The challenges of dealing with A.I. in academic publishing.

Traditionally, there have been two important media of academic publishing: scholarly journals and scholarly books. The first scholarly journal, the Journal des Sçavans, was founded by Denis de Sallo, appeared already in January 1665 in Paris, reappeared after the French Revolution as the Journal des Savants, and still exists as a leading journal in the humanities. Only a few weeks later, Henry Oldenbourg, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, established a second scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions, with a focus on science. The purpose of these journals was to formalize the extensive correspondence between philosophers and scientists.1 In the 18th and the 19th century, more specialized journals gained in importance, most of which were published by learned societies. At the end of the 19th century, university presses too began to publish scholarly journals. Another traditional means of academic publishing are the various types of scholarly books, in particular monographs, edited volumes, reference works (specialist dictionaries, encyclopedias, and specialty reference manuals), and technical handbooks.2 A narrow definition of academic works would exclude textbooks and books for the broader public. Shavell (2010, 337–39) employs four criteria to determine whether a journal or book is academic in nature: (1) the authors and/or the publisher are usually academics; (2) the readers are mainly academics; (3) the content is academic in character; (4) only low royalties are paid, if any. As of today, scholarly journals are the preferred mode of academic publishing in particular in the sciences and some social sciences (e.g., economics), whereas scholarly books still play an important role in the arts, the humanities, and part of the social sciences. Whereas scholarly books are published by a large number of small national publishers in a multitude of languages, the most important scholarly journals are typically in English language and published by a few large commercial publishers. Until the mid-20th century, the most important journals were published by learned societies, before commercial publishers began to enter the academic publishing market in the 1960s and 1970s by launching new titles or acquiring existing ones. This development has led to a significant concentration of (commercial) publishers in the academic journal market.3 It is difficult to say for sure how many scholarly journals are available around the world. Some sources speak of more than 100,000, others of 87,000 or 73,000.4 In August 2018, Ulrich's Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals with about 3 million articles a year, complemented by an additional 9,372 journals in other languages. As an important subset, 11,655 journals with 2.2 million articles were included in the Clarivate Analytics' Journal Citation Reports (STM, 2018, 25–26). The Web of Science (WoS) database counted almost 12,500 journals in 2019 (see below, Section 2.2.1). With the mass expansion of academic education and the increasing size of faculty after World War II, publications in peer-reviewed, highly ranked journals have become an important precondition for academic careers in many disciplines, in particular in the sciences, economics, and partly in the other social sciences. In 1964, Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index to calculate the impact factors of journals in science, medicine, and technology. This index was later followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index in 1973, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 1978 (Regazzi, 2015, 86–88), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015. These indices led to the development of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a metric that serves to rank a scholarly journal based on the number of citations to articles in that journal by articles in other indexed journals within a certain time period. During the same time, commercial publishers have increased their market shares to the detriment of non-for-profit publishers, such as learned societies and universities, becoming the dominant players in the market for scholarly journals. Today, the "big five" commercial academic publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—cover more than half of the market for scholarly journals. Since the 1980s, we have seen a sharp increase not just in the number of journals but in particular also in journal subscription prices, forcing many academic libraries to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs (the so-called serials crisis, cf. Eger & Scheufen, 2018, 23–29). These developments induced an increasing number of scholars, initially in the United States, to promote open access (OA) to scholarly articles as a replacement of or an addendum to the subscription model. After some individual initiatives in the late 1980s, the early 2000s saw the emergence of a global movement by scholars, librarians, and research sponsors, resulting in the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (February 2002), the "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing" (June 2003) and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (October 2003).7 Two roads to OA can be distinguished8: First, gold OA refers to electronic journals with OA for all readers, often based on creative commons licenses. The publishers' costs are covered not by subscription fees but from other sources, such as article-processing charges (APCs)9 paid by authors, libraries, learned societies, or research sponsors, or subsidies from learned societies and other sources. Hybrid OA journals, whose numbers are rising fast, allow the authors to choose between paying an APC, thereby granting the reader OA, or not paying an APC and requiring the reader to pay for access to the article.10 A special branch of gold OA is mega-journals, the first one of which, PLOS One, was first published in 