Étiquette : scholarly journals

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Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

Author : Martin Paul Eve

Introduction

Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the digital object identifier (DOI) system. We do not currently know, at scale, the extent to which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved.

Methods

We construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample.

Results

Of the 7,438,037 works examined, there were 5.9 million copies spread over the archives used in this work. Furthermore, a total of 4,342,368 of the works that we studied (58.38%) were present in at least one archive. However, this left 2,056,492 works in our sample (27.64%) that are seemingly unpreserved.

The remaining 13.98% of works in the sample were excluded either for being too recent (published in the current year), not being journal articles, or having insufficient date metadata for us to identify the source.

Discussion

Our study is limited by design in several ways. Among these are the facts that it uses only a subset of archives, it only tracks articles with DOIs, and it does not account for institutional repository coverage. Nonetheless, as an initial attempt to gauge the landscape, our results will still be of interest to libraries, publishers, and researchers.

Conclusion

This work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied. (Note that when, in this article, we write “preserved,” we mean “that we were able to confirm as preserved,” as per the specified limitations of this study.) A slightly larger proportion, i.e., 8.5% (n = 1,797), preserved over 50% of their content in two or more archives.

However, many members, i.e., 57.7% (n = 12,257), only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n = 6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, which is against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

URL : Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288

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New academic journals: an international overview of indexing and access models

Authors : Rosangela Rodrigues, Cristóbal Urbano, Patrícia Neubert, José Miguel Rodríguez-Gairín, Marta Somoza-Fernández

Introduction

An international analysis of academic journals newly created in the period from 2011 to 2020 according to type of publisher, place of publication, their relationship with open access, and their indexing in databases.

Studies of the issues of concentration of journal publisher ownership, uses of metrics, and access to titles reveal a changing landscape that is nevertheless still dominated by large commercial oligopolies. One notable trend is the creation of new titles in various configurations.

Method

To assess the global scenario, we analyse titles created from 2011 to 2020, focusing on indexing and access models. The methodology is multidimensional, predominantly bibliometric and quantitative. The data were collected from Crossref and other databases and processed with the resources of the Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals.

Results

The findings confirm the expansion of the periodical publishing market, of which the academic journal market represents a small fraction (7.29%). Of thdatabases may be considered academic based on indexing in some database, most are open access, indicated by their presence in the Directory of Open Access Journals (55.21%).

The analysis of publisher type confirmed the predominance of commercial publishers (44.57%), followed by universities (30.08%). The largest proportion of the titles are in the health field, compatible with the existing distribution of fields, followed by journals in the multidisciplinary and education fields.

Conclusion

In the expansion of the publishing market, academic journals represent a small fraction of the total. The main sources of new titles in open access with no processing charges for authors are universities in countries that are not home to large commercial publishers (Indonesia, Brazil, and Spain), all with government subsidies.

URL : New academic journals: an international overview of indexing and access models

Original URL : https://informationr.net/infres/article/view/466

DOI : https://doi.org/10.47989/ir284466

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Judging Journals: How Impact Factor and Other Metrics Differ across Disciplines

Authors : Quinn Galbraith, Alexandra Carlile Butterfield, Chase Cardon

Given academia’s frequent use of publication metrics and the inconsistencies in metrics across disciplines, this study examines how various disciplines are treated differently by metric systems. We seek to offer academic librarians, university rank and tenure committees, and other interested individuals guidelines for distinguishing general differences between journal bibliometrics in various disciplines.

This study addresses the following questions: How well represented are different disciplines in the indexing of each metrics system (Eigenfactor, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar)? How does each metrics system treat disciplines differently, and how do these differences compare across metrics systems?

For university libraries and academic librarians, this study may increase understanding of the comparative value of various metrics, which hopefully will facilitate more informed decisions regarding the purchase of journal subscriptions and the evaluation of journals and metrics systems.

This study indicates that different metrics systems prioritize different disciplines, and metrics are not always easily compared across disciplines. Consequently, this study indicates that simple reliance on metrics in publishing or purchasing decisions is often flawed.

URL : Judging Journals: How Impact Factor and Other Metrics Differ across Disciplines

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.6.888

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Roles and Responsibilities for Peer Reviewers of International Journals

Author : Carol Nash

There is a noticeable paucity of recently published research on the roles and responsibilities of peer reviewers for international journals. Concurrently, the pool of these peer reviewers is decreasing. Using a narrative research method developed by the author, this study questioned these roles and responsibilities through the author’s assessment in reviewing for five publishing houses July–December 2022, in comparison with two recent studies regarding peer review, and the guidelines of the five publishing houses.

