Étiquette : Scholarly Publishing

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Motivations and barriers to publishing open access book chapters and monographs: An institutional perspective

Authors : Wm. Joseph Thomas, Allison Kaefring, Jeanne K. Hoover

Introduction

Recent years have seen an increase in publishers exploring open access for monographs and book chapters. Programs like the Direct to Open from MIT Press and JSTOR’s Path to Open have provided avenues for libraries and authors to support open access monographs generally, but not campus authors specifically. On our campus, we have seen an increase in requests for and questions about publishing monographs and book chapters open access.

Description of Program

We offer several options for support for open access article publishing, including transformational agreements, institutional memberships, and an open access fund, but have limited resources and strategies for supporting book and chapter authors to make their publications open access.

To gauge our authors’ awareness and interest, we surveyed faculty who recently published a book or chapter about their publishing experiences with a focus on open access publishing. In addition to our survey, we conducted interviews with faculty to gain a better understanding of open access publishing from their perspective as recent authors.

Next Steps

In response to this research, the library has explored new methods of supporting open monograph publishing and plans to develop open education resources and webinars about the open monograph publishing process.

URL : Motivations and barriers to publishing open access book chapters and monographs: An institutional perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18280

 

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Academic Quality or Commercial Concern? The Role of APCs in Open-Access Communication Studies Journals

Author : Burak Ili

Despite the positive effects of the open access (OA) movement on academic publishing, commercial publishers’ profit-driven policies continue to prevail, making the publishing process increasingly difficult for many researchers, particularly those from developing countries. T

his study critically examines open-access Q1 and Q2 journals listed in the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) within the field of Media and Communication Studies.

Despite the OA movement’s goal of increasing access to information, the capitalist academic publishing model transforms knowledge production into a commercial activity through article processing charges (APCs). The research reveals that high APCs demanded by high-impact journals represent a significant barrier, especially for researchers with limited financial and institutional support.

This situation underscores the urgent need for institutional reform in the structure of academic publishing, particularly within the field of Media and Communication Studies.

The proposed reforms should focus on critical areas such as increased support for OA models, freeing journals and editorial boards from Western monopolies, fairly compensating the labour of reviewers and editors, and offering greater language support.

Steps taken in this direction will contribute to the creation of a more transparent, fair, and inclusive structure for academic production and sharing processes.

URL : Academic Quality or Commercial Concern? The Role of APCs in Open-Access Communication Studies Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v23i1.1547

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The business of transformative agreement

Author : Reece Steinberg

What can transformative agreements (TA) tell us about the future of Open Access (OA)? To investigate and analyze the business model of big publishers driving these agreements, this article uses a case study of the publisher Wiley, a business model canvas, and a decision matrix. The study uncovers motivations for moving to this model and effects to libraries and research spread unequally among institutions and globally.

This has implications for the work of liaison librarians – the frontline with researchers, as well as library leadership, university leadership and others concerned with equitable access to publishing, and diversity of research.

URL : The business of transformative agreement

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103020

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The Impact of Print-on-Demand on Spanish University Presses

Authors : Marta Magadán-Díaz, Jesús I. Rivas-García

The university book plays a crucial role in disseminating research and teaching, but its usage has declined due to a preference for journal articles and digital materials. This article examines how Spanish university presses are employing Print-on-Demand (POD) to adapt to changes in the publishing market, enhancing flexibility, reducing costs and optimising the production of monographs and academic books. POD enables publishers to print copies based on actual demand, minimising the risk of overproduction and storage costs.

This model has transformed the publishing supply chain, offering efficient solutions for managing the lifecycle of books, from their launch to potential delisting. University presses are also using innovations in digital printing to respond swiftly to fluctuations in the academic market. This study adopts a qualitative approach to examine how POD affects scholarly publishers’ efficiency, longevity and production strategies, proposing that this technology is crucial for the future sustainability and competitiveness of the sector. The flexibility of POD is vital in environments where demand is unpredictable, and scholarly publishers must manage financial resources carefully.