2006. In these journals, the peer review is restricted to examining only the soundness of the submitted articles but not their broader interest or impact. Also, mega-journals are not oriented towards a specific subject matter. The second road, green OA, refers to authors self-archiving pre-prints or post-prints of their papers on so-called OA repositories, potentially in addition to publication in traditional subscription-based journals. OpenDOAR listed 5,713 repositories in July 2021, of which 5,073 were classified as institutional repositories managed by universities, faculties, or other academic institutions, 364 as disciplinary (subject) repositories which aggregate research papers in specific disciplines (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN, and RepEc), 138 as aggregating repositories (including Academia and Scielo), and 139 as governmental repositories.11 Whereas institutional and disciplinary repositories generally respect the authors' or publishers' copyright, so-called Robin Hood or Pirate OA repositories do not. The most prominent example is Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young scholar from Kazakhstan, which made over 60 million journal articles publicly available. Due to complaints by academic publishers, Sci-Hub had to switch domains several times.12 Recent years have seen the emergence of academic social networks such as Research Gate and Mendeley, as well as a stream of new forms of disseminating scientific content, including blogs, podcasts, and Facebook posts by prominent scholars. Regarding OA books, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in June 2021 listed 43,036 academic peer-reviewed books from 621 publishers.13 The number of academic journals, as listed in the WoS database, has been growing steadily over the past two decades, from around 5,000 in 2000 to almost 12,500 in 2019 (Figure 1).14 Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) The academic journal market is dominated by a few large commercial publishers, with the "big five" accounting for more than half of the academic journals listed by the WoS in 2019: Elsevier (1,754 journals), Springer (1,406), Wiley Blackwell (1,242), Taylor & Francis (1,199), and Sage (642).15 However, due to a downturn by Elsevier that began around 2006, this dominance has declined from around 60% in 2000 to around 51.7% in 2019 (Figure 2). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) Coupled with the advent of the internet and the concurrent increasing digitization of academic works, which through the bundling of different journals and/or formats ("big deals") facilitated second-degree price discrimination, this dominance has led to a drastic increase in subscription prices since the early 1990s (Bergstrom, 2013; Eger & Scheufen, 2018; Ramello, 2010). The resulting serials crisis—with academic libraries having to cut their journal portfolio—gave rise to a new publishing regime that offers OA to journal content. The share of pure (i.e., non-hybrid) OA journals as listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (2021) has been increasing steadily, from around 3% of all WoS-listed journals in 2000 to more than 10% in 2019 (Figure 3). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) Interestingly, pure OA journals also gained ground in terms of quality. Figure 4 shows boxplots of the impact factors16 of closed access (CA) versus OA journals over time. While CA journals enjoyed an impact factor advantage over OA journals for a long time—all location scales of the impact factor for CA journals being above the ones for OA journals—OA journals are nowadays of the same quality, notwithstanding considerable differences between disciplines (see the contribution by Eger et al. to this issue). In 2019, impact factor distributions of both OA and CA journals are at the same level. Thus, advancing both in quantity and in quality, OA journals are becoming ever more relevant. The literature has identified the following advantages of an OA regime for academic works: (1) OA publications are likely read and therefore (2) cited more widely,17 which in turn (3) raises the incentives for academic authors to publish their research results as citations increase their reputation. These observations led to a broad discussion in academia as to whether the copyright regime may impede the evolution towards a universal OA regime, with very different conclusions being drawn regarding the impact of OA from a social welfare perspective (Scheufen, 2015; Shavell, 2010). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) The growing relevance of academic OA publishing warrants a closer look at the development of pure OA journals as the gold road towards OA. Figure 5 shows the number of newly launched OA journals from 2002 to 2020. Following relatively slow growth from 2002 to 2014, with fewer than 500 new OA journals per year (except 2013), the number has exceeded 1,000 in every year since, peaking in 2017, when more than 2,000 new OA journals were added to the DOAJ database. Today, the DOAJ database counts more than 16,000 OA journals in many different fields of research, published in 80 languages by publishers from 126 countries.18 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Notwithstanding this impressive development, the relevance of OA journals varies substantially across academic disciplines (Figure 6).19 The research field with the largest attributed number of OA journals is Social Sciences (3,817), followed by Health Sciences (2,785), Technology and Engineering (1,416), and Language and Literature (1,153). By contrast, the natural science fields of Mathematics & Statistics (341), Physics & Astronomy (274), and Chemistry (181) feature only few OA journals.20 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Remarkable differences also exist regarding a variety of OA journal characteristics (Table 1).21 Most (52%) OA journals leave the copyright of published works with the author, whereas the traditional CA