JOSS and national journal lists

[danielskatz]

Partly related to JOSS & Web of Science, this is information gathered by @rossmounce while part of a group preparing a paper about JOSS:

Having noted that the Norwegian journal evaluation system officially approves of JOSS, I thought I’d take a look at JOSS’s reputational standing with other national-level journal evaluation systems…
The Finnish have a listing portal called JUFO
The entry for JOSS is here: https://jfp.csc.fi/en/#!PublicationInformationView/id/84408
Unfortunately the Finns at JUFO have given JOSS a 0 every year since 2017.
The level categories of the JUFO classification are:
3 = top
2 = leading
1 = basic
0 = Publication channels that do not meet the level 1 criteria.

JOSS appears not to be listed in the Indian UGC-approved list either, a copy of which is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371618232_List_of_UGC_Approved_Journal_List_2023

JOSS is also not in the 2024 Polish Journal Ranking tables, which are available to download from here:
https://www.gov.pl/web/nauka/komunikat-ministra-nauki-z-dnia-05-stycznia-2024-r-w-sprawie-wykazu-czasopism-naukowych-i-recenzowanych-materialow-z-konferencji-miedzynarodowych

And here's a useful overview of national-level journal lists:
National-Lists-of-Scholarly-Publication-Channels-An-Overview-and-Recommendations-for-Their-Construction-and-Maintenance.pdf

I think we can also infer (from absence) that ANVUR – the Italian research evaluation body, also ignores / does not rate JOSS.
Here’s the list of accepted journals for ‘Area 13’ (Economics and Statistics): https://www.anvur.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Area13_scientifiche_14032024.pdf
Included in this list is rather similar journals like The R Journal and International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes
But absent are both JOSS and(!) SoftwareX .
Any Italian economist is therefore a little disincentivized from choosing JOSS ☹️
The situation is a little complicated in Italy as they only use approved journal lists in “non bibliometric” disciplines. https://www.anvur.it/en/activities/rating-of-scientific-journals/
For e.g. biology, medicine, chemistry instead they use citation analysis leveraging Web of Science and/or Scopus where of course JOSS is also left out because of non-indexing by Web of Science & Scopus 🙃

[MartinBeseda]

@danielskatz @arfon Considering all of this information, I do strongly believe, that we should open "multiple fronts" simultaneously w.r.t. the Clarivate / WoS acceptance. Such approach would allow us to now only to get higher online coverage and credibility faster, but also to obtain feedback from multiple different places at once, being able to improve our applications / JOSS image on the fly.

In other words, considering WoS/Clarivate acceptance is being dealt with (#1283) and Google Scholar indexing is being "fixed" somewhat regularly (#130, #1376) we should probably start contacting also JUFO, ANVUR, PJR, etc. to get their reasoning behind poor JOSS ranking or not-including and try to improve on that. Hopefully, there are one or two main "red flags", that we'll be able to identify in this way.

[frankier]

JUFO has re-ranked JOSS as JUFO 1. I wrote a short blog post about it here https://nordic-rse.org/blog/joss-jufo/

[danielskatz]

@frankier - this is great!! thanks for pushing this through, and then for writing about it

(cc @rossmounce)