URL : The Impact of Print-on-Demand on Spanish University Presses

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1658

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The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): Bringing Open-Source Software Practices to the Scholarly Publishing Community for Authors, Reviewers, Editors, and Publishers

Authors : Patrick Diehl, Charlotte Soneson, Rachel C. Kurchin, Ross Mounce, Daniel S. Katz

Introduction

Open-source software (OSS) is a critical component of open science, but contributions to the OSS ecosystem are systematically undervalued in the current academic system. The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) contributes to addressing this by providing a venue (that is itself free, diamond open access, and all open-source, built in a layered structure using widely available elements/services of the scholarly publishing ecosystem) for publishing OSS, run in the style of OSS itself.

A particularly distinctive element of JOSS is that it uses open peer review in a collaborative, iterative format, unlike most publishers. Additionally, all the components of the process—from the reviews to the papers to the software that is the subject of the papers to the software that the journal runs—are open.

Background

We describe JOSS’s history and its peer review process using an editorial bot, and we present statistics gathered from JOSS’s public review history on GitHub showing an increasing number of peer reviewed papers each year. We discuss the new JOSSCast and use it as a data source to understand reasons why interviewed authors decided to publish in JOSS.

Discussion and Outlook

JOSS’s process differs significantly from traditional journals, which has impeded JOSS’s inclusion in indexing services such as Web of Science. In turn, this discourages researchers within certain academic systems, such as Italy’s, which emphasize the importance of Web of Science and/or Scopus indexing for grant applications and promotions. JOSS is a fully diamond open-access journal with a cost of around US$5 per paper for the 401 papers published in 2023. The scalability of running JOSS with volunteers and financing JOSS with grants and donations is discussed.

URL : The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): Bringing Open-Source Software Practices to the Scholarly Publishing Community for Authors, Reviewers, Editors, and Publishers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18285

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Regional profile of questionable publishing

Authors : Taekho You, Jinseo Park, June Young Lee, Jinhyuk Yun

Countries and authors in the academic periphery occasionally have been criticized for contributing to the expansion of questionable publishing because they share a major fraction of papers in questionable journals. On the other side, topics preferred by mainstream journals sometimes necessitate large-scale investigation, which is impossible for developing countries.

Thus, local journals, commonly low-impacted, are essential to sustain the regional academia for such countries. In this study, we perform an in-depth analysis of the distribution of questionable publications and journals with their interplay with countries quantifying the influence of questionable publications regarding academia’s inequality.

We find that low-impact journals play a vital role in the regional academic environment, whereas questionable journals with equivalent impact publish papers from all over the world, both geographically and academically. The business model of questionable journals differs from that of regional journals, and may thus be detrimental to the broader academic community.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07844

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‘As of my last knowledge update’: How is content generated by ChatGPT infiltrating scientific papers published in premier journals?

Author : Artur Strzelecki

The aim of this paper is to highlight the situation whereby content generated by the large language model ChatGPT is appearing in peer-reviewed papers in journals by recognized publishers. The paper demonstrates how to identify sections that indicate that a text fragment was generated, that is, entirely created, by ChatGPT. To prepare an illustrative compilation of papers that appear in journals indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases and possessing Impact Factor and CiteScore indicators, the SPAR4SLR method was used, which is mainly applied in systematic literature reviews.

Three main findings are presented: in highly regarded premier journals, articles appear that bear the hallmarks of the content generated by AI large language models, whose use was not declared by the authors (1); many of these identified papers are already receiving citations from other scientific works, also placed in journals found in scientific databases (2); and, most of the identified papers belong to the disciplines of medicine and computer science, but there are also articles that belong to disciplines such as environmental science, engineering, sociology, education, economics and management (3).

This paper aims to continue and add to the recently initiated discussion on the use of large language models like ChatGPT in the creation of scholarly works.

URL : ‘As of my last knowledge update’: How is content generated by ChatGPT infiltrating scientific papers published in premier journals?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1650