Universal Science Citation Index (USCI), with the vision of developing a reputable universal science citation index, aims to achieve maximum dissemination of the refereed scientific research articles on the internet, digital and mobile media. The USCI aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly papers thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The USCI aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly papers that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, webwide. OA to refereed journal articles can be provided in two ways: by publishing in an OA journal that provides OA (OA publishing, "Gold" OA) or by publishing in a non-OA journals and self-archiving the article ("Green" OA).  There are two roads to OA:

(1) the "golden road" of OA journal-publishing , where journals provide OA to their articles (either by charging the author-institution for refereeing/publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online edition free for all.

(2) the "green road" of OA self-archiving, where authors provide OA to their own published articles, by making their own eprints free for all.

The two roads to OA should not be confused or conflated; they are complementary. OA self-archiving is not self-publishing; nor is it about online publishing without quality control (peer review); nor is it intended for writings for which the author wishes to be paid, such as books or magazine/newspaper articles. OA self-archiving is for peer-reviewed research, written solely for research impact rather than royalty revenue.

Definition of Open Access Publication

An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
(1) The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

(2) A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.

Who benefits from Open Access?

Society as a whole benefits from an expanded and accelerated research cycle in which research can advance more effectively because researchers have immediate access to all the findings they need. The visibility, usage and impact of researchers' own findings increases with OA, as does their power to find, access and use the findings of others. Universities co-benefit from their researchers' increased impact, which also increases the return on the investment of the funders of the research, such as governments, charitable foundations, and the tax-paying public. For teachers, Open Access means no restrictions on providing articles for teaching purposes. Only the URL need be provided; Open Access takes care of the rest. Publishers likewise also benefit from the wider dissemination, greater visibility and higher journal citation impact factor of their articles.

Putting Open Access into Practice

Researchers, their institutions and their funders need to be informed of the benefits of providing Open Access and instructed on how quickly and simply it is done. Institutional Open Access Repositories need to be created, most important, an OA self-archiving policy for systematically filling these repositories with their target content needs to be adopted and implemented. An Institutional Repository is the best way to provide OA to research output

Open Access Journals (OAJ)

Open Access (OA) journals perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. OA journals use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Their expenses consist of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. OA journals aim to achieve maximum dissemination of the articles they publish so that as many scientists and scholars as possible can have access to them. By making electronically-published research results available free of charge, their visibility and accessibility is increased. This leads to higher citation rates which, in turn, increases the respective journal's impact factor and, thus, its reputation. Contributions in OA journals are original publications. Before publication they go through a peer-review process. In addition to toll-free access for users, a further advantage of OA journals is the fact that the publication process is usually more cost- effective. Essentially, the quality of scientific and scholarly articles depends on whether their scientific content is relevant and well-founded. Two evaluation strategies which are implemented at different stages in the publication process are peer review and the determination of the impact of a publication by means of citation analysis.

Peer Review Process (PRR)

Before an article is published in a journal it usually goes through a review process during which the scientific or scholarly manuscript is evaluated (as a rule by other scientists or scholars) in terms of its significance and publication-worthiness. This process is known as peer review. In double-blind peer reviews neither the author nor the reviewer knows the other's identity. Like their conventional counterparts, many OA journals use peer review as a means of controlling the quality of the articles they publish. However, the traditional peer-review process is subject to a lot of criticism. For example, the slowness of the process is criticized as is subjectivity and bias on the part of the reviewers. In response to this criticism, new (supplementary) review procedures are being developed.

OA enables immediate full-text access to scientific and scholarly information which means that the relevance and scientific quality of contributions can be publicly discussed by the scientific community (open peer commentary, collaborative peer review). The interactive two-stage publication process in  OA journals is supported by an international network of editors. In the first review stage, the manuscript is evaluated by a topical editor to ensure its basic scientific and technical quality (access peer review). The editor may ask independent referees of his choice for their support. He may suggest technical corrections which the author may perform before the manuscript is published as a discussion paper on the website of the scientific discussion forum. The paper is opened for interactive public discussion. During an 8-week period, referee comments (anonymous, if desired) and attributed comments by members of the scientific community are published alongside the discussion paper. At the end of the open discussion the authors are given the opportunity to respond with final comments. In the second stage, the manuscript is revised by the author and submitted for publication in the Journal. It is then either accepted or rejected immediately or reviewed again. In other words, manuscripts can sometimes go through several revision stages before publication as a final revised paper. The discussion paper and comments from the first stage are permanently archived in the online discussion forum, irrespective of whether a manuscript is published.

Publicly reviewed manuscripts are available to the scientific community for use and evaluation at an early stage so that inaccurate or dishonest results can be detected faster. Furthermore, this procedure should tend to prompt authors to take greater care when producing and submitting their manuscripts. This will make the editor's job easier and may lead to a reduction in the journal's rejection rate.

Journal Impact Factor (IF) and Science Citation Index (SCI)

The Journal Impact Factor (IF), a quantitative tool for ranking and comparing journals, is used as a measure of the reputation of a scholarly journal. It indicates how often the articles published by a particular journal are quoted in other periodicals. The quality of a scientific or scholarly article is often assessed on the basis of the IF. This can affect the author's career prospects, especially with regard to recruitment and review procedures. What is often forgotten is the fact that, even in a journal with a high impact factor, the quality of articles can vary considerably.

The Science Citation Index (SCI) – in the social sciences the Social Science Citation Index (SCCI) and in the arts and humanities the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) – are multidisciplinary data bases which provide access to cited references in scientific and scholarly journals. They form the basis for the calculation of the impact factor. The IF is the average citation rate of the articles published by a particular journal and it is calculated once a year. The calculation is done by dividing the number of current year citations of articles published during the previous two years by the number of citable articles published in that period. Since the reference period is two years, an impact factor is issued in the third year of publication at the earliest. This can prove a problem – especially for many OA journals – because most of them have been launched only quite recently.

The criticism of the IF as a measure of scientific quality is directed at this method of calculation and the parameters used. The lower the number of articles published by a journal, the higher the impact factor. Moreover, the journals covered are mostly English-language journals and journals which have been on the market for at least three years. According to recent data, less than a quarter of the peer-reviewed journals worldwide are covered by SCI.

Despite the criticism leveled at the IF as a measure of the quality of scientific and scholarly journals, a study by ISI found many references in the Internet to lists of OA journals with an impact factor. However, there are also alternative yardsticks for visibility. In addition to citation-based indicators of the reputation of a journal, the increased visibility of OA-published scientific and scholarly texts can be deduced from the number of downloads, although this measure should also be interpreted with caution. A further indication of the visibility of texts published in OA journals is the increased number of invitations to participate in conferences or book projects reported by authors after the appearance of OA publications.