| ERIH PLUS | |
| Producer: | Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills |
| Country: | Norway |
| History: | 2014 - present |
| Disciplines: | Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Depth: | Bibliographic information |
| Formats: | Academic journals |
| Geospatial: | Europe |
ERIH PLUS (originally called the European Reference Index for the Humanities or ERIH) is an index containing bibliographic information on academic journals in the humanities and social sciences (SSH).[1] The index includes all journals that meet the following requirements: "explicit procedures for external peer review; an academic editorial board, with members affiliated with universities or other independent research organizations; a valid ISSN code, confirmed by the international ISSN register; abstracts in English and/or another international language relevant for the field for all published articles; information on author affiliations and addresses; a maximum two thirds of the authors published in the journal from the same institution".[2] ERIH has not been intended for evaluation purposes.[3]
ERIH was originally established by the European Science Foundation and was transferred to the NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data in 2014, mainly because it already operated the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers.[4] At the same time, it was extended to also include social science disciplines and renamed ERIH PLUS.[5] [6] The aim of ERIH PLUS is to increase the visibility and availability of SSH. The index goes beyond the commercial indexing services by providing a comprehensive coverage of the scholarly communication and publishing in the fields, enabling researchers to better disseminate their work in national and international languages.[7] As of July 1, 2021, the ownership was transferred to the fresh Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills.
ERIH PLUS has been criticized for "the ease of having the journal included [in it] – semi-automatically, upon a set of criteria which are mostly formal, without taking quality into consideration".