“University presses currently exist in the dual worlds of print and digital publishing. Current staffing needs require that they hire personnel with skills and experience that mirror that present duality. Training and maintaining a skilled workforce requires a commitment to flexibility and an openness to the ever-changing nature of scholarly communication. As the scholarly publishing ecosystem continues to evolve, university presses will need to look to a future workforce that has additional training, knowledge, and experience beyond the traditional skills associated with academic publishing, one that fully embraces the realities of a digital world, the habits of new generations of researchers, and the increasing role of technology in scholarly communication. This article looks at what the future might look like, what skills might be required, and how one might prepare for that future.”
Why Do We Still Have Journals?
“The Web has greatly reduced the barriers to entry for new journals and other platforms for communicating scientific output, and the number of journals continues to multiply. This leaves readers and authors with the daunting cognitive challenge of navigating the literature and discerning contributions that are both relevant and significant. Meanwhile, measures of journal impact that might guide the use of the literature have become more visible and consequential, leading to “impact gamesmanship” that renders the measures increasingly suspect. The incentive system created by our journals is broken. In this essay, I argue that the core technology of journals is not their distribution but their review process. The organization of the review process reflects assumptions about what a contribution is and how it should be evaluated. Through their review processes, journals can certify contributions, convene scholarly communities, and curate works that are worth reading. Different review processes thereby create incentives for different kinds of work. It’s time for a broader dialogue about how we connect the aims of the social science enterprise to our system of journals.”
Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project
The ICT revolution of the last decades impacted scientific communication as it has impacted many other forms of communications, changing the way in which articles are delivered and how they can be discovered.
However, the impact of ICT on the research itself has been much more profound, introducing digital tools to the way in which researchers gather data, perform analyses, and exchange results.
This brought new, digital forms of research output, and disseminating those calls for changes deeply impact the core format of the scientific article.
In 2009, Elsevier introduced the “Article of the Future” project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions.
First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories — such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly.
We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results.
The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?
URL : Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8446
Enhanced Publications Data Models and Information Systems …
Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems :
““Enhanced publications” are commonly intended as digital publications that consist of a mandatory narrative part (the description of the research conducted) plus related “parts”, such as datasets, other publications, images, tables, workflows, devices. The state-of-the-art on information systems for enhanced publications has today reached the point where some kind of common understanding is required, in order to provide the methodology and language for scientists to compare, analyse, or simply discuss the multitude of solutions in the field. In this paper, we thoroughly examined the literature with a two-fold aim: firstly, introducing the terminology required to describe and compare structural and semantic features of existing enhanced publication data models; secondly, proposing a classification of enhanced publication information systems based on their main functional goals.”
URL : Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8445
A survey of authors publishing in four megajournals
“Aim. To determine the characteristics of megajournal authors, the nature of the manuscripts they are submitting to these journals, factors influencing their decision to publish in a megajournal, sources of funding for article processing charges (APCs) or other fees and their likelihood of submitting to a megajournal in the future.
Methods. Web-based survey of 2,128 authors who recently published in BMJ Open, PeerJ, PLOS ONE or SAGE Open.
Results. The response rate ranged from 26% for BMJ Open to 47% for SAGE Open. The authors were international, largely academics who had recently published in both subscription and Open Access (OA) journals. Across journals about 25% of the articles were preliminary findings and just under half were resubmissions of manuscripts rejected by other journals. Editors from other BMJ journals and perhaps to a lesser extent SAGE and PLOS journals appear to be encouraging authors to submit manuscripts that were rejected by the editor’s journals to a megajournal published by the same publisher. Quality of the journal and speed of the review process were important factors across all four journals. Impact factor was important for PLOS ONE authors but less so for BMJ Open authors, which also has an impact factor. The review criteria and the fact the journal was OA were other significant factors particularly important for PeerJ authors. The reputation of the publisher was an important factor for SAGE Open and BMJ Open. About half of PLOS ONE and around a third of BMJ Open and PeerJ authors used grant funding for publishing charges while only about 10% of SAGE Open used grant funding for publication charges. Around 60% of SAGE Open and 32% of PeerJ authors self-funded their publication fees however the fees are modest for these journals. The majority of authors from all 4 journals were pleased with their experience and indicated they were likely to submit to the same or similar journal in the future.
Conclusions. Megajournals are drawing an international group of authors who tend to be experienced academics. They are choosing to publish in megajournals for a variety of reasons but most seem to value the quality of the journal and the speed of the review/publication process. Having a broad scope was not a key factor for most authors though being OA was important for PeerJ and SAGE Open authors. Most authors appeared pleased with the experience and indicated they are likely to submit future manuscripts to the same or similar megajournal which seems to suggest these journals will continue to grow in popularity.”
URL : A survey of authors publishing in four megajournals
Alternative URL : https://peerj.com/articles/365/
Open access journals in Humanities and Social Science
This British Academy research project on the effects of current UK open access policies was funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and was overseen by a Steering Committee set up by the Academy to manage the project. The project was led by Professor Chris Wickham, FBA (British Academy Vice-President, Publications), with support and co-writing from Dr Rebecca Darley and Dr Daniel Reynolds. It investigates some of the issues involved in open access publishing, seeking to examine various practical issues and difficulties that may arise, using the example of twelve disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS).
The key issues investigated were:
- the degree to which non-UK journals are ‘compliant’ with current UK open-access policies, particularly ‘green’ open-access policies;
- the differences between journal half-lives across the same disciplines;
- library acquisition policies and the degree to which these are affected by embargoes before articles are openly available.
Access to Research: the experience of implementing a pilot in public libraries
The Access to Research project is a collaboration between scholarly publishers and librarians to provide free licensed access to research journals via terminals in public libraries. The project is an element of the ‘balanced package’ proposed by the Finch Working Group on how to expand access to published research in the UK, which reported its recommendations to the UK government in June 2012. We describe the setting up of the project and the findings from a three-month technical pilot prior to the launch of a two-year national pilot in February 2014.
The project has already attracted support from the major scholarly publishers, with about 8,400 journal titles now available. The access platform has been shown to be usable by public librarians and library patrons. We are now addressing the challenge of understanding how the public will make use of the system and exploring how best to provide training and education for librarians and users.