A body of rules and statutes that defines conduct prohibited by the government because it threatens and harms public safety and welfare and that establishes punishment to be imposed for the commission of such acts. The term criminal law generally refers to substantive criminal laws. Substantive criminal laws define crimes and may establish punishments. In contrast, Criminal Procedure describes the process through which the criminal laws are enforced. For example, the law prohibiting murder is a substantive criminal law. The manner in which government enforces this substantive law—through the gathering of evidence and prosecution—is generally considered a procedural matter. The top open access journals are peer reviewed scholarly journals of Sociology and Criminology. The top open access journals are freely available on the public internet domain, allowing any end users to read, download, copy, distribute, prink, search or link to the full texts of the articles. These provide high quality, meticulously reviewed and rapid publication, to cater the insistent need of scientific community. These journals are indexed with all their citations noted. The top open access journals are indexed in MEDLINE, PUBMED, SCOPUS, COPERNICUS, CAS, EBSCO and ISI. Impact factor The impact factor of journal provides quantitative assessment tool for grading, evaluating, sorting and comparing journals of similar kind. It reflects the average number of citations to recent articles published in science and social science journals in a particular year or period, and is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. It is first devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information. The impact factor of a journal is evaluated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years.