EPS journal case study:
Journal of Tourism Futures

When we first approached Emerald about a partnership to publish the Journal of Tourism Futures, we couldn’t have asked for a better publisher. The publishing team at Emerald are the true professionals in managing the publication. But what makes the difference is their experience and advice. They have helped us as editors prepare applications for impact assessment, citation index and ranking with the Australian Business Schools Deans Council amongst others. They are just great to work with and nice people as well! (JTF Editors).

To achieve their goal of informing and inspiring their audience about the future of tourism, it was important to choose a publisher with the processes and expertise to handle every step of the journey from submission to publication, followed by dissemination worldwide through an open access model.

All of the core publishing services needed for a scholarly journal were available with Emerald Publishing Services (EPS):

• A bespoke journal submission and peer review system using the ScholarOne Manuscripts platform – set up by Emerald to fit the journal’s requirements
• Typesetting, proof-reading and light copy-editing and electronic production
• Hosting of the journal on www.emerald.com/insight with their own dedicated home page
• All articles of the journal are published and made freely available – using the Open Access CC-BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution license
• Copyright remains with the journal owners
• Emerald provides the journal with journal performance information, via system generated reports
• The journal is given global visibility and accessibility via www.emerald.com/insight – an industry leading research platform with enhanced search and discoverability through enriched metadata and search engine optimisation.

 

Indexing and ranking support

Highlights:

• 2017 CiteScore of 1.72, currently Tracking at 3.25 in 2019
• Average citations per year: 107.25 (Crossref); 203.17 (Google Scholar)
• Average citations per paper: 2.5 (ESCI); 5.25 (Google Scholar)

JTF is abstracted and indexed by:

• Scopus
• European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS)
• Cabells Directories
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Emerging Sources Citation Index (Clarivate Analytics)

JTF is ranked by:

• Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List – C ranking

Under the guidance of Emerald’s Open Access team, JTF has successfully been included in the Cabells Whitelist and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the largest independent database of Open Access Journals, alongside our other EPS journals.

The Emerald team have also successfully applied to leading ranking indexes SCOPUS and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) on the JTF’s behalf just two years after JTF first began publication. These ranking bodies evaluate a journal’s influence based on various metrics, including downloads and citations, so that researchers can select the most relevant publications to read or submit their work to.

The benefits of being listed in CABELLS, DOAJ, SCOPUS and ESCI are:

• Increased traffic to the journal – typically threefold after inclusion in DOAJ – over 95% of the DOAJ Publisher community said that DOAJ is important for increasing their journal’s visibility
• Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) services, particularly SCOPUS and ESCI are often the first port of call for researchers and therefore provide greater visibility and exposure for a journal
• In ESCI and SCOPUS the journal is ranked and compared to other journals in its subject area so researchers can find the most relevant articles
• DOAJ metadata is free and widely available to all the major aggregators (including Scopus and EBSCO) and many research organisations and university library portals.

The EPS team also submitted JTF to the Australian Deans Business Council (ABDC). The ABDC list is used as a guide by business schools around the world to assess the quality of the journals in which faculty members’ research is published. So JTF readers can be assured that they are accessing influential and impactful articles.

 

Rapid publication

• Since joining Emerald in 2015, JTF has benefited from Emerald’s streamlined set-up, in which a bespoke homepage and journal submission system were created in just 12 weeks
• JTF uses Emerald’s Article Level Publishing (ALP) workflow, which enables rapid publication of articles in an average of 20 working days (after acceptance)
• In 2018 and 2019 the timeframe from submission to final decision for JTF was just 60 days, compared to the expected industry timeframe of 180 days
• Publishing with Emerald has helped JTF to attract an international authorship. Accepted articles have come from a diverse range of 20 countries, including Australia, Canada, Barbados and Ethiopia.

 

Global reach and discoverability

• With Emerald, JTF is given global visibility and accessibility via www.emerald.com/insight - an industry leading research platform with enhanced search and discoverability through enriched metadata and search engine optimization
• Content is configured to ensure it is crawled rapidly by Google, with a focus on inclusion in Google Scholar and the journal is indexed in all major discovery services including Primo, Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service and WorldCat
• Like all EPS Journals, JTF is published Open Access under CC BY 4.0 helping to maximise dissemination, which can be seen in the dramatic increase in pageviews, downloads and citations.