25th January 2012, 3 min read

Open access journals in Computer Science

Open access journals make articles freely available. Some of them even allow the authors to keep the copyright of their work. It would seem that they offer a compelling alternative to traditional journals, especially if you hope to reach to people outside academia.
However, open access may allow you to get a free copy of an article, but your rights might still be limited. For example, videos on YouTube are freely available, but you are not allowed to copy or reuse them freely.

The directory of open access journals gives a list of over 300 open access journals in Computer Science. Thus, finding an adequate open access journal where you can submit your work is relatively easy.

However, there are a few sore points.

__1. Indexing of open access Computer Science journal is generally weak
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A journal needs to be indexed so that your fellow researchers can find out about your work. Most open access journals will be indexed by Google Scholar, but other indexes are important in Computer Science such as DBLP and the ACM Digital Library. Scopus is also often used by hiring and promotion committees. (Scopus is run by Elsevier.)

As I review the open access journals in Computer Science, I find that indexing is often a sore point. The next table shows that the ACM Digital Library does a poor job at indexing open access journals. In fact, I could find only two open access journals indexed by ACM. It cannot be explained by the prestige of the respective journals: some of these open access journals that ACM fails to index are just as good or better than others it indexes. And, of course, no ACM publication is open access. Quite clearly, ACM is doing little to help open access.

Elsevier and Springer allow authors of papers in some regular journals to make them available under an open access format in exchange for a one-time fee. Their journals are typically well indexed so they may offer good alternatives. __2. Many open access Computer Science journals require complete copyright transfer
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To publish an article, a journal does not require complete copyright ownership. The only valid justification for requiring that the author gives away his copyright is to restrict access. When reviewing open access journals in Computer Science, I see that several of them inexplicably require complete copyright transfer:

Conclusion There is still much room for progress.