Commercial Publishers Research Articles

Presenter: Werner Paulus, University Hospital Muenster, Muenster. Publishing A High-quality, Non-commercial Neuropathology Journal Without a Publisher: The First Nine Months

Scholarly communication faces increasing economical and ethical challenges, including pricing policies and overbearing behavior of commercial publishing houses. Based on the hypothesis that a diamond open access neuropathology journal of a high scientific and technical quality can be run entirely by neuropathologists, we launched Free Neuropathology (FNP; freeneuropathology.org) in January 2020. Classical publisher activities, such as copyediting, layout, website maintenance, and journal promotion, are undertaken by neuropathologists and neuroscientists using free open access software. The journal is free for both readers and authors, and papers are published under a Creative Commons BY SA licence, where copyright remains with the authors. Based on 26 articles published by August 2020, it takes FNP 11.1 days from submission to first, and 19.9 days to final, decision. High-quality copyediting, layout, and online publishing in the final format is accomplished in only 8 days. Absence of a commercial publisher enables prioritization of democratic and scientifically-driven decisions on editorial structure, website design, journal promotion, paper formatting, special article series, and number of accepted papers. This new model of journal publishing, which returns the control of scholarly communication to scientists, will be of interest to neuropathologists and wider scientific community alike.Learning ObjectivesSummarize the current state and driving forces behind commercial and non-commercial scientific publishing in neuropathology.Describe the advantages and challenges of a non-commercial publishing platform for neuropathology.

What Matters More in Open Access Journal Publishing: Scientific Rigor or Financial Vigor?

Academics and librarians around the world are raising concern about the current state of scholarly journal publishing in that the majority of journals are under the control of five multinational commercial journal publishing companies. Some are advocating for scholars to take back control of scholarly communication, particularly because it is the academics who are supplying and managing most of the content for journals. Open access publishing is one option, but the question of sustainability in funding streams raises concerns. Also the roles of scholarly societies, academic association, and universities in looking for stability in nonprofit journal publishing are discussed.

Open Data Policies among Library and Information Science Journals

Journal publishers play an important role in the open research data ecosystem. Through open data policies that include public data archiving mandates and data availability statements, journal publishers help promote transparency in research and wider access to a growing scholarly record. The library and information science (LIS) discipline has a unique relationship with both open data initiatives and academic publishing and may be well-positioned to adopt rigorous open data policies. This study examines the information provided on public-facing websites of LIS journals in order to describe the extent, and nature, of open data guidance provided to prospective authors. Open access journals in the discipline have disproportionately adopted detailed, strict open data policies. Commercial publishers, which account for the largest share of publishing in the discipline, have largely adopted weaker policies. Rigorous policies, adopted by a minority of journals, describe the rationale, application, and expectations for open research data, while most journals that provide guidance on the matter use hesitant and vague language. Recommendations are provided for strengthening journal open data policies.

Online Manuscript Editing Services for Multilingual Authors: A Content Analysis Study

ABSTRACT Online writing and editing services can help overcome obstacles faced by researchers seeking publication of their manuscripts. As professional services providers, they have business acumen, experience, and insight about the publishing industry. They supply their editing services for a fee and make additional services available to writers who seek to publish their work. Multilingual authors sometimes face challenges when publishing their research in English language journals. These challenges might have to do with the intricacies of technical writing; or how to find the best journal to submit their manuscript; or even how to explain their datasets in a more visual manner. Writing and editing services help multilingual authors with the creation of a publishable manuscript; give advice about the submission process; and provide other services to enhance the visibility of the published article via social media or other outlets. In this study, the author applied the content analysis method to identify online editing organizations (n = 16) that provide their services to authors. The author then divided these editing organizations into two main categories: seven are commercial publishers and nine are editing companies. It was found that Emerald Publishing Services, a commercial publisher, is the most prominent among the organizations that offer manuscript preparation services, followed by Elsevier, Hindawi, SpringerNature, and Taylor & Francis. As for the online editing companies, the study revealed that Enago has the most service offerings, followed by ManuscriptEdit, Editage, and Sirius Interactive. The study identified 15 distinct editing services offered by these organizations. The results show that the 16 online editing organizations offer four key services: language editing, manuscript formatting, figure preparation, and translation with language. The study recommends that multilingual authors consult editing services to improve the quality of their manuscripts before submitting them to journals.

