The University of Szeged is committed to providing not only infrastructural opportunities but also financial support for its researchers to enable them to publish their scientific results as Open Access with the world’s leading international publishers.
To achieve this goal, the university has signed Read and Publish agreements with several major publishers. These agreements allow researchers to receive funding for a greater number of journals, while the university can process payments more smoothly, without the need for handling invoices.
From a dedicated fund, the University can also provide Open Access funding for publishing in journals not covered by agreements, provided that the quality and authorship criteria are met.
Previously, the eligibility of the target journal was evaluated based on its ranking in two major international journal rankings (Scimago Journal Rank and Journal Citation Reports). The primary reason for this approach was that different university rankings use different data sources to evaluate academic performance, therefore allowed the university to ensure that it met the criteria of as many rankings as possible.
As these the two journal rankings use slightly different data, the sets of journals they include differ, and the metrics are not entirely uniform; in some disciplines, the same journal can sometimes be ranked in completely different quartiles in the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) and Journal Citation Reports (JCR). An additional difficulty is that, although a journal has been ranked appropriately in SJR, it has not yet been included in JCR.
This has often made it difficult for researchers at the university – especially in the field of humanities and social sciences – to find journals that meet the criteria for institutional Open Access funding.
In order to ensure that more researchers can benefit from the advantages of Open Access publishing and thus contribute to the university’s Open Access scientific output, the university’s lead management has decided to phase out the use of Journal Citation Reports ranking in grant evaluations from February 2025. From then on, journals will only need to meet the minimum quartile requirements in the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR).
We hope that this change will make Open Access publishing more widely available to our researchers, thus alleviating the pressure to publish Open Access, and will allow our researchers to dedicate the resources freed up by this change fully to their profession.
To better understand the impact of these changes and the needs related to other publishing support services, we will request your participation in a survey we plan to conduct this spring. Feedback collected will help us to further improve our services.
Date: February 4, 2025
