Model Of Scholarly Publishing Research Articles

Technology Adoption Among University Scholars: Institutional Repositories Case Study

The emergence of institutional repositories (IRs) is seen as a new scholarly publishing model. This study aims to understand the adoption of technology from the perspective of information behavior by exploring users' characteristics of information need, awareness, and need of IRs concerning the use of IRs. Three hundred university lecturers from six state Islamic universities were observed to obtain their perception of the need for IRs using a questionnaire survey. Partial least square structural equation modeling was used for data analysis. The analyses of measurement and structural models were conducted to validate the relationship between the observed variables. The study found that the information-seeking behavior model has partially explained the use of repositories among university scholars by 53,5%. The results mean that other factors influence the use of IRs that are not examined by this research.

Open access movement in the scholarly world: Pathways for libraries in developing countries

Open access is a scholarly publishing model that has emerged as an alternative to traditional subscription-based journal publishing. This study explores the adoption of the open access movement worldwide and the role that libraries can play in addressing those factors which are slowing its progress within developing countries. The study has drawn upon both qualitative data from a focused literature review and quantitative data from major open access platforms. The results indicate that while the open access movement is steadily gaining acceptance worldwide, the progress in developing countries within geographical areas such as Africa, Asia and Oceania is quite a bit slower. Two significant factors are the cost of publishing fees and the lack of institutional open access mandates and policies to encourage uptake. The study provides suggested strategies for academic libraries to help overcome current challenges.

The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Publishing (in Finance) – An Author’s view

This note originated as part of the author’s regular research publishing activity. The author’s and colleagues’ experiences suggested broadening the usual examination of potential outlets. What we encountered was not “more of the same” from previous searches for outlets but very significant fundamental changes in the academic/scholarly publishing landscape. We first review the standard research process in the context of academic tenure and promotions. The we proceed to identify and enumerate potential publishing outlets, which we further classify into groups reflecting these critical differences meaningful for academic authors and their supervisors: nature of the outlet (for profit, not for profit; commercial, academic, and professional), open versus restricted access, peer-reviewing, and nature of the final article depository. What we consider the usual way to go about publishing shows many disruptions that do not benefit authors, such as major (commercial) publishers favoring a certain type of article and engaging in massive desk-rejection practices as well as less powerful publishers either closing down or imposing restrictions (words, reviewers), with serious unintended consequences. The traditional scholarly publishing model of requiring a given number of articles every x years may have become unsustainable, as it is extremely expensive and does not favor disinterested research. On the plus side, we find increasing publishing opportunities for authors, but these alternative opportunities might imply decisions that do not fit the traditional evaluation approach and might require innovative agreements between faculty and their academic supervisors.

A new university press as a space to connect the building blocks of Open Science

Watch the VIDEO. The number of new university presses is growing, and they are becoming a more influential phenomenon in the publishing world and in the realm of scholarly communications. These new university presses often challenge traditional scholarly publishing models with their focus on Open Science and open publishing practices. The University of Groningen Press (UGP), the Netherlands, is an example of such a publisher that tries to harmoniously connect the building blocks of Open Science and translate the lessons learned from one area into another. This session will outline our experience with setting up the newest UGP initiative, an open textbook publishing service, based on the expertise and lessons learned from the already well-established open access journals and open monographs publishing initiatives. By including open educational resources in the form of interactive open textbooks in its portfolio, the UGP is transitioning to being an all-around open publisher that enables cross-contamination and mutually fruitful exchange between different fields of Open Science, thus enhancing the synergy between them. Drawing on our experience from the (ongoing) open textbook pilot, we would like to demonstrate that a new university press could serve as a natural playground for connecting these building blocks of Open Science, thus allowing for a more sustainable transfer of know-how, better dissemination of knowledge, and closer engagement with the wider “open” agenda. Being an open-access publisher, the UGP offers a publishing platform for journals, books, series, and textbooks by university faculty and researchers. The open access publishing model enables any researcher, student, or interested reader around the world to find and access scholarly information without barriers. At the same time, the UGP’s publishing decisions are not dependent on the potential commercial success of a title but rest on scientific relevance, thus enhancing the academic and societal impact of such publications. This way, every scholar gets an opportunity to publish high-quality open monographs, articles, and lately also textbooks, thus contributing to wider dissemination of research and more equitable access to education. Along with other new university presses, the UGP has been reflecting and at times spearheading the changes in scholarly communication, research and education cultures. This includes the incorporation of Open Science practices supported by technical innovations. Transition to Open Science and greater uptake of open practices requires a shift in the academic and publishing culture that would be impossible without joint actions from all sides and without facilitating mutually beneficial exchanges within the open movement. As a result of this session, by turning to our open textbook publishing case study, we would like to spark a conversation around the role of new university presses in the greater Open Science framework as a space for connecting its multiple facets. Together with the audience, we hope to generate new ideas and solutions to potential challenges such initiatives face along the way.