Publication Model, Ownership and Impact of the Top Endocrinology Journals

Background: Subscription-based (SB) is the traditional publication model for peer-reviewed research; however, open-access (OA) models have been rising in popularity in recent years. Journals may be owned by commercial, professional society, university or government publishers. SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator is a measure of the scientific influence of scholarly journals.Objectives: The purpose of this study is to assess the publication model, ownership and SJR indicator of the top Endocrinology journals. This will help inform researchers’ decisions when selecting a journal to submit their work to.Methods: The SCImagoJR website was used to obtain a database of active, peer-reviewed Endocrinology journals worldwide. Publishers were grouped by parent company and categorized as commercial, professional society, university or government. Journals were searched on the National Library of Medicine catalogue to determine whether they are indexed on MEDLINE. Data was analyzed using IBM Statistics version 25. Fischer’s exact test was performed to assess the distribution of publication model and indexing status. Kruskal-Wallis H test was used to assess the distribution of SJR.Results: 207 Endocrinology journals were included; 134 SB (64.73%) and 73 OA (35.27%). 122 journals are indexed in MEDLINE. The top three publishers of Endocrinology journals are Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley, all of which are commercial entities. They collectively own 91/207 (43.96%) Endocrinology journals and 70/122 (57.38%) MEDLINE-indexed journals. The top three publishers own more SB than OA journals, though this difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.080). There was no significant difference in the distribution of indexing status across the top three publishers (p = 0.250) and the four publisher types (p = 0.928). There were significantly more SB than OA journals indexed in MEDLINE (p<0.001). There was no significant difference in the distribution of SJR indicator across the top three publishers (p = 0.283) and publisher types (p = 0.873) (see Table 1). SB journals had significantly higher SJR indicators compared to OA journals (all journals, p = 0.002; indexed journals only, p = 0.013).CONCLUSIONS: Endocrinology journals are largely controlled by a few commercial entities and are primarily SB. Compared to OA, SB journals have significantly higher SJR indicators, meaning they are more influential. This is an important consideration for researchers when considering where to submit their work.

Scholarly book publishers as publicity agents for SSH titles on Twitter

The purpose of this paper was to examine the presence of scholarly book publishers on Twitter, and tweets about books in 10 SSH disciplines (2014–2018). This included time of tweet relative to the book's publication date and time span of twitter activity. We also investigated the ‘categories of conversation' in publisher tweets, with a focus on hashtags and @-mentions. Data collection involved matching 15,454 unique book titles from the BKCI-Web of Science with tweets retrieved from Altmetrics.com, using ISBNs. This led to a working dataset of n = 6258 books (41%), which had received at least one tweet. Our analyses show that scholarly publishers have been using Twitter more and more over a 5 year period, especially commerical publishers. Commercial publishers are more likely than university presses to have multiple Twitter accounts. Both, though mainly commercial publishers, are active at targeting the Twitter accounts of book authors, book editors, other individuals and universities/institutions/organisations. Whilst re-tweets do not often follow first, or ‘initiator' tweets made by publishers, publisher engagement in general corresponds significantly with other tweets, and contributes to keeping the book active for a longer period on Twitter. Publishers play a key role as promotional agents, particularly when a scholarly title is part of a special offer, relevant to a conference, event or special calendar date, when an author is a prize winner, or if author-agreements have been made in regards to open access book chapters.

