Macdonald-Kelce Library Blog

Gray Area Journals

Thank you to everyone who came to the “Gray Area Journals” presentation.

The suggested takeaway from the presentation was the following:

What happens if you publish in a reputable journal in good faith only to see that journal experience a loss of reputation later in your career?

Consider asking your department, or the T&P committee, what kind of safeguards might be put into place so that good faith efforts to publish are not harmed by future developments.

Some of the resources we have for journal analysis and learning more about open access can be found in these guides:

Journal Analysis
Open Access Resources
Scholarly Communication @ UTampa

Some of the articles I referred to during the presentation:

• Butler, Leigh-Ann, Lisa Matthias, Marc-André Simard, Philippe Mongeon, and Stefanie Haustein. "The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges." Quantitative Science Studies 4, no. 4 (2023): 778-799.
• Hanson, Mark A., Pablo Gómez Barreiro, Paolo Crosetto, and Dan Brockington. "The strain on scientific publishing." Quantitative Science Studies 5, no. 4 (2024): 823-843.
• Oviedo-García, M. Ángeles. "Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)." Research evaluation 30, no. 3 (2021): 405-419a.