606 non-profit, learned society, or university-associated journals relevant to the field of ecology and evolutionary biology

adapted from : https://quantixed.org/tag/lag-times/
DAFNEE Usage Index calculator :
Author's articles in academia-friendly journals / Author's total articles in surveyed journals



Motivations

The scientific publishing market is widely known to be dysfunctional [1]. The average publishing price is an order of magnitude above the real cost [2,3]. This anomaly essentially results from the 'publish or perish' pressure placed on individual scientists, and the power of large publishing groups with high profit margins [4]. Yet not all scientific journals are economically equivalent. Some are run by non-profit organizations. Some are associated with learned societies, so the publication fees are partly reinvested in academia. Some are supported at moderate cost by scholarly institutions. Scientists are not always well informed about the complexity of journal business models, and rarely take this criterion into account when deciding to interact with a journal as an author, reviewer or editor. Supporting academia-friendly journals, though, is a way to contribute to a fairer scientific publishing system [5, 6].

Content

The DAFNEE database offers a list of 606 non-profit, learned society, museum or university-associated journals relevant to ecology and evolutionary biology. The database includes generalist journals (e.g. eLife, PLoS Biol, PNAS, Science), flagship society journals (e.g. Am Nat, Heredity, JEB, Proc B, MBE, Syst Biol), Open Science initiatives (e.g. Peer Communiy In, MorphoMuseuM), and many high-quality journals specialized in palaeo-archaeobiology, systematics, genetics, theoretical biology, organismal biology, environmental and health sciences. Journals can be queried/sorted by topic, business model, academic partnership, publication fees, and Scimago Rank.

Attributes

  1. Journal [Journal name]
  2. Field [an arbitrary thematic classification of journals intended to ease DAFNEE browsing]
  3. Publisher Business model [subscription, reader pays; OA: Open Access, author pays; diamond_OA: free Open Access, neither reader nor author pays; hybrid: author choses OA or not]
  4. Institution [non profit/governmental/university/society (co-)owning/associated with the journal]
  5. Institution type [Society: learned society; Uni/Gov: university or governmental research institution; Museum: museum/botanical garden; Non-profit: not-for-profit organisation]
  6. Web site [journal Web site]
  7. APC [Article Processing Charges; what authors have to pay for Open Access; there might be publication charges in the non-OA model (not provided); APC are in euros]
  8. Scimago Rank (SJR): a measure of journal impact accounting for self-citation and cartel-like behaviour
  9. PCI partnership [relationship with the Peer Community In initiative]

DAFNEE usage Index

An interactive tool gives scientists an opportunity to evaluate and compare his/her DAFNEE usage index. This is defined as the ratio of the author's PubMed articles in academia-friendly journals to PubMed articles in journals surveyed by DAFNEE.

Curation

The content of the database is updated every 12 months via the inspection of journal websites by a group of curators. Curators primarily survey the journals in which scientists affiliated with the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier publish. To be included in DAFNEE, a journal must:

  • have an accessible web site with up-to-date information
  • have an editorial committee and publish peer-reviewed articles
  • have an international scope
  • be relevant to the field of ecology and evolutionary biology
  • be (co-)owned by, or supported by, or partner with, an academic institution or a non-for-profit organization; the partnership must be explicit both on journal and academic institution/non-for-profit organization web site.
Curators Pierre-Olivier Antoine, Christophe Boëte, Frédéric Delsuc, Nicolas Galtier, Elise Huchard, Sonia Kéfi, Sebastien Puechmaille, Céline Scornavacca, Carole Smadja
Support Developer: Khalid Belkhir
Biblio : Christine Bibal, Laure Paradis
Contact isem-dafnee@umontpellier.fr
References [1] Rose-Wiles L M. 2011. The High Cost of Science Journals: A Case Study and Discussion. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship 23:219-241.
[2] Alizon S. 2018. Inexpensive Research in the Golden Open-Access Era. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 33:301-303.
[3] Grossmann A, Brembs B. 2021. Current market rates for scholarly publishing services. F1000Research 10:20.
[4] Walter P, Mullins D. 2019. From symbiont to parasite: the evolution of for-profit science publishing. Mol Biol Cell 30:2537-2542.
[5] Racimo F, Galtier N, de Herde V, Bonn N, Philips B, Guillemaud T, Bourguet D. 2022. Ethical publishing: how do we get there? Philosophy Theory and Practice in Biology 14:15.
[6] Receveur A. et al. 2024. David versus Goliath: Early career researchers in an unethical publishing system. Ecology letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14395

1152 eco-evo journals that were considered for possible inclusion in DAFNEE Download all surveyed journals