Evolution of institutional repositories: Managing institutional research output to remove the gap of academic elitism

The article tries to highlight the evolution and conceptual framework of institutional repositories and their impact on the academic and scholarly circles in terms of better visibility, wider audience and earlier communication of research. The characteristics associated with the institutional repositories are also highlighted, which makes them stand out from the crowd in the family of open access scholarly platforms. The study is based on the examination and evaluation of the articles published across various peer-reviewed journals showcasing numerous dimensions of institutional repositories, ranging from their evolution to open scholarly acceptance. A preliminary search on institutional repositories was carried through two well-renowned indexing/abstracting databases of peer-reviewed literature, Clarivate Analytic’s, Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus. Search terms like institutional repositories, institutional research output, open access repositories, green open access, open access, open access publishing, open access initiatives, digital libraries, directory of open access repositories, open DOAR and scholarly communication were run across the databases for article retrieval, and the relevant studies were extracted accordingly. To make the study more comprehensive and current, the studies citing the retrieved articles were also consulted. The study reveals that the benefits associated with institutional repositories are manifold. They recounter users with the information which was otherwise unavailable due to the reasons ranging from the non-availability of supplementary information (like unpublished reports and working papers, multimedia and audiovisual items, learning objects, other special item types, bibliographic references, datasets, lecture notes and so forth) to the paywall/subscription models adopted by commercial channels of scholarly communication. Furthermore, the social, research and technological factors tend to be the main motivating factors for their wider acceptance by the scholarly community at global, national, organizational, and individual levels. They enhance the preservation of institutional research output with increased viewership and prestige apart from achieving a potential research impact. They, in a real sense, have abrogated the unilateral assault orchestrated by the commercial publishers on the author community by democratizing their scholarly voices via open and barrierless scholarly platforms. They are the future of the academic output of an institution/author as they perform successfully within the constitutional boundaries of scholarly and academic publishing, thus safeguarding the rights and claims of every academic actor. Given the importance of institutional repositories for a more democratic, barrierless and impactful information communication, they are for sure going beyond various scholarly circles by breaking the traditional and rigid walls of scholarly endeavours. The study presents a useful overview of the progression of the institutional repositories, their intended purpose and how they serve to fill the gaps in scholarly publishing and meet the needs of the wider academic community. The article summarizes in one place a concise overview of the use and impact of institutional repositories. The study is also an eye-opener for scholars interested in the research in the field of institutional repositories.

O is for open (as well as optimal, operable, optimistic, organic)

Much as we might like to think of the academy as an enlightened domain of pure knowledge creation, it is inextricably linked to financial and corporate influences. The business of academic publishing is a complex ecosystem of actors, processes, expectations, and perversions. Many of us have encountered—indeed, have reinforced—such entanglements. Very often our academic success depends on learning the rules of engagement and then following them. We research, we write, we publish; we review, we critique, we edit. We make our textual submissions and pay our subscription fees, whether directly to a journal or indirectly through our participation in the institutions, organizations, and libraries to which we are connected. But this system, when we start to unpack it, can present some pretty nefarious effects. Research papers published in for-profit journals are not easily and freely accessible to those outside of institutional life. Yet these papers are generally produced by people with access to public funding, either from research councils or educational institutions. By paying for journal articles that sit behind paywalls, we are effectively transferring tax revenue into the pockets of private corporations. Of course, for those who can’t or don’t want to pay, there are semi- and non-legal options, but even ‘free’ access to PDFs comes with costs (often folded back into commercial publishers’ fee structures).

خدمات تحرير المسودات البحثية المقدمة للنشر بالدوريات العلمية: دراسة ميدانية مقارنة

This study aimed at revealing the most prominent editing services provided online by some editing organizations. These services mainly aim to assist non-native English-speaking to facilitate the task of editing and reviewing their research manuscripts before submitting for publication. The study identified (16) organizations provide (15) editing services to researchers. Editing organizations are divided into two main categories: seven commercial publishers and nine editing companies. It was found that Emerald is the most prominent among the organizations that offered author services, followed by Elsevier, Hindawi, Taylor & Francis, and SpringerNature. The results revealed that there are two main categories of editing services: basic services and support services. Editing organizations provided four basic services: language editing, manuscript formatting, figure preparation, and translation. The study identified 11 support services such as journal selection, journal submission, pre-peer review, plagiarism check, and research marketing. The researcher suggests that the results of this study could benefit Arab researcher who is interested in scholarly publishing in social sciences and humanities discipline.

