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Last Updated on Monday, 28 November 2011 17:05 Thursday, 21 July 2011 14:06

 
CHED and C&E Collaborate to Promote Responsible Research Publication Through PEJ
by Katherine Laparan

In an effort to foster a culture of responsible research publication in the country, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and C&E Publishing, Inc. have set out to work together in disseminating relevant resources to researchers and publishers through the Philippine E-Journals (PEJ) website (www.ejournals.ph).

The collaboration between the two educational institutions was forged to address the following issues related to scholarly journal publication: quality of research outputs, visibility of journals, and access of publishers to pertinent information on academic publishing.

As a first step, CHED will release an advisory to the publishers of journals accredited in their Journal Accreditation System (JAS) and encourage them to join PEJ. C&E, in turn, will encourage their existing contributors to submit their journals for accreditation. “JAS is a mechanism through which a national standard for peer review and journal refereeing system can be implemented uniformly for all research journals published by the Philippine Higher Education Institutions,” according to a 2009 CHED Memorandum. Therefore, JAS-accredited journals have been evaluated by the commission to comply with this national standard.

When these journals become available online, they can serve as examples of good academic publication practice and inspire other publishers to do the same. In addition, being online will give the journals more opportunity of being read and appreciated both locally and abroad.

CHED will make available on the PEJ site memorandums and circulars pertaining to journal publication for easy access of the stakeholders. The commission can take advantage of the large network of PEJ to disseminate such and similar other information on academic publishing among the members of the local research community.

C&E, meanwhile, will provide information for publishers and researchers about the different international indexing and abstracting initiatives, e.g. Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) and Scopus, to educate them on how their journals can qualify for these services. Articles that will guide publishers through the different aspects of journal publication will also be made available on the PEJ web site.

Through their cooperation, CHED and C&E hope for journal publishers and researchers to have a strengthened commitment to producing high quality research outputs and for the rest of the academic community to have an increased interest in research publication itself. The meeting between CHED and C&E was held on June 9 at the CHED Main Office and was attended by top officials of the commission, led by Executive Director Atty. Julito D. Vitriolo, and officers of C&E, spearheaded by Executive Vice President Maximo S. Gomez and PEJ Consultant Dr. Isagani R. Cruz.

*This article also appears in Volume 3 Issue 3 of EdTechie, the official newsletter of the Educational Technology Division of C&E Publishing, Inc.