regime demands that the exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher. Moreover, only around 28% of all OA journals charge APCs—a remarkable finding, as the OA regime implies the transition from a "reader pays" to an "author pays" model. Other fees (e.g., a submission fee to cover the review process) are charged by only around 2% of all OA journals. Nevertheless, author fees may constitute a significant obstacle for authors to publish in an OA venue, especially for non-tenured researchers seeking to publish in highly ranked journals, which are most likely to charge APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020). This obstacle also applies in particular to many researchers from developing countries, whose institutions rarely cover such costs. Yet 18% of OA journals provide for the possibility to waive such author fees. OA publishing may indeed be considered a form of development aid, for two reasons: First, few institutions in the developing world have so far been able to subscribe to academic journals. The OA regime can thus promote scientific participation and thereby foster the global evolution of science as a "trial and error" process. Free or cheaper access to literature for researchers in the developing world tends to increase both their output (number of publications) and input (number of references) (Mueller-Langer et al., 2020). Second, an OA regime grants access to the latest results in science for groups who were previously excluded because they are not "club" members of a university library. This includes, e.g., corporate researchers, physicians, or farmers. Notwithstanding all the changes discussed above, scholarly journals remain the most important medium of communication in many disciplines. For more than 300 years, they have been fulfilling the four key functions of registration (attribution), certification of articles (peer review), dissemination (distribution, access), and preservation (scholarly memory and permanent archiving). In recent decades, a fifth function must be added: the evaluation of researchers and their institutions.22 The increasing importance of OA articles in scholarly journals has triggered some controversial discussions, in particular regarding the questions as to whether OA negatively affects the quality of journal articles, whether OA improves the dissemination of research results, and how OA affects the competition between academic publishers as well as the distribution between academics and non-academics, between poor and rich universities, and between poor and rich countries. We shall discuss each of these questions and some related points in more detail below. In times when "alternative facts" tend to trump sound research results, academia must provide the public with reliable information. The users of this information should be sufficiently certain that the results are based on proper methods, reflect the state of science in the specific field, and were obtained independently, e.g., of any political or commercial interests.23 For that reason, strict and continuous quality control of research results is a "conditio sine qua non" for academic publishing. Facilitating the communication of content from authors to readers, the academic journal market may be characterized as a two-sided market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). While readers look for the most important research results in their fields by top authors, the latter are interested in the journal's reputation, in wide readership, and in citations. Thus, journals with high impact factors hold the greatest attraction to both sides. With this in mind, the crucial question arises what effect, if any, OA is likely to have on the quality of academic articles. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is very skeptical regarding the quality of OA articles, especially those that are financed by APCs: "By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge" (Beall, 2013, 590). 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<p indent="0mm">In recent years, with the increasing support for academic publishing in China, the development of academic publishing in China is facing good opportunities. Under this background, first, we should conscientiously study and summarize the experience of international and domestic academic publishing, accurately understand the nature of academic publishing, which is an integral part of scientific research, an important field of cultural work, and the core sector of cultural industry; second, to promote the prosperous development of academic publishing in China, we should pay close attention to the international and domestic progress and trends, including the new advances in digital technology, the high concentration trend of international academic and professional publishing, the influence of open science on the publishing industry, etc. At present, professional publishing has experienced a development path from paper publishing to online databases and digital decision-making tools and has formed a mature modern academic publishing process. We should not only learn from the advanced experience of international academic publishing, but also realistically summarize and analyze the experience and problems of domestic academic publishing since the reform and opening-up, fully realize the significance of academic publishing in promoting scientific and technological innovation and economic and social development, and continuously improve the level of academic publishing in our country, to better serve the national scientific and technological innovation strategy and provide strong support for our country’s high level of self-reliance in science and technology. Finally, Chinese publishers should have lofty pursuits, strive to establish a relatively complete publishing system that also participates in international competition, and serve China’s economic, technological, and cultural development, and the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.

