We at Hindawi very much believe that transparency is a great thing and so we try to be as transparent as possible. For example, each and every published paper has the name of the editor who recommend the publication of such a paper. We also provide a publicly accessible page with useful statistics about each of the journals we publish. The page is located at http://www.hindawi.com/statistics/.
This pages contains the acceptance rate for each journal, time from submission to first decision, to final decision, and to acceptance (for those articles that are accepted for publication). The numbers are calculated based on a one year period. For the acceptance rate for example, the report looks at the oldest paper that has been submitted to the journal that is not decided upon yet. This might have been submitted 87 days ago, for example. We then take the 12 month period that end right before the date of submission of this paper. All the papers in this 12 month period are decided upon (either accepted or rejected). We use these papers for calculating the acceptance rate shows on the above page. Same goes for time from acceptance to first decision, final decision, and acceptance. If the number of papers is not large enough to drive meaningful numbers from it, we omit the number from the report until we have enough papers to calculate a meaningful number. As you can see on this statistics page, our acceptance rates varies considerably by the journal. Our average acceptance rate across our whole collection is about 40%. So, although we don't really know how many papers are going to be accepted from the 5,400 submitted in March 2012, I would expect the number to be just above 2,000. Ahmed Hindawi On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 8:29 PM, Couture Marc <couture.marc at teluq.ca> wrote: > On April 2, 2012, Jeffrey Beal asked Paul Peters : > >> >> How many of those 5,400 [March] submissions [to Hindawi journals] will >> be accepted for publication? >> > > Maybe I should wait for Mr Peters' reply, but if he knows the answer before > these papers are reviewed, there will be some reason for concern. > > Even if I suspect this is by no way a na?ve question, considering Jeffrey > Beall's well known (and certainly useful) hunt of "predatory" OA journals, I > will take it at face value. > > Acceptance rate is one indicator (among many) that can be used to evaluate > journal quality. But, as all such indicators, it must be used with extreme > caution. Like the ubiquitous impact factor, it may vary widely according to > various factors : discipline, intended readership, editorial choices, etc. > For instance, due to an openly stated editorial stance, PLoS One has a 70% > acceptance rate, much higher than other prestigious journals. > > Another thing is that comparisons are difficult, as this indicator isn't easy > to obtain. Some journals display this information, others not. And if I found > easily a reference to Cabell's directories (http://www.cabells.com), which > covers 3000 journals in various fields, I couldn't go farther without a > subscription. The same applies, to a lesser extent, to the impact factors, > which are available for only a fraction of journals (and a small one for OA > journals). > > So, even if I had the numbers for some or all Hindawi journals, I don't know > what it would really mean, except when it is close to 100%. > > To end with a little bit of humour, I invite your to discover what is > certainly the most prestigious journal according to this indicator : > http://www.universalrejection.org > > Marc Couture > > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL at eprints.org > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