Toward a Sustainable Model of Scientific Publishing

The current models of commercial publishing of scientific research costs universities, funding organizations, and governments billions of dollars in the form of annual subscriptions and publishing charges. Yet, many research papers are behind a paywall for the public and those unaffiliated to universities. Much of the research that is freely accessible to everyone requires authors to pay an unreasonable fee leading to inequalities in knowledge dissemination based on affordability. So, we need a sustainable model of scientific publishing that is beneficial to scientists, universities, and the public, especially in light of Covid-19 pandemic related budget cuts. Similar to commercial publishers, many scientific societies publish their own journals. Funding sources and universities should offer publishing grants or annual contributions to fund such societies’ open-access journals and thus support a sustainable publishing model wherein profits generated from academic publishing are invested back into the scientific community. Funding sources should also mandate publishing papers in society journals. To encourage that, hiring committees should place more importance on the article-level metrics than journal quality metrics such as the impact factor. The societies can use the publishing grants to cover journal publication costs and pay commercial publishers only for their value-added services such as manuscript handling and hosting the content online. The proposed publishing model will be sustainable and can strengthen scientific communities by supporting scientific society journals and making science more accessible.

Editing After Exit – Alienation and Counter–Alienation in the Cultures of Cultural Studies Journals

ABSTRACT The paper addresses the implications for the contemporary academy of changes in the organization of journal editorship. Taking the example of cultural studies and the journal Continuum, it considers the shift from the intimate ‘artisanal’ mode in which many journals have had their origins to more impersonal alienated forms, organized through market or quasi-market relations. A common interpretation of this shift is that it has been driven by the interests of large commercial publishers, who have subordinated editing to the requirements of ‘academic capitalism’. In contrast to this, the paper suggests that the demise of the artisanal mode might be understood through A.O. Hirschman’s concept of ‘exit’. Market or quasi-market forms have not been imposed but rather chosen as a response to a situation in which alienation has already occurred. The perspective allows us to see editorial work ‘after exit’ not as passively driven by external forces, but as involving its own kinds of creative choices. For the case of Continuum, particular tribute is paid in this context to the editorial direction of Brian Shoesmith.

Self-help for learned journals: Scientific societies and the commerce of publishing in the 1950s.

In the decades after the Second World War, learned society publishers struggled to cope with the expanding output of scientific research and the increased involvement of commercial publishers in the business of publishing research journals. Could learned society journals survive economically in the postwar world, against this competition? Or was the emergence of a sales-based commercial model of publishing – in contrast to the traditional model of subsidized journal publishing – an opportunity to transform the often-fragile finances of learned societies? But there was also an existential threat: if commercial firms could successfully publish scientific journals, were learned society publishers no longer needed? This paper investigates how British learned society publishers adjusted to the new economic realities of the postwar world, through an investigation of the activities organized by the Royal Society of London and the Nuffield Foundation, culminating in the 1963 report Self-Help for Learned Journals. It reveals the postwar decades as the time when scientific research became something to be commodified and sold to libraries, rather than circulated as part of a scholarly mission. It will be essential reading for all those campaigning to transition academic publishing – including learned society publishing – away from the sales-based model once again.

