Philippine journals

In 2007 I attended the First International Public Knowledge Project Conference held in Vancouver, Canada, where I met the heads of the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). I asked them to come to Manila to train journal editors in the use of a journal management software called Open Journal Systems. In response to the British experts spending time and money coming to Manila, the editors of some of our scholarly journals agreed to have their issues posted online in Philippines Journals Online (PhilJOL).

Unfortunately, INASP was able only to provide seed money for the initial hosting of the site. Its rules did not allow it to host a country’s journals indefinitely. In 2009 I visited INASP in their Oxford headquarters and agreed to find a Philippine host for the website. In 2010 the management of PhilJOL was turned over to Asia Pacific College and to the Philippine INASP representative, Lourdes T. David, the director of Ateneo’s Rizal Library.

Because PhilJOL used to be based in Oxford, its standards are understandably high, and until today, only 43 journals have qualified to be on it. Without admitting that other Philippine journals are of lesser quality, I realized that 43 journals do not adequately represent the kind of scholarly activity that is currently going on in our more than 2,000 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), each of which is supposed to have at least one journal.

I found a sympathetic publisher in C&E Publishing, which saw the need for a website that would feature a lot more Philippine journals. Using its extensive Philippine network, C&E Publishing was able to invite other editors to post their journals in Philippine E-Journals (PEJ).

Modesty aside, my having helped put up the two websites resulted in some of our journals being recognized by the two international arbiters of academic merit, Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge (commonly referred to as ISI, which was its former name) and Elsevier’s SciVerse Scopus.

Among the journals that have benefitted from the exposure provided by the two sites are Ateneo’s Kritika Kultura (ISI), De La Salle’s DLSU Business and Economics Review (Scopus), and De La Salle’s Asia-Pacific Social Science Review (Scopus).

Particularly dramatic is the rise of De La Salle’s The Asia Pacific Educational Researcher (edited for a long time by Allan Bernardo) as a world-class journal. Because it was highly regarded by both ISI and Scopus, it attracted the attention of Springer, which negotiated with me (I was then the journal’s publisher) to acquire it. It has become the first and only Philippine academic journal published by a leading international publisher.

Why is going online crucial to the success of an academic journal?

First of all, having only print copies of a journal clearly limits its readership. Usually, only administrators, teachers, and students of a university get copies of the university’s journal. Research results reported in the journal would never have an impact on the world.

Second, a university’s world ranking is highly dependent on the number of foreign scholars that cite findings in articles written by the university’s faculty. These foreign scholars would never cite an article that they have not read, and they would not be able to read articles that are only in print circulation in the Philippines. Having a journal online in an internationally-recognized website greatly increases the chances of having scholars cite its articles and thus having Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds rank a university.

Third, going online is much cheaper than having a journal printed. In fact, there is no cost in going online, because neither PhilJOL nor PEJ charge anything for their services. Articles in journals nowadays are always encoded in Portable Document Format (PDF) anyway, and the two sites accept PDFs through email.

Fourth (although this sounds too mundane for universities), going online earns royalties for a university. PhilJOL does not charge readers and therefore does not pay anything to its contributors, because it believes in Open Access (knowledge is for everyone and should not cost anything), but PEJ believes in the right of creators to the fruits of their intellectual property (readers should pay for knowledge which scholars spent time, money, and energy researching).

At the end of 2012, PEJ had 85 journals from 37 institutions. Some of the institutions want to follow the practice of PhilJOL; as a result, 30 of the journals are open access. The rest of the journals charge readers who want to download articles. Highest royalty earners so far are Arellano, Davao Doctors, Jose Rizal, De La Salle, Liceo de Cagayan, Miriam, St. Paul Manila, and Trinity.

In the year 2012 alone, PEJ had 598,587 page views and 59,625 full-text downloads, with an average of 217 full-text downloads every day.

Readers from 131 countries make full use of PEJ. Most readers come from the Philippines, but hundreds of readers come from the USA, India, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Turkey, Singapore, Australia, and other countries.

Similarly, in the latest report of PhilJOL that I got, there were 262,608 page views in just half a year.

Some Philippine universities have their own websites, where they feature their own journals, but their viewership is negligible compared to those of PhilJOL and PEJ.

Our journals are now being read and cited abroad, thanks to the Internet.