United Arab Emirates University, University of Wollongong in Australia, and others are finding that their journals’ reach is bigger in every way: more submissions, more readers, a global reach and higher rankings in national excellence frameworks and academic associations. We celebrate the success of these international journals and salute the hard-working IR administrators and journal editors who we are privileged to work with here at Digital Commons!
The University of Wollongong (UOW) is using Digital Commons to showcase its robust journal publishing program with 31 journals in its repository spanning law, science, education, humanities & arts. Global readership is growing in journals such as the Australasian Accounting, Business and Finance Journal (AABFJ), a double blind peer reviewed academic journal that currently has 822,169 downloads and is gaining prominence. AABFJ is now ranked in the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS’s) Academic Journal Guide and has a 6 point rating on list B of the Polish Ministry of Science. AABFJ was also a ranked journal on the 2010 ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) List of the Australian Research Council. After UOW published an archive of the avant garde arts and culture journal Oz Magazine in their IR, the journal was picked up by major news outlets with powerful results:
UOW Library Associate Director for Collections & Scholarly Communications, Rebecca Daly, reported: “It is quite amazing – we had 4,500 downloads in the 9 months prior, and 10,000+ downloads in just 2 weeks.” (Read more here.)
To illustrate the global reach of these journals, Singapore Management University’s IR reveals an impressive 11,328 downloads to date of their single most popular journal paper from the School of Business, “Advice giving: A subtle pathway to power.” The University of Business and Technology in Kosovo’s repository has an apt IR motto highlighting this global reach, “UBT Knowledge Center – Making Local Knowledge Visible,” with two international journals already in their roster, International Journal of Business and Technology and UBT International Conference.
United Arab Emirates University’s repository, Scholarworks@UAEU, publishes in Arabic and English to reflect the university’s status as a world-class research institution with readers across the globe. The International Journal for Research in Education (IJRE) is a great example of UAEU displaying what makes them unique, as much of their metadata is in Arabic and English to better serve the international research community. A popular paper, “The Effectiveness of Implementation Flipped Classroom Strategy on Academic Achievement to Learn Programming in a Computer Subject,” shows the effective bilingual presentation of the article’s title, authors, and abstract in both Arabic and English. In addition to higher numbers of readers in a broader range of countries, IJRE reports expanding the content of its articles “to allow for the dissemination, discussion and debate of contemporary quality educational research from the Arab region and beyond.”
