual salary review process only considers articles that are indexed by Web of Science. Can we get JOSS included in the WoS master list?

[arfon]

As noted here, we've (re)submitted: https://github.com/openjournals/joss/issues/153#issuecomment-1566213527

[chadagreene]

Thanks @arfon. The resubmission was back in May, which is why we're inquiring about updates. A video on the WoS Publisher Portal says there's an Evaluation Tracker that should provide some insights about the current status of the submission. Does it tell us anything?

[arfon]

Not much sorry. Just checked the portal and this is all of the information available.

[chadagreene]

I just reached out to Clarivate to check on the status and got this response:

Dear Chad,

Thank you for contacting Clarivate.

I understand that you want to know the evaluation status of the journal “Journal of Open Source Software”, ISSN: 2475-9066 in Web of Science Publisher Portal.

Upon checking, I noticed that the journal has been recently rejected. Rejection emails has been sent out from the email of [email protected] and has be sent to who was listed as the Editorial Contact ([email protected]). The Editorial contact may also track the status of the journal on the Publisher Portal dashboard.

I hope this helps.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions.

I will be happy to assist you.

Regards

[sneakers-the-rat]

the journal review criteria: https://clarivate.com/products/scientific-and-academic-research/research-discovery-and-workflow-solutions/webofscience-platform/web-of-science-core-collection/editorial-selection-process/editorial-selection-process/

Initial Triage:

• [x] Have an ISSN - yep
• [x] Have a title
• [x] Have a publisher
• [x] Have a URL
• [x] Have access to content
• [x] Presence of peer review policy
• [x] Have contact details

Editorial Triage:

• [x] Primarily scholarly content
• [x] Article titles and abstract in english
• [x] Bibliographic information in roman script
• [x] Clarity of language in published work
• [x] Have a publication schedule that is adhered to (for JOSS it's just continuous), and have published "enough" work
• [x] Website must be accurate and easy to navigate and link to publisher website and vice versa
• [x] Presence of ethics statements - yep
• [x] Editorial board members must be identifiable and available for contact
• [x] Authors need to be identified with affiliations - idk if we enforce this but it's certainly there.

Editorial evaluation (quality)

• [x] Editor and editorial board geographical and other diversity, consistent with volume and breadth of output
• [x] Published content should do the things the policy says it should do
• [x] "Published content must reflect adequate peer review and editorial oversight - signs of deficient peer review include articles that demonstrate lack of scholarly rigor or validity, presence of articles outside the scope of the journal"
• [x] Journal must have scope, and papers must be within that scope
• [x] If supported by a grant, say so
• [x] Adherence to community standards - "editorial policies are consistent with recognized best practices such as COPE Core Practices" - idk joss basically invented the best practices for open peer review of software so...
• [x] Author diversity, geographic, institution, etc.
• [x] Appropriate citations to surrounding literature

Editorial evaluation (impact)

• [x] Papers have to be cited a lot - Dimensions says that there are 56K citations with a mean of 24.22, which rocks, including such "everyone knows them" works like the tidyverse, umap, seaborn, and the like.
• [x] Most authors should have a publication record also in WoS - I mean i can only assume, they certainly are showing up in dimensions as being recognized
• [x] Most editorial board members should have a publication history in WoS - again like.. yes?
• [x] "Content significance" - content should be important, unique or "enrich the breadth of WoS coverage"

So i would love to know the reason they rejected us, because we easily pass every check

[sneakers-the-rat]

Using dimensions, the JIF score (which i don't endorse, but I know orgs like WoS do)

$IF = \frac{Citations_y}{Publications_{y-1}+Publications_{y-2}}$

Using 2021 and 2022 data (since this is what clarivate seems to do, lag by a year?) divided by 2 to get mean citations in 2023 since I can't get citations in a single year for works in two years in dimensions: 10K/2 = 5000

Total works in 2021 and 2022: 730

So joss had an IF: $\frac{5000}{730} = 6.85$

so like not trying to be the most prestigious journal in the world, but then browsing the "computer science, software engineering" category on WoS's journal metrics platform, sorting by JIF, JOSS would have the 9th highest JIF out of 132 journals. So it can't be the "JOSS isn't cited enough"

I wonder what's different about JOSS than other journals... hmm... 🤔

[rossmounce]

rather than continuing to beg the black box for a different arbitrary decision, or another roll of the dice... Perhaps the JOSS community might want to turn the attention to working on eliminating "Does the journal have a Clarivate assigned Journal Impact Factor™?" from hiring, promotion, tenure, and salary review processes, wherever those thought-bunkers may be found?

