Archive for DOAJ

Alternatives to Scopus

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on August 7, 2025 by telescoper

Yesterday I had a very interesting meeting with the Library Staff who are working behind the scenes on the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Most of the meeting was about reviewing the finances of the journal, so I had a look at the official accounts. These confirmed that the total cost incurred is under $30 per paper. The financial year here at Maynooth runs from October 1st to September 30th – don’t ask me why – so this year is not yet complete but will be just over $5000 dollars. We will have published about 180 papers in that period.

People ask me how the journal can be so inexpensive, and the answer is that we keep publishing costs to a minimum by offering a “no frills” service, and also because our editors and referees are all unpaid.

Anyway, in the course of the meeting I mentioned Scopus (which is owned by publishing behemoth Elsevier). This is used by many universities and funding agencies as a source of bibliometric information, but my experience is that it is unreliable and poorly managed. I thought I would share a few other, better, bibliometric databases here.

We have for some time being indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and in fact our articles’ metadata are automatically deposited there every time we publish a paper. This however only covers fully Open Access journals which excludes some journals.

The go-to repository for astrophysicists is the NASA Astrophysics Data System, known to its friends as ADS. This has very complete bibliographic information going back over 100 years, as well as links to catalogues and other supplementary information. It’s also fairly complete for general physics.

Scopus being so awful I was pleased to find a system which is more general than NASA/ADS but with wider coverage. OpenAlex fits the bill rather well. It’s not quite complete but far better than Scopus. Articles from the Open Journal of Astrophysics are index there, and the information is almost as complete as NASA/ADS.

One candidate is Scimago. This is largely concerned with the (in my opinion) pointless task of journal rankings, but the Open Journal of Astrophysics is listed there. Again the information is not totally complete, but it’s not bad.

One thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that if you want to compare the impact of journals or individual articles it’s absolutely essential to use the same source of information because there is a huge variation between databases. When I look at astrophysics articles I always use NASA/ADS, but in other fields you could use OpenAlex or Scimago. There are no circumstances that justify the use of Scopus, even if your boss tells you to…

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The Open Journal of Astrophysics: Last Update for 2018

Posted in Maynooth, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 20, 2018 by telescoper


As term staggers to its close tomorrow, two things this morning reminded me that I should post a final update for the The Open Journal of Astrophysics.  I’ve been regularly boring all my readers with a stream of stuff about the Open Journal of Astrophysics, but if it’s all new to you, try reading the short post about the background to the Open Journal project that you can find here.

The first item was a little piece in the latest edition of University News (which was delivered this morning) about the launch event for the journal here at Maynooth University way back in October.

I didn’t make it into the picture above as I had to leave the event before the end in order to give an undergraduate lecture, but the appearance of this piece reminds me to express once more my gratitude to Maynooth for providing such excellent support for this project.

The other event this morning was an email notification that the OJA has received yet another submission. We now have a number of papers in the pipeline, and interest seems to be picking up. I can’t say how many submissions will actually be published, but the papers we have received are working their way through the peer-review system and we’ll see what transpires.

On a related point, a few people have asked me why the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The answer to that is simply that DOAJ requires a minimum of five papers published in a calendar year and because we had a long hiatus before the re-launch we don’t yet qualify. The way things are going we should meet the threshold for 2019 pretty quickly.

Though I stress that the Editorial Board of OJA is not going to compromise standards just to get listed on DOAJ.
we are hoping to increase the number of submissions with time (in a manageable way). As it happens, we do have funds available to promote the OJA as I think quite a large number of members of the astrophysics community still haven’t heard of it. This also makes it a little difficult to enlist referees who perhaps jump to the conclusion that this is a dodgy or predatory journal. There are many of these about, sadly, but I hope we can establish relatively easily the fact that we’re not of that ilk.

I would like here to repeat a small request I posted a while ago. Do any of you have any ideas for promoting The Open Journal of Astrophysics? We could advertise directly in journals of course, but I’m wondering if anyone out there in the interwebs has any more imaginative ideas? If you do please let me know through the comments box below.

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