Editorial

Editorial

  • Eray Çaliskan

Turk J Obstet Gynecol 2016;13(3):-

Dear Colleagues, Scholarly publishing is an area of great competition. On one side there are the classical journals that publish scientific papers for decades and are supported by renowned publishing companies. Academicians and their supporters pay all the costs of a research and gain no money from the copyright of their paper. On the contrary journal owners and publishing companies own the copyright of the manuscripts only in the expense of publishing costs. Companies and journal owners sell the manuscripts at high cost, earn money from subscriptions, advertisements and pay nothing for the time of editors, reviewers who are expected to spend their time for scientific acceptance and idealism. As the number of new journals and published manuscripts increases renowned journals are cited more than the others and get high impact factors. As the impact factor increases more scientists sent their manuscripts for evaluation to these journals which enables them to select best research which will even accelerates their impact factor. This is a vicious circle that prevents new journals to compete with renowned journals for copyrighted citation indexes. This is such a high profit sector that publishing companies are launching new journals every day. This situation while increasing the profit of the publishing companies decreases the income of the scientific societies whose primary function should be promoting scientific productivity independently. The present situation is leading to a monopoly of big publishing companies. Among the new journals an alternative way of appearing in the front rows is open journal publishing strategy. Professional publishing companies provides a venue of independent publishing for the researchers and takes the publishing cost with unreasonably high profits from the researchers. The bill differs from 500 to 2000 dollars for a seven page manuscript and even e-journals take the same amount of money despite the lack of hard copy printing costs. Some may argue that this provides an independent scholarly publishing but the conflict of interest arises from the fact that the more manuscripts open journals publish the more profit they get so there is the possibility of quick and a non-rigorous scientific evaluation process. Not all the open journals are the same of course. Like our journal some open journals are fully sponsored by scientific societies. The idealism dominates in every step. Researchers pay no money for publishing, evaluation and language editing. The editors and reviewers donate their time and knowledge free of charge. The manuscripts appearing in the journal can be freely down loaded and distributed which enables the scientists, students and all target readers to reach up to date knowledge easily and freely. We hope that these efforts will find a platform of real independent knowledge sharing and awarded by higher citation numbers. Hope to see your support in the new issues. Best wishes,