B!SON - an open tool to help researchers find suitable Open Access journals for their work

Abstract

The poster presents key facts on B!SON, an open recommendation service for Open Access journals.

There is a whole range of web-based services designed to help researchers find a suitable journal for their findings. Few of them, however, are inherently oriented towards the needs and interests of the research community: they are often provided by commercial actors, only include journals of one single (major) publisher, the procedures for the recommendations are not transparent, the source code is not publicly available, their sustainability is unclear or they are merely aggregated journal lists with advanced filter functions. B!SON has set out to do things differently: It is a tool developed and provided by two major German academic libraries - TIB (Technische Informationsbibliothek) and SLUB (Saxonian State and University Library Dresden). It includes only genuine Open Access journals, uses only community-based, open data sources from DOAJ and OpenCitations, discloses its recommendation algorithm based on semantic and bibliometric methods, handles user data sensitively and has been designed with sustainability in mind. B!SON's simple user interface with input fields for a manuscript's title, abstract and references provides users with a list of DOAJ-listed journals in which similar research has been published. A similarity score is provided for each journal listed, along with the underlying articles where similarity was found, to make the recommendation verifiable.