What should be most important in peer review is found discrepant among the author, those judging peer review in these publications, and the five publishing houses. Furthermore, efforts to increase the pool of peer reviewers are identified as ineffective because they focus on the reviewer qua reviewer, rather than on their primary role as researchers.

To improve consistency, authors have regularly called for peer review training. Yet, this advice neglects to recognize the efforts of journals in making their particular requirements for peer review clear, comprehensive and readily accessible.

Consequently, rather than peer reviewers being trained and rewarded as peer reviewers, journals are advised to make peer review a requirement for research publication, and their guidelines necessary reading and advice to follow for peer reviewers.

URL : Roles and Responsibilities for Peer Reviewers of International Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11020032

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How do journals deal with problematic articles. Editorial response of journals to articles commented in PubPeer

Authors : José-Luis Ortega, Lorena Delgado-Quirós

The aim of this article is to explore the editorial response of journals to research articles that may contain methodological errors or misconduct. A total of 17,244 articles commented on in PubPeer, a post-publication peer review site, were processed and classified according to several error and fraud categories.

Then, the editorial response (i.e., editorial notices) to these papers were retrieved from PubPeer, Retraction Watch, and PubMed to obtain the most comprehensive picture. The results show that only 21.5% of the articles that deserve an editorial notice (i.e., honest errors, methodological flaws, publishing fraud, manipulation) were corrected by the journal. This percentage would climb to 34% for 2019 publications.

This response is different between journals, but cross-sectional across all disciplines. Another interesting result is that high-impact journals suffer more from image manipulations, while plagiarism is more frequent in low-impact journals.

The study concludes with the observation that the journals have to improve their response to problematic articles.

URL : How do journals deal with problematic articles. Editorial response of journals to articles commented in PubPeer

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2023.ene.18

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The Issues with Journal Issues: Let Journals Be Digital Libraries

Author : C. Sean Burns

Science depends on a communication system, and today, that is largely provided by digital technologies such as the internet and web. Despite the fact that digital technologies provide the infrastructure for this communication system, peer-reviewed journals continue to mimic workflows and processes from the print era.

This paper focuses on one artifact from the print era, the journal issue, and describes how this artifact has been detrimental to the communication of science, and therefore, to science itself.

To replace the journal issue, this paper argues that scholarly publishing and journals could more fully embrace digital technologies by creating digital libraries to present and organize scholarly output.

URL : The Issues with Journal Issues: Let Journals Be Digital Libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11010007

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Do open-access dermatology articles have higher citation counts than those with subscription-based access?

Authors : Fangyi Xie, Sherief Ghozy, David F. Kallmes, Julia S. Lehman

Background

Open-access (OA) publishing is increasingly prevalent in dermatology, and many journals now offer hybrid options, including conventional (subscription-based access [SA]) publishing or OA (with an author publishing charge) in a subscription journal. OA publishing has been noted in many disciplines, but this has been rarely studied in dermatology.

Methods

Using the Clarivate Journal Citation Report, we compiled a list of English-language dermatology hybrid OA journals containing more than 5% OA articles. We sampled any OA review or original research article in 4 issues from 2018 to 2019 and matched an equal number of SA articles. Citation count, citation count excluding self-citations and view counts found using Scopus and Altmetrics score were recorded for each article. Statistical analyses were performed using logistic and negative binomial models using R software.

Results

Twenty-seven hybrid dermatology journals were found, and 538 articles were sampled (269 OA, 269 SA). For both original research and review articles, OA articles had significantly higher mean citation counts (mean 13.2, standard deviation [SD] 17.0) compared to SA articles (mean 7.9, SD 8.8) (odds ratio [OR] 1.04; 95% CI 1.02–1.05; P < .001) including when adjusted for time from publication.

Original research OA articles had significantly higher citation counts than original research SA articles (excluding self-citations; OR, 1.03; 95% CI, 1.01–1.05; P = .003), and review articles also had OA citation advantage than review SA articles (OR, 1.06; 95% CI, 1.02–1.11; P = .008). There was, however, no significant difference in citation counts between review articles and original research articles (OR, 1.00; 95% CI, 0.19–5.31; P = 1.000).

There was no significant difference seen in view counts (OA: mean±SD 17.7±10.8; SA: mean±SD 17.1±12.4) and Altmetric score (OA: mean±SD 13.2±47.8; SA: mean±SD 6.3±25.0) between OA and SA articles. Potential confounders included the fact that more OA articles were published in Europe than in Asia, and pharmaceutical-funded articles were more likely to be published OA.

Conclusions

We noted a higher citation count for OA articles than SA articles in dermatology hybrid journals. However, dermatology researchers should take into account confounding factors when deciding whether to increase the impact of their work by selecting OA over SA publishing.

URL : Do open-access dermatology articles have higher citation counts than those with subscription-based access?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279265