The Role of the Editor: Publisher Perspectives

This chapter explores innovating in scholarly journal publishing through the lens of publishing as pedagogy, an approach where scholarly publishing practices are intentionally designed for learning. Scholarly publishing is described as a learning space with significant scope for innovating, with respect to both the scholarly publishing culture and its practices. Innovating in scholarly publishing is defined as a social, creative, disruptive, and intentional process. The critical intersections to innovating in scholarly publishing are considered and an example of what innovating in scholarly publishing can look like, in practice, is provided—by sharing personal reflections and experiences of conceptualizing, designing, and managing J-BILD, a scholarly journal. In exploring these intersections and the notion of innovating, an innovative model of publishing founded on the principles of open access, transparency, and collaboration is described. This chapter concludes with possibilities for future directions with respect to innovating in scholarly publishing.

The next generation of electronic journals: prospects and problems

Although developmental feedback is widely recognised as a key strategy for teaching and learning, limited research has explored how doctoral students perceive supervisor feedback and its impact on academic outcomes. This study empirically investigates this issue using data from a cross-sectional online survey with 11,087 doctoral students. Building on the student feedback interaction model, the study examines the relationship between supervisor developmental feedback and doctoral students’ academic publications, with a focus on the mediating roles of satisfaction and research self-efficacy. While a direct negative relationship was observed between supervisor developmental feedback and academic publications, supervisor feedback significantly predicts publication outcomes through indirect pathways. Specifically, research self-efficacy functions as a significant independent mediator, whereas satisfaction does not independently mediate this relationship but serves as a critical first-stage mediator within a sequential chain, activating research self-efficacy and thereby indirectly fostering publication outcomes. This study offers practical implications for improving supervisor-student interactions, suggesting that feedback should be effectively internalised by doctoral students to enhance their academic motivation and publication productivity.

Academic e-Book Publishing in China: An Investigation of Current Status and Publishers' Attitudes

<i>Epilepsia</i> and the rough seas of medical publishing

The fourth APE – Academic Publishing in Europe – Conference in the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, was about ‘the impact of publishing’. The APE 2009 spectrum varied from usage and users, peer reviewing and quality assurance, branding, funding and investing, business models, new types of information, enabling technologies, search engines, to research excellence, dissemination, access and sharing of knowledge. In this issue we present the APE 2009 Short Conference Report, written by Svenja Hagenhoff and Chris Armbruster, and we publish a relevant selection of papers from this conference. As there was simply too much material, we did not attempt to publish full proceedings this time. Most presentations can be found under ‘APE Literature’ on the APE 2009 website: www.ape2009.eu. APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open minds’ with a free exchange of opinions and experiences between all stakeholders. Participants were: academic, educational, scientific, technological, medical, legal and professional publishers, university presses, scientists, authors, editors, librarians, teachers, learned and professional societies and associations, funding agencies, politicians and policy makers, subscription agencies and booksellers, recruiting agencies and technology providers. Academic Publishing and library activity face significant technical, financial and political challenges in the coming years. This may have major consequences for scholarly communication. Europe is the largest producer of scientific research and scholarly knowledge with a very strong publishing and library culture, with different scientific and professional cultures and a multitude of languages, but the acceptance, requirements and expectations are changing rapidly. Although the supportive role of academic organisations, societies and the private sector is subject to an intensive debate, there is a lot of uncertainty about current challenges and possibilities of the scholarly communication system, like new business models, the role of established players, funding schemes, quality and integrity of information, intellectual property, or life cycle and preservation of digital objects. Those issues are often discussed fiercely and emotionally, and there seems to be little interaction and knowledge exchange between the different players of the scholarly communication system, like librarians, publishing houses, university presses, scientists, funders and policy makers.

This paper examines and situates theoretically from a Marxist political economic perspective the capitalist model of academic publishing using Marx’s concepts of ‘primitive accumulation’ and ‘alienation.’ Primitive accumulation, understood as a continuing historical process necessary for capital accumulation, offers a theoretical framework to make sense of contemporary erosions of the knowledge commons that result from various enclosing strategies employed by capitalist academic journal publishers. As a theoretical complement, the article further suggests that some of the elements of alienation Marx articulated in respect of capitalist-controlled production processes capture the estrangement experienced by the actual producers of academic publications. After offering a short assessment of the open-access movement as a remedial response to the enclosing and alienating effects inherent in the capitalist-controlled academic publishing industry, the article briefly outlines a suggested alternative model for academic publishing that, building on open-access projects, could radically subvert capitalist control.

Since Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gower’s public boycott of Elsevier kicked off the so-called ‘academic spring’ in 2012, activist calls for open access academic publishing and the expansion of the scholarly knowledge commons through new digital technologies have only intensified. These have had direct, dramatic and fast-evolving impacts upon governmental policy, as well as debates about the public value of research, in the United Kingdom. However, the bulk of the attention in this context thus far has been given to journal articles and academic publishing companies like Elsevier that specialize in periodicals. Comparatively little attention has been given to the effects of these open access policies and discourses upon academic books and their publishers, even though the largest university press in the world, Oxford University Press, and the largest higher education textbook publisher, Pearson, are both UK based. This article, therefore, will explore how, precisely, the open access movement in the United Kingdom is affecting academic book publishing, with potentially global consequences. I begin by tracing the contemporary origins of open access back to open source software initiatives and exploring their recent impact upon Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) policies. Then, I look at open access initiatives and other strategies in response to shifts in policy and public discourse within the two overlapping yet distinct fields of academic book publishing, (1) scholarly book publishing and (2) higher education textbook publishing, and find unintended consequences potentially resulting in less openness and equitable access to knowledge production and consumption. Ultimately, I will contend, the open access movement in the United Kingdom risks further concentrating control of academic book publishing within a few powerful institutions, such as well-endowed elite universities and those businesses whose profits rely upon managing, manipulating and repackaging the information freely available in the digital age.

