The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) has announced the launch of a new journal, Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). QSS is owned by ISSI, the primary scholarly and professional society for scientometrics and informetrics, and will be published jointly with the MIT Press in compliance with fair open access principles.
QSS will be a journal run for and by the scientometric community. The initial editorial board will be fully constituted by the former editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI), an Elsevier-owned journal. The transition of the editorial board from JOI to QSS was initiated by the unanimous resignation, on Jan. 10, of all members of the JOI editorial board. The editorial board members maintain that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers; that journals should be open access; and that publishers should make citation data freely available. The members of the board had been unsatisifed with Elsevier for not meeting their expectations, and they therefore resigned their positions.
The content for QSS will be open access and therefore freely available for readers worldwide. Funding for establishing and marketing the new journal has been provided in part by the MIT Libraries. To ensure access for authors, the MIT Press will charge a comparatively low per-article charge, which will be fully covered by the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology for the first three years of operation, with support of the Communication, Information, Media Centre of the University of Konstanz. The funds from TIB will be managed by the Fair Open Access Alliance to ensure that the journal is operating under fair open access principles. The MIT Press is also a full participant in the I4OC initiative, which promotes unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data.
A recognized leader in open access book and journals publishing, the MIT Press has partnered with the MIT Libraries on several open access projects, including the Strong Ideas, a new hybrid open-access/print book series; and with the MIT Media Lab to launch the Knowledge Futures Group to support the development of new open access publishing platforms and tools.
“The MIT Press is very pleased to be the ISSI’s publishing partner for QSS,” says Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access at the MIT Press. “Both organizations share many goals around extending the reach and availability of scholarship and QSS will undoubtedly quickly become a central node for scientometrics research.”
QSS is now open and accepting submissions. Please consult the journal’s website for more details.
