Multi-authored publications: their influence in the distribution of the financing costs in world licenses

Abstract

Due to the rising costs of periodicals and the necessity of assuring access to the research results of the scientific community, new publishing models are required. Most of them are based on the distribution of financing costs among all participating authors, affiliations or countries according to the number of their scientific publications. Thus the distribution of costs may depend very much on the manner in which the problem of multi-authorship is handled. Our study focuses on the dependence of the distribution of financing costs on multi-authorship handling for a case study: the hypothetical Austrian participation in the world project SCOAP. Our results show that the distributions of costs differ widely. We also survey whether there is any correlation between the number of full-text downloads operated by several universities with the number of their publications in these journals. The correlation results vary depending on the type of journal: broader or specific journals. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.