JOURNAL COMMENT

Journal Accreditation and Standards

Here is some useful information to get 2019 and our Journal off to a good start. The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) published Research Output Policy (2015) in the Government Gazette (vol. 597 of 11 March 2015, no. 38552), to be implemented from 1 January 2016, which was a revised version of the Policy and Procedures for Measurement of Research Output of Public Higher Education Institutions of 2003.

Go to www.dhet.gov.za/ and enter research output policy in the search box to view the details. In response to some recent concerns that the Journal of the SAIMM was not accredited by the DHET and therefore that papers that were published in the JSAIMM were not eligible for DHET subsidization, we have been advised by the DHET that as long as our Journal appears in Scopus, WoS, and SciELO SA, academia in South Africa can submit claims for subsidization to the DHET for articles published in the Journal. This was confirmed at a very useful meeting between Alastair Macfarlane, Sam Moolla, myself, and Nolusindiso (Sindi) Kayi, Director: Research Support and Policy Development of the DHET at the offices of the DHET in Pretoria in December.

Universities are aware that if a journal appears in any of the DHET-accredited lists (WoS, Scopus, IBSS, SciELO SA, and the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals (Level 2 only), then they can submit claims for papers that are published in that journal.

The SAIMM Journal is listed in:

Web of Science: http://mjl.clarivate.com/

Scopus: https://www.journalsindexed.com/2018/07/scopus-indexed-journals-list.html

SciELO South Africa: https://assaf.org.za/index

On 28 November 2018, along with Kelly Matthee our Journal Coordinator, I attended the SciELO SA user group meeting which was hosted by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA is South Africa's premier open-access (free to access and free to publish) searchable full-text journal database in the service of the South African research community. The database covers a selected collection of high-quality peer-reviewed South African scholarly journals and forms an integral part of the SciELO Brazil project.

The Journal of the SAIMM is one of the selected peer-reviewed scholarly journals on the SciELO database. Our Journal was accepted into the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) early in 2018 and there are certain standards and conditions that we are required to satisfy in order to maintain our accreditation with ASSAf and SciELO SA. This accreditation ensures that papers that are published in our Journal are recognized by the DHET and are eligible for subsidization, a feature that is very important to academia in Southern Africa.

Two new features will become mandatory for our Journal in the New Year.

>- ORCiDs will need to be included in the PDFs of articles that are submitted to the journal.

- ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identification) is an open, not-for-profit organization with the aim of supplying a persistent and unique identifier - an ORCID - to any individual who is involved in research, scholarship, and innovation activities.

- The National Research Foundation (NRF) in South Africa requires that all researchers and students applying for funding and rating at the NRF have an ORCID. This will help researchers to uniquely identify themselves as the author of their work across all systems integrated with the ORCID registry (https://orcid.org/)

>- Author contributions: At the end of each article the contribution of each author and collaborator needs to be stated. Authorship must conform to the notions of responsibility and credit; thus special attention must be given to the first 'lead ' author (sometimes explicitly shared), and the inclusion in the authorship listing only of persons who have made a significant contribution to the production of the work at an intellectual, practical, or conceptual level. Examples of criteria to consider are:

- Who carried out the study

- Who wrote the manuscript

- Who supervised the study

- Who proofread the manuscript.

There are a number of compliance matters that we are required to attend to in the short, medium, and long term. In this endeavour we will be guided by the team at ASSAf and it is quite likely that we will have to modify the layout of the Journal.

D. Tudor