Our NIDL team has a strong commitment to Open Educational Practices (OEP), which extends to quite tangible support for Open Scholarship. Not only do colleagues intentionally publish their work in open access publications, such as this recent article by Eamon Costello, Tiziana Soverono and Prajakta Girme presenting ‘A Postdigital Fable‘, but they also play lead editorial roles in several journals.
In particular, the NIDL has a strategic investment as a formal Editorial Partner in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (ETHE), which is published by Springer. As an Editorial Partner our support helps to ensure that ETHE remains freely available to educators and researchers.
Therefore, we are delighted to report that the ETHE has consolidated its status as the leading open access publication in the field, as borne out by altmetrics, leading indexes and its social impact. The traditional impact indexes have shown how, for the second year running, ETHE has climbed further up the rankings of academic publications in the field of Education.
In just one year, ETHE has moved from 27th position to 18th (out of a total of 264 journals) in the Journal Citations Reports (JCR) Core Collection for education.
It has also significantly boosted its journal impact factor (JIF), increasing from 3.080 in 2019 to 4.944 in 2020 (first quartile, Q1).
In Scopus, another leading database of international scientific publications, ETHE has moved up from 41st to 11th place (out of a total of 1,531), obtained a CiteScore of 9.2 for 2020 (in 2019 it was 5.6) and entered Q1 of the education and computer science categories.
Beyond these traditional measures, another indicator is how the education community perceives the value and quality of the Journal, and we can report that in 2020 ETHE received almost 1,300 articles, 62% more than in the previous year.
This year the total submissions to September stands at 950, reports Josep M. Duart, Co-Editor-in-Chief from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).
Altmetrics are another set of indicators that measure and analyse social interaction through the number of times an article is downloaded, its presence in bibliographic managers such as Mendeley, its mentions on social media such as Twitter and Facebook, its appearances in newspapers and blogs, etc. They measure the impact of research by quantifying its presence on the social web. There is clear evidence of how ETHE is also showing growth and achieving high impact levels in altmetrics. For example, in 2020, the journal obtained 2,493 altmetric mentions on social media and its articles were downloaded 1,093,680 times.
The Journal has a truly international outreach. In 2020, for example, 186 authors from 34 different countries published their work in ETHE.
A key element to ensure the variety, quality and internationalisation of the Journal’s subject matter is its team of more than 500 peer reviewers. The editorial team and advisory board is also made up of researchers and scholars from all of the world’s continents and regions. The Editorial Board is currently made up of 53 researchers from 27 countries, and balanced in terms of gender too.
The Journal’s team of Co-Editors-in-Chief is made up of Mairéad Nic Giolla Mhichíl, from the NIDL, Álvaro Galvis, from Colombia’s University of the Andes, Airina Volungevičienė, from Lithuania’s Vytautas Magnus University, and Josep M. Duart, from the UOC. Under the team’s leadership, ETHE publishes regular thematic issues with a timely collection in 2019 for example on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on higher education. Professor Nic Giolla Mhichíl is currently leading a forthcoming special issue on the burgeoning topic of micro-credentials with guest co-editors Mark Brown and Beverley Oliver.
You can read more about the history of ETHE beginning in 2004 on the Journal’s website.
Digital Learning Dispatches 