Focus and Scope

The journal publishes for a broad scholarly audience and for the policy domain commissioned reports, short communications and multi-disciplinary research papers on the quantitative or qualitative assessment of scientific-scholarly activity, communication and performance. Its mission is to enhance among a wide scholarly and policy audience the knowledge on the potential and limits of scholarly assessment methodologies, in order to establish optimal conditions for an informed, responsible, effective and fair use of such methodologies and their metrics in actual scholarly assessment practices.

The journal aims to enhance the communication between developers of research assessment methodologies and indicators on the one hand, and the wider scholarly community and the research policy community on the other.
Presenting a multi-disciplinary view of research assessment and evaluation for a broad audience, the journal does not assign a preferred status to any particular disciplinary viewpoint, assessment methodology or practical application.
It informs research policy officials and managers and the wider scientific-scholarly community about the pros and cons of the various assessment methodologies and applications.
The journal aims to constitute a platform for reflections upon current assessment processes, and for proposals for new, alternative approaches.
It critically discusses policy claims and assumptions, and opens new viewpoints. In addition, it proposes to colleagues in other disciplines possible new analytical tools.

The subjects covered by the new journals include – but are not limited to:

The potential and limits of science indicators, including citation-based measures and altmetrics.
The effect of the use of informetric or bibliometric indicators in research evaluation upon researchers, editors, and policy makers
Actual research assessment practices and proposals for ‘best’ practices.
Integrated approaches to the assessment of the research, teaching and social service activities and performance of higher education institutions.
The measurement of technological and innovative performance, and the science-technology interface.
Econometric analyses of the research system and its productivity.
Study of favourable and less-favourable conditions to scientific-scholarly progress and quality.
Development of a scholarly framework for the study of scholarly performance in humanities and social sciences.
A philosophical analysis of the key concepts and their theoretical assumptions in research evaluations.
The study of peer review of scholarly manuscripts, research proposals and programmes.
The communication effectiveness, access modes and business models of the scholarly publication system.

Publication Frequency

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publically available.

The journal aims to publish in 2020 and 2021 at least two issues with a total of around 30 papers.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. For a list of generic and subject-specific repositories that meet our peer review criteria, visit the Open Access Directory or datacite.org.

Journal Archiving

All Levy Library Press content is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). All metadata is openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH and journals are registered with Open Archives.

As member of CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) our content is regularly archived with many of the world's leading research libraries. The CLOCKSS archive ensures that all Levy Library Press content will always be made available as open access, in any eventuality. We fully support and encourage author self-archiving of all content (sometimes termed 'green' open access). We register all of our journals with SHERPA RoMEO to ensure that the license terms and self-archiving policies of the journals are clear.

This journal is indexed by the following services:

Journal Statistics

Core journal statistics for the 2020 volume:

Submissions received¹	20
Reviews requested²	56
Reviews received³	29
Total Rejections⁴	4
...of which, Desk rejects⁵	1
Acceptances⁶	19
Acceptance rate⁷	82.6%
Time from submission to publication⁸	94.6 days

Definitions
¹Number of new articles received by the journal
²Number of peer review invitation emails that were sent out
³Number of completed peer review reports received
⁴Total number of articles rejected (including desk rejects)
⁵Number of articles rejected prior to peer review
⁶Number of articles that received a 'Accept for publication' decision
⁷Number of acceptances, as a percentage, against the total number of final decisions
⁸'Mean' average from submission to publication for all publications in the volume

Annotation and post-publication comment

The journal platform permits readers to leave comments and in-browser annotations via hypothes.is. Readers will require a hypothes.is account to create annotations, and will have the option to make these public or private. Comments may be moderated by the journal, however, if they are non-offensive and relevant to the publication subject, comments will remain online without edit.

Advertisement Policy

The journal only displays advertisements that are of relevance to its scope and will be of interest to the readership (e.g. upcoming conferences). All advertising space is provided free of charge and the editor and publisher have the right to decline or withdraw adverts at any point. Adverts will include a text heading to make it clear that they are adverts not related to the journal.

If you wish to propose a potential advert then please contact the editorial team. All advert images will have to be provided to the publisher.

Issue Archive