jonny, 3 months ago

@rmounce wrote a piece on this recently, and imo his conclusions are correct

"I talked about a tale of two open access journals catering for the same authors, one of which has author-side article processing charges (APCs): SoftwareX, and the other: Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), which does not charge APCs.

they publish a high volume of papers, with over 300 in SoftwareX and over 400 in JOSS in 2023, challenging the notion that “diamond open access can’t scale”. However, that is where their similarities end.

Yet two proprietary journal indexers have not given these journals equal treatment. Scopus (Elsevier) and Web of Science (Clarivate) have accepted SoftwareX into their indexes but have refused to index JOSS, despite multiple applications from the JOSS team

The best solution here is not to beg for JOSS to be included in these proprietary indexes, but rather to call institutions and departments relying on Scopus and Web of Science to review and change their policies."

https://council.science/current/blog/open-science-round-up-january-2024/

Refusal to index JOSS is transparently an attempt to deter submissions to a journal that costs next to nothing to operate while providing high quality, collaborative, open peer review that perfectly matches the needs of the community it serves. JOSS is too compelling of an example of what waits on the other side after the abolition of commercial publishing - and refusal to index shows us what barriers remain to reach it.