At the end of the day Clarivate is fully entitled to choose an arbitrary list of journals to annoint with a proprietary and statistically illiterate number (the Journal Impact Factor™) and also which journals they care NOT to give a proprietary and statistically illiterate number to. I would abandon the notion that Clarivate is necessarily fair, wise, or well-intentioned - they have a product to sell and a lucrative tradition to maintain. The strategy to approach this problem needs to be different.

Time to help the organizational users of these statistically illiterate numbers and arbitrary inclusion/non-inclusion journal lists to see sense?

[sneakers-the-rat]

To be clear the last thing i was suggesting was that they were a fair player that followed their rules, just pointing out how obviously they don't. I think in this case OP is saying they have a direct need in order to be able to publish their work in JOSS, but i also think we can 'do both' - continue trying to replace the world of proprietary metrics and also hassle and mock them about their editorial practices

[sneakers-the-rat]

Can we get clarification/confirmation from anyone who would know whether we received notice or any justification from clarivate re: refusal to index?

[MikeTaylor]

I just reached out to Clarivate to check on the status and got this response:

Dear Chad, Thank you for contacting Clarivate. [snip]

Surely you can send a follow-up message asking for the reasons JOSS was rejected?

[chadagreene]

@MikeTaylor I agree, it would be nice to get more information, but I think any followup needs to come from the JOSS editors who submitted the application.

[danielskatz]

@arfon - can you say what email was received?

[arfon]

Upon checking, I noticed that the journal has been recently rejected. Rejection emails has been sent out from the email of [email protected] and has be sent to who was listed as the Editorial Contact ([email protected]). The Editorial contact may also track the status of the journal on the Publisher Portal dashboard.

We received a desk rejection (based on an initial check) as we don't have :

• Editor titles and affiliations listed.
• A postal address for the publisher.

I'm planning on adding this information to the JOSS site in the coming weeks, but haven't got around to it yet. As it was a desk rejection, once we have made these changes we can immediately resubmit.

@MikeTaylor I agree, it would be nice to get more information, but I think any followup needs to come from the JOSS editors who submitted the application.

Right. While I appreciate the enthusiasm here ❤ , I'd strongly prefer for the communications with Clarivate, Scopus, any external entity to come from the JOSS editorial team directly.

[MikeTaylor]

@arfon Oh, I strongly agree! When I wrote "Surely you can send a follow-up message asking for the reasons JOSS was rejected?" the "you" was meant to refer to the JOSS editorial team!

[sneakers-the-rat]

So if i've got the timeline right, we submitted last May and it took them this long to desk reject us for not having a listed address? (the editor titles and affiliations do seem to be listed) And this is after a prior attempt at being indexed n (?) years ago? Seems like a slow walk to me. thanks to y'all for handling the work of submission and resubmission, even if we (speaking personally) don't love the proprietary index machine.

[JaGeo]

If there are any news, I would also be interested.

[fboehm]

What is the postal address for the publisher? I'm not sure what this term means, or what we might list for it. Are we expected to list Arfon's home mailing address? I'm not sure that that's a good idea...

[logological]

I've known other journals that were published by individuals (usually retired/former academics) and where the publisher's address reported in the journal was the publisher's home address. So this situation isn't entirely unheard of. Whether Arfon wants his home mailing address disclosed is something he'd have to decide for himself. (It's not clear to me whether WoS wants this address published in JOSS, or simply disclosed privately to Clarivate.)

If the address needs to be made public and Arfon doesn't want to give his home address, then some possible options would be:

• JOSS pays for a PO box at some location convenient for Arfon to occasionally check.
• Arfon or some trusted/long-term editor gets permission from their employer to use their office address, and remembers to occasionally check for incoming mail.

[rossmounce]

I'm pretty sure if one did some sleuthing one would find many instances of Clarivate indexed journals that give a PO box as their address. I don't have an example to hand, but I'd be willing to bet there are many.

[mkhorton]

I believe there are "virtual PO box" options too, where physical mail can be scanned and forwarded electronically. For example see https://www.anytimemailbox.com which offers this for $5/mo (not an endorsement of this service, I have not used it).

[JaGeo]

I am just adding here again that many institutions check annual performances based on Web of Science-listed journals. Thus, this is a huge consideration when submitting a paper.

[danielskatz]

As the postal address for the publisher, perhaps we should be using NumFOCUS's address as our fiscal sponsor