The Science of Reading: Four Forces That Modified, Distorted, or Ignored the Research Finding on Reading Comprehension

ABSTRACTThe science of reading is the latest version of the reading wars brought to national attention by the popular press. Although most of the popular press has focused on phonics and early reading, in this article, we chose to study what happened to the research on reading comprehension. By the beginning of the 21st century, there had emerged a mainstream view of reading comprehension and comprehension instruction. However, four factors distorted, impeded, and swamped the research findings. (1) Commercial publishers fit comprehension instruction into a curricular format that distorted the intent of the research. (2) The No Child Left Behind Act, with its high‐stakes testing and concomitant interim assessments, moved the focus in schools from developing comprehension to passing tests. (3) The publishers’ criteria for the Common Core State Standards promoted instruction that ran contrary to research findings. (4) Problems with the educational research, publication, development, and dissemination process itself further weakened the effect of research on practice. We conclude with suggestions for researchers to better communicate their results and procedures to other educators, suggestions for how the research community can have a greater impact on the development and review of commercial reading materials and policy initiatives, and suggestions for improving the education of future researchers, administrators, and teachers.

Cultural determinants affecting pedagogical decisions in content design: a case study

Purpose Commercially produced educational materials often reflect the pedagogical beliefs and culture(s) of the content developers. While many teachers involved in teaching English as a foreign language have relied on commercially published content in the past, the advent of ubiquitous technology has afforded them the ability to create content that is contextualised and to share it with other educators across the globe. The purpose of this study is to investigate cultural determinants which affect the pedagogical decisions of teachers when designing content. Design/methodology/approach This case study, conducted at a higher educational institution in the Gulf, addresses the issues that arise when cultures or ideologies of educators as material developers are different to that of the target audience. Three semi-structured interviews with teachers were conducted in an effort to understand cultural determinants that influence decision-making about pedagogy when creating in-house content to motivate undergraduate students on an English language program in the United Arab Emirates. Findings The results of this study indicated that the participants maintained mainly essentialist perspectives of local cultures and sub-cultures and their thinking in content creation was not all that different to that of commercial publishers. Practical implications This study holds implications for awareness-raising and pedagogical training for educators involved in in-house content development. Originality/value This case study addresses an area that has been under-researched in the Gulf region.

Reflections on a Physician Assistant Entrance Exam: Does the Profession Need One?

Standardized entrance exams are used in many health professions as one way to objectively measure knowledge and facilitate comparisons across student groups. The physician assistant (PA) profession has historically not employed a profession-specific entrance exam, and the idea was never seriously explored until the Physician Assistant College Admissions Test was developed recently by a commercial assessment publisher, with field testing in some volunteer programs in 2018 and the exam's first administration in May of 2020. The 2020 Physician Assistant Education Association Presidents Commission chose to investigate the issues raised by a consensus-derived, PA-specific entrance exam to stimulate more informed discussion on the efficacy of such an exam. While it may have the potential to enhance efficiency in PA admissions and reduce variability in admissions requirements, a PA entrance exam would also likely introduce new challenges, including increased costs, impact on the diversity of the applicant pool, and incongruence with an increasingly holistic admissions process. The biggest barrier would likely be the lack of current consensus on the knowledge, skills, and attributes that matriculants need to be successful in the program and in clinical practice. Development of a consensus-derived PA entrance exam would be a complex, expensive, and time-consuming endeavor, requiring considerable attention to technical issues of psychometric quality, process transparency, and legal defensibility. Changes being made to health professions admissions practices due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the dropping of test scores as a requirement by some institutions, may make some of the issues raised in this paper more timely than ever.

