Majority Of Publishers Research Articles

‘To tweet or not to tweet?’ A study of the use of Twitter by scholarly book publishers in Social Sciences and Humanities

• Twitter is a popular and efficient channel for disseminating scientific outputs, it seems to be an acceptable publisher engagement rate, but still the minority. Only 12% of the surveyed books were mentioned by their publisher Twitter accounts on Twitter from 2014 to 2018. • More and more publishers are participating in Twitter book promotion. Compared with some traditional publishing giants, media-small publishers have higher Twitter engagement. • Publisher play an important role in the scientific communication process on Twitter, books were mentioned by their publishers on Twitter get more tweets than books were mentioned by non-publishers. Publishers might believe the use of Twitter will help promote their scholarly books. In this study, we analyzed 18,691 books indexed by the Book Citation Index (BKCI) in the Social Sciences and Humanities, published between 2014 and 2018, and proposed two indicators describing the Twitter engagement of publishers: relative coverage and relative receptivity . The results show significant disciplinary and year differences in publishers’ Twitter engagement For instance, in all 10 disciplines, small and medium-sized publishers generally prefer to promote their books (high relative coverage) on Twitter, but the majority of publishers have low relative coverage in these 5 years. In addition, results show that books mentioned by their publishers’ Twitter accounts get significantly higher Twitter mentions (high relative receptivity) as compared to books mentioned by non-publisher’ Twitter accounts. The results suggest that scholarly book publishers should engage in social media activity to increase Twitter mentions and visibility of their books.

Evolving landscape of scholarly journals in open access environment

PurposeOpen access journals (OAJs) offer immediate, free and unrestricted online access to the scholarly literature. The purpose of this study is to trace the status and characteristics of OAJs published across the globe. Various trends that have evolved in OAJ market have been studied.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on data collected from one of the largest OA journal directory – Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The data were downloaded on 02 January 2018 and details of OAJs added to DOAJ till 31 December 2018 were harvested, codified and further analyzed in SPSS software. A Microsoft-Excel template application – MAKESENS – developed by Finnish Meteorological Institute (Finland) in 2002, was explored to perform Mann–Kendall Test and Sen’s Slope Estimates.FindingsA less score of OAJs offer access to their archival content. An increasing trend is witnessed in the OAJ publishing with Elsevier, Sciendo and BioMed Central (BMC) as the top publishers. Majority of publishers are from high-income zone countries, followed by upper-middle and lower-middle zone countries. Majority of OA publishers are from the UK, Indonesia and Brazil. A lesser score of journals offer article processing charges and/or author submission charges. Majority of OAJs from high- and lower-middle-income zone countries levy submission/processing charge to authors compared to OA journals from upper-middle- and lower-income zone countries (p < 0.01). OJS stays a prioritized platform for hosting OA journal content. Portico and CLOCKSS/LOCKSS are mostly used for long-term preservation purposes. Majority of OAJs from high-income zone countries participate in digital arching initiatives compared to ones from other income zones. Majority of the journals adopt a peer review (double-blind peer review, blind peer review, peer review and open peer review) process for validation of their scholarly content. The time lag between submission and publication ranges from one to 53 weeks, with majority of OAJs having a time lag of 11-20 weeks. Creative Commons Licenses are mainly adopted by OAJs.Research limitations/implicationsAs the study is based on the data offered by DOAJ, any gaps in the DOAJ data will also get reflected in the study. Further, there might be other OAJs also that have yet to show compliance with DOAJ standards and get indexed with it.Originality/valueThe study tries to showcase the current status and characteristics of OAJs.

The ‘upside down’: exploring offset pricing models and article deposit terms at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

In the ‘normal’ world of retail and commerce you pay for an item and receive the item. In the world of academic journals you prepay for a journal which you might later receive and you might then get some money back (depending on what journals you did or did not receive). In the world of offset pricing you prepay, then you pay again, and you sometimes use vouchers; you might get a discount the following year, then you might get money back (or you might not). Are publishers knowingly placing barriers to offset models, and not transparently offsetting the APCs to the subscription cost, in order to raise more income? Where a publisher is operating a hybrid open access model, institutions wish to offset the cost of the university’s APCs against their subscription fees, and avoid effectively paying twice. The new business model of scholarly communication is based on shifting the costs from subscriptions to publishing. Can we get to a mutually beneficial position where the author can deposit the accepted version of the article into the institutional repository without any embargo period if the institute agrees to pay the subscription fee on an ongoing basis? This article will explore how resolving the inherent complexities in offsetting models will save libraries money and also time wasted on tedious and unnecessary administration work. Researchers do not want to know about offsetting agreements nor should they need to know. It is difficult enough to do, and write up, valuable research without having to do further research on offset pricing models. If libraries can organize as groups at regional or international level, more favourable licensing agreements, including standardized offset pricing model language, can be leveraged which will be advantageous to all parties: publishers, libraries and, most importantly, authors. Publishers need to understand that, while the goal is ultimately to by-pass the necessity for APCs, this approach is an attempt to reimagine the business model, not to put them out of business. While profit margins may be the bottom line for the majority of publishers, it is clear from our University’s recent communications with these publishers that the existing publishing model will change, and the questions remaining are by how much and how long it will take to implement the change. This article builds on a breakout session given by the author at the 2018 UKSG Conference. A corrigendum article related to this work can be found here: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.454