In academic publishing, stings appear to be on the rise. Stings may involve a paper with nonsense or fabricated content, fictitious authors or affiliations, and may be supported by artificially created emails or ORCID accounts, the latter to offer a false impression of validation. In recent times, stings have been used to protest editorial policies or to challenge claims of peer review, with the objective of exposing flawed policies and procedures. While some hail stings as success stories in exposing poor editorial policies and publication flaws, and while others draw humor from them, very few academics have suprisingly assessed the ethics (or lack thereof) and/or criminality of such operations. Consequently, it is rare to find academic papers that are critical of such stings from an ethical and/or criminal perspective. An equally surprising fact is that ethics-promoting organizations (COPE, ICMJE, CSE), which have ethics guidelines for paper submission to a wide swathe of academic and scholarly journals and publishers, do not have ethics clauses specifically calling out sting operations, even though several of their stated ethics guidelines consider fake, false or falsified elements in an academic paper to be unethical. In this paper, some reflection on broad ethical, humor-related and possible criminal elements of sting operations in academic publishing are considered. In addition, the COPE, ICMJE and CSE ethics guidelines were scrutinized to identify any clauses that could support the argument that stings in academic publishing are unethical.

The academic and educational publications are among the most demanded publications in the Russian book market and hold their substantial share. However, university publications do not find wide audience and are unknown to readers though needed by scientific community. To evaluate the demand for academic and scientific literature, the authors analyze 2021–2024 statistical data provided by the Russian Book Chamber. The books published by academic publishers make the significant share of the book market segment. According to the surveys conducted by the authors in 2020 and 2024, the Ural Federal University students and faculty are unaware of the products and services of university publishers which is a serious challenge for commercialization. The academic publishers lose their audience due to their invisibility and limited circulation of the published books though the academic readers are potentially interested. To resolve the situation, the awareness of academic publications and publishers has to be increased. For this purpose, the authors identify the promotion specific features for academic publishers as the book market players; they also discuss the publishers’ interior and exterior brand attributes. The case study of the Ural Federal University demonstrates the application of branding instruments.

The concept of resilience is frequently found in academic documents describing the favoured solution for how to address the threat of terrorism. Despite this, few attempts have been made to critically examine what resilience means and whether it is a favourable concept in terrorism research. Since multiple researchers in other disciplines have claimed that the resilience concept serves as an umbrella concept for a range of positive attributes, this study investigates the different discourses that resilience in the academic terrorism literature is built upon. The analysis outlines five different discourses in the academic literature that contain different descriptions of what it means to be resilient regarding terrorism. It is concluded that the meaning of terrorism resilience in the academic literature is multifaceted, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory. The positive connotation embedded in the concept of resilience and the absence of a description of what it means not to be resilient is problematic because it turns resilience into a utopian goal rather than a realistic counterterrorism project. Moreover, resilience normalises the view of terrorism as a ubiquitous omnipresent threat and legitimises counterterrorism measures as a positive, depoliticised necessity. Resilience is serving ideological purposes, and thus researchers should not uncritically accept resilience as the solution to the threat of terrorism.

Deaths at music festivals are not infrequently reported in the media; however, the true mortality burden is difficult to determine as the deaths are not yet systematically documented in the academic literature. This was a literature search for case examples using academic and gray literature sources, employing both retrospective and prospective searches of media sources from 1999-2014. The gray literature documents a total of 722 deaths, including traumatic (594/722; 82%) and non-traumatic (128/722; 18%) causes. Fatalities were caused by trampling (n=479), motor-vehicle-related (n=39), structural collapses (n=28), acts of terror (n=26), drowning (n=8), assaults (n=6), falls (n=5), hanging (n=2), and thermal injury (n=2). Non-traumatic deaths included overdoses (n=96/722; 13%), environmental causes (n=8/722; 1%), natural causes (n=10/722; 1%), and unknown/not reported (n=14/722; 2%). The majority of non-trauma-related deaths were related to overdose (75%). The academic literature documents trauma-related deaths (n=368) and overdose-related deaths (n=12). One hundred percent of the trauma-related deaths reported in the academic literature also were reported in the gray literature (n=368). Mortality rates cannot be reported as the total attendance at events is not known. The methodology presented in this manuscript confirms that deaths occur not uncommonly at music festivals, and it represents a starting point in the documentation and surveillance of mortality. Turris SA , Lund A . Mortality at music festivals: academic and grey literature for case finding. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2017;32(1):58-63.