Awareness, use and attitudes of the Indian higher educational institutions students about scholarly open access: an empirical analysis

PurposeOpen access is a new scholarly publishing model that has appeared in place of the commercial publishing model. The aim of this study was to investigate the level of awareness, use and attitudes of the Indian students in higher educational institutions about scholarly open access.Design/methodology/approachSurvey method was used in the study. The sample population of the study was 212 Indian students belonging to different higher educational institutions in India.FindingsThe results of the study reveal a gloomy picture about the open access (OA) awareness and use among Indian students. Unfamiliarity with the OA journals and high publication fee were the main obstacles for the students not to publish in OA journals. However, a majority of the students reported their willingness to publish in OA journals in future if the obstacles are removed. A very meager ratio of the respondents had published in OA journals so far. In addition, motivational factors for publishing in OA journals were also taken into consideration, and respondent's indicated winning research grants, great impact and higher citations as main factors to publish in OA journals.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is geographically limited to the students of the higher educational institutions located in India.Practical implicationsThis study will help to understand the involvement and behavior of the Indian students toward scholarly open access. The study will also guide what measures need to be taken in the take up of open access movement.Originality/valueInstitutional repositories appeared to be relatively a novel term for the respondents, and in order to get the citation advantages and higher visibility, librarians can make an effort to persuade students to publish their research work in open access journals and institutional/subject repositories. The study recommends that institutions need to take appropriate measures to inform students about the importance and overall benefits associated with using of OA platforms in their scholarly work.

Researchers’ Perceptions and Experiences with an Open Access Subvention Fund

Objective – This study investigated researchers’ perceptions of open access publishing and the ways in which the university’s open access subvention fund could evolve to meet the campus community’s needs. Methods – In spring 2021, two librarians conducted an anonymous survey using a convenience sample to recruit participants. The survey was directly distributed to 113 University of Idaho (U of I) affiliates who had received funding from, or expressed interest in, the open access subvention fund during the previous three years (FY 2019 to FY 2021). Other U of I affiliates were also offered the opportunity to participate in the survey via a link shared in the U of I’s daily email newsletter as well across the U of I’s graduate student email list. The researchers received 42 usable survey responses. The survey included 26 closed and open-ended questions and analysis included cross-tabulations based on fund applicant status as well as respondent role. Of the 26 questions, 4 were modified from a colleague’s previous study with U of I faculty members (Gaines, 2015). Results – Survey responses showed that interest in and support for open access were common among respondents. Although a majority of respondents had published an open access journal article and would like to continue to publish open access in the future, only 17% agreed that they had departmental support to do so. Results also demonstrated that researchers were less willing to pay article processing charges (APCs) out-of-pocket and preferred for funding to come from grant budgets first, followed by Office of Research Budgets, department or college budgets, and library budgets. Respondents expressed support for many of the open access subvention fund’s current criteria and processes, but they also indicated an interest in establishing a more equitable fund distribution cycle and allowing researchers to seek pre-approval once their article was accepted for peer-review. Findings related to open access publishing perspectives built upon previous research conducted at the U of I (Gaines, 2015) and across other institutions. Conclusion – This study confirmed the importance of evaluating and assessing library programs and services to ensure that they continue to meet the needs of campus communities. Through the study results, the researchers demonstrated that respondents were interested in open access publishing and the continuation of the open access subvention fund, as well as offering the U of I an opportunity to adjust the open access subvention fund’s processes to better serve researchers. These results also highlighted the need for those involved in open access publishing support to investigate new open access advocacy and education efforts to ensure that researchers receive the philosophical and financial support they need to pursue different models of scholarly publishing.

South Africa’s journey towards open access publishing

South Africa’s journey into open access publishing is not new, but it has received renewed energy and vigour. The current dominant commercial model of scholarly publishing undermines the production and dissemination of knowledge in science systems such as South Africa’s, first through a hopelessly inequitable higher education and science system with large disparities amongst institutions and because of the increasing unaffordability of the current subscription-based model. This is a description of the approach being adopted to address one part of the quest towards open access scholarly publishing.

The Future is Wide Open: Sustainable Scholarly Communications and Affordable Learning in Libraries

Our current scholarly publishing model is not sustainable. Librarians need to engage our academic communities in a shift toward open access models. It will involve new work, new positions in libraries, and significant changes to roles within our institutions. In this commentary, the authors lay out why this shift is necessary and what it might entail for libraries and library resources. They describe their library’s increasing role in supporting and advocating for open access and open educational resources through participation in campus affordable learning initiatives, working with disciplinary faculty in new ways to draw attention to open access resources.

Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures

Digital scholarship and electronic publishing within scholarly communities change when metrics and open infrastructures take center stage for measuring research impact. In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories as a new model of scholarly publishing over the last three decades has been one of the major developments. As it unfolds, the landscape of scholarly communication is transitioning—with much being privatized as it is made open—and turning towards alternative metrics, such as social media attention, author-level, and article-level metrics. Moreover, the granularity of evaluating research impact through new metrics and social media changes the objective standards of evaluating research performance. Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. Moves towards scholarly web development and publishing on the semantic and social web with open infrastructures, citations, and alternative metrics—how preprints advance building the web as data—is discussed. We determine that this will viably demonstrate new metrics and, by enhancing research publishing tools in the scholarly commons, facilitate various communities of practice. However, for preprint repositories to be sustainable, scholarly communities and funding agencies should support continued investment in open knowledge, alternative metrics development, and open infrastructures in scholarly publishing.

Faculty awareness, use and attitudes towards scholarly open access: A Pakistani perspective

Open access is a new scholarly publishing model that aims to provide free access to scholarly information to all members of society. This study analyzes the awareness, use and attitudes of Pakistani faculty members towards scholarly open access. A structured questionnaire was designed to collect data from the respondents by using an online survey tool, Google Forms. The population of the study was the faculty members of 21 universities and higher education institutions located in Islamabad. A sample of 3000 faculty members were invited, through email, to participate in the study; of which 616 completed the survey, with a response ratio of 20.53%. Descriptive statistics and (SPSS) version 21.0 were used for data analysis. The findings of the study reveal that, although majority of the Pakistani faculty members (71.5%) were aware of the scholarly open access before this survey, their awareness level about open access-related resources and initiatives was very low. The Pakistani faculty members used open access venues more frequently to access scholarly contents rather than to publish