Detecting Anti Ad-blockers in the Wild

Abstract The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers who primarily rely on online advertising to monetize their services. To address this threat, publishers have started to retaliate by employing anti ad-blockers, which scout for ad-block users and react to them by pushing users to whitelist the website or disable ad-blockers altogether. The clash between ad-blockers and anti ad-blockers has resulted in a new arms race on the Web. In this paper, we present an automated machine learning based approach to identify anti ad-blockers that detect and react to ad-block users. The approach is promising with precision of 94.8% and recall of 93.1%. Our automated approach allows us to conduct a large-scale measurement study of anti ad-blockers on Alexa top-100K websites. We identify 686 websites that make visible changes to their page content in response to ad-block detection. We characterize the spectrum of different strategies used by anti ad-blockers. We find that a majority of publishers use fairly simple first-party anti ad-block scripts. However, we also note the use of third-party anti ad-block services that use more sophisticated tactics to detect and respond to ad-blockers.

DEBIUTUOJANTIS RAŠYTOJAS LIETUVOS KNYGŲ RINKOJE

The object of the article is the publishing of first-time authors’ books in Lithuania. The aim of the work was to explore the situation of first-time authors in the Lithuanian book market in 1990–2009 and to reveal its main problems. The tasks of the work were to define the conception of first-time author, to explore his role and its changes in the Lithuanian publishing market, to determine the ways of selecting of first-time literature books, to study the features of first-time book publishing and marketing, and to reveal the problems the publishers face in Lithuania.Analysis of literature sources and interviews has shown that first-time authors are essential for the publishers as professional writers. Furthermore, it has been discovered that there is a great demand of first-time books in the market. However, it has encouraged the development of graphomania, i.e. the writing of literarily worthless books. For this particular reason, it is important to distinguish between professional and talented first-time authors and graphomaniac writers. Besides, the work shows that the present situation of first-time book publishing is extremely related to a strong competition among the writers and to competition for publishing houses and readers. As a result, the literature is getting more and more dependent on the reader’s influence. On the one hand, such literature creates a higher level of trust between the writer and his reader; on the other hand, it strengthens the commercial side of first-time book publishing.First-time books are being produced by the bigger number of Lithuanian publishing houses. The majority of publishers produce individual first-time books while the others publish series of such books which require more effort and time constraint. Also, such books are being published by both large and small publishing companies, and the financial risk is partly transferred to national or private institutions. In addition, it has been noticed that publishers do not attempt to find or pull new authors and do not use the wide possibilities of literature festivals and contests. The research of a specific case has revealed the fact that it is not necessary to promote big advertising campaigns or use extraordinary marketing actions and money to successfully publish a first-time book. Most important are a close cooperation between the author and his publisher during the whole publishing process and, of course, a professionally written book.

Grondslagen van verandering. Assimilatie en differentiatie van het Antwerpse boekbedrijf in de tweede helft van de zeventiende eeuw

The foundations of change. Integration and diversification in the Antwerp book trade during the second half of the seventeenth centuryWar, ruthless international competition, high import and export duties on books, and unforeseeable changes in the taste of readers all posed a serious threat to the survival of the book trade in the Southern Netherlands during the late seventeenth century. Nevertheless, some Brabantine printers not only survived the crisis they even managed to prosper. This article provides additional insights into the survival strategies adopted at the time based on material from the archives of Balthazar II Moretus’ Officina Plantiniana and the medium-sized publishing house of Hieronymus III Verdussen. Although both entrepreneurs reacted to the crisis by imposing harsh reforms, restructuring, and implementing innovative techniques such as sale on approval, their actual management choices differed greatly. The Officina Plantiniana focused more on the industrial component by opting for large-scale printing. Moretus cut back deliveries to smaller markets and dealers and concentrated on the major booksellers instead as they were able to order in bulk and resell the books to their smaller colleagues which meant that he no longer had to pay for transport and marketing. Moretus also abandoned the inefficient barter system and insisted upon cash payments so that he no longer had to take on books with a limited market value. Verdussen on the other hand followed a completely different path and seemed to renounce printing. He outsourced more and more printing work to jobbing printers in Germany or the United Provinces, thereby externalizing the risk of overstocking or losing out due to a drop in demand. By cultivating a number of advantageous alliances, Verdussen was also able to drastically reduce his custom and transport costs. As the registers of their guild reveals, in order to survive the crisis the majority of publishers in Antwerp chose Verdussen’s course of commercial capitalism as opposed to the industrial approach followed by Moretus.

Newspapers' Sunday Supplements: Rocky Present, Bright Future?

Why do newspapers continue to carry national Sunday supplements? Findings from a sample survey suggest these supplements have little effect on increasing circulation. A majority of publishers said Sunday supplements did not attract new advertisers to the newspaper, yet these publishers continue to carry the supplements due to audience atttraction. This high readership gave publishers strong support for the future of the supplements.