Hot Type: Scholars Create High-Impact Journal for About $100 per Year - Publishing - Th... - 1 views
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George Mehaffy on 03 Feb 11"January 30, 2011 Scholars Create Influential Journal for About $100 a Year By Jennifer Howard A group of herpetologists-researchers who study reptiles and amphibians-has been quietly demonstrating that it's possible to put together a well-regarded, researcher-run journal with the tiniest of budgets and no help from a publisher. The journal, Herpetological Conservation and Biology, caught my eye as a well-developed example of a movement for grass-roots scholarly publishing that has been rapidly picking up speed. The herpetology publication, founded in 2006, is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed journal with a budget of about $100 a year. (That money comes out of the editors' pockets.) Unlike most science journals, it charges no author or download fees. It has a submission-to-publication turnaround time measured in weeks or at most a few months. And it has just hit a milestone: The editors learned in December 2010 that HCB will be included in Journal Citation Reports, a service run by the commercial publisher Thomson Reuters that calculates impact factors for journals-a significant measure of importance for many researchers. HCB will receive its first impact rating in 2012 or 2013, and the editors expect the journal to rate highly. That credential will help reassure potential contributors, especially researchers who don't yet have tenure, that publishing an article in HCB will be good for their careers. Judged by the number of visitors to the site, the journal has caught on. In its first year, 2006, it received just over 6,000 unique visitors. In 2010 it received 42,288, according to the editors. Readers from more than 160 countries came to the site. And the number of submissions that are deemed good enough to be sent out for peer-review stage-more than 100 in 2010-has more than doubled since 2006, according to Malcolm L. McCallum, the managing editor. He says HCB's acceptance rate for submissions that make it to peer review is running about 50