Publishing work on the authority

In a conversation with the executive editor of a reputable periodical, I noticed that the journal “Economic Consultant”, according to the financial model of Gold Open Access, publishes its articles in the open access, but at the same time charges the authors (or institutions) for publishing services. In response, I heard the editor exclaim: “If our journal becomes paid, I will leave my job!” The authors are also dissatisfied with the need to pay for the publication, I quote: “I don’t agree! I have never paid for my intellectual product, and I am not going to pay for it. I give it for free, and I consider the publication of my material as a fee for my work”. Indeed, some institutions have their own journals, the publication of which is free for employees. However, this is possible because the work of proofreaders, reviewers, and employees of the printing house is paid by the scientific or educational organization itself. Young commercial publishers that do not have sponsorship have to cover their costs through payments from authors. It should be noted that the absence of printed versions of journals does not in any way simplify publishing: electronic periodicals have additional expenses for maintaining the site, preparing data for uploading to bibliographic and information databases, etc. With that, it is necessary to understand that the reflection of the results of specialists’ research work in periodicals significantly increases the authority not only of the authors themselves but also of these publications. A number of commercial periodicals take a hybrid approach to publishing. For example, some publications do not charge authors who “do credit to the journal”. There are journals in which the authors act as free consultants, reviewers, thereby getting the opportunity to publish their own articles free of charge. The rector of one of the higher education institutions, after another open day, said: “We used to choose, and now they choose us”. Something similar is now observed in the publishing industry – there is a struggle between authors for publication in reputable periodicals, and young journals themselves have to fight for authors. The journal “Economic Consultant” adheres to the financial model of Gold Open Access, which provides for payment by the authors for the services of preparing an article for publication. Almost the entire amount received from the author is spent on translating Russian-language articles into English, the rest – on typesetting, that is, the author understands what he is paying for. No fee is charged for authors of English-language articles – in this case, we work according to the Platinum Open Access model since we do not charge either readers or authors. Publishing activities under the open access model are funded by institutions, societies, using grants. In the absence of financial support, the publisher is forced to work for free – for the future, for credibility.

Competition and coordination in Swedish botanical publication, 1820–79: Eleven editions of Hartman’s Handbook

In 1820, a Handbook of the Flora of Scandinavia by Carl Hartman was published in Stockholm by Zacharias Haeggström. The Handbook was a successful project for both author and publisher: similar enough to textbooks and academic publications to appeal in educational settings, yet ostensibly written for the general public. The Handbook went through eleven editions, becoming the standard reference flora for Swedish botanists – academic as well as others – before being succeeded after 1879 by a range of specialized floras aimed at schoolboys, students, or academic botanists. The trajectory of Hartman’s Handbook through the nineteenth century highlights the changing conditions of Swedish botanical publication. It draws attention to authorship as a scientific career tool, and, conversely, the significance of scientific texts in the emergence of commercial publishing in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Conflicts of Interest Arising from Simultaneous Service by Editors of Competing Journals or Publishers

In this day and age of challenging post-publication peer review and heightened academic scrutiny, editors serve an increasingly important role in screening submissions and managing the quality of information that is published in scholarly journals. Publishers compete for an intellectual market while commercial publishers compete for a commercial share of the market. The assumption argued in this perspective is that having editorial positions in competing journals or publishers (CJPs) may represent competing intellectual, professional and/or financial interests. Thus, based on this assumption, an editor would be expected to show loyalty to a single entity (journal or publisher). Editorial positions on the editorial boards of CJPs, as well as conflicts, financial or other, should be clearly indicated for all editors on the editorial board page of a journal’s website, for transparency. In science and academia, based on these arguments, the author is of the belief that editors should thus generally not serve on the editorial boards of CJPs, or only under limited and fully transparent conditions, even if they serve as editors voluntarily. The author recognizes that not all academics, including editors, might agree with this perspective, so a wider debate is encouraged.

Founding Limnology &amp; Oceanography Letters: The challenges, risks, and rewards of launching a new scientific journal

Founding <i>Limnology &amp; Oceanography Letters</i>: The challenges, risks, and rewards of launching a new scientific journal

The production, circulation, consumption, and ownership of scientific knowledge: Historical perspectives: Review

Key points The paper is the product of a long period of research in the Royal Society's extensive archives. Through an exploration of the evolution of Philosophical Transactions, this paper addresses the question of who owns scholarly content and who has the right to circulate it. For much of its history, Philosophical Transactions has not operated on a commercial basis but instead as a component of the Royal Society's information dissemination efforts. Commercial publishing is relatively new: it grew considerably in the early part of the Cold War. While commercial publishers are well placed to respond to changes in the market, the paper vividly demonstrates no business model is invulnerable to change.