The Government Legislation Center has published a regulation by the Minister of Science and Higher Education concerning the compilation of lists of publishers of scientific monographs, scientific journals, and peer-reviewed materials from international conferences. The new guidelines are the result of extensive consultations with the scientific community, during which more than 700 comments were analyzed.
The new lists will be compiled according to new rules. This means that the points a journal or publisher had previously accumulated will no longer apply when the new lists are prepared—each entity will be evaluated according to new rules that take into account the current market situation. Ethical standards have also been applied—the Science Evaluation Commission (KEN), which is the body responsible for preparing draft lists, has been granted the authority to lower a journal’s score or remove it from the list if it engages in unethical publishing practices.
Two Stages of Compiling Lists of Scientific Journals
The journal evaluation process will now be a two-stage process, more transparent and consisting of the following stages:
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Stage 1. Bibliometric Evaluation (mandatory)
Journals from the prestigious Scopus and Web of Science databases are automatically included in the draft journal list. The score (from 40 to 200 points) depends on the journal’s position in the above-mentioned rankings. A new feature of this system is that journals indexed in these databases that do not yet have calculated metrics are awarded 40 points at the outset (previously, this was 20 points). -
Stage 2. Expert evaluation (optional)
Over 2,500 researchers from the Scientific Committees of the Polish Academy of Sciences have been involved in the evaluation process. Experts may submit for inclusion in the list journals from other databases (ERIH+, DOAJ, Index Copernicus JML, EBSCO) that they consider valuable but that were not automatically included in the draft list. They may also request a change in scoring and evaluate journals that will be forwarded for expert evaluation
The list of journals will also automatically include scientific journals submitted as part of the most recent call for proposals under the “Support for Scientific Journals” program, as well as materials from international conferences included in the International CORE Conference Rankings (ICORE) and listed in the DBLP database.
Monographs in three categories
For publications, a change was made to introduce a division into three groups:
- The most prestigious international publishers will receive 200 points;
- publishers of significant national importance—which do not yet meet all global criteria but are crucial to Polish science—will receive 140 points (a newly introduced threshold);
- the remaining publishers that meet ethical and scientific standards will receive 80 points.
For more information, visit the website of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
Source: Ministry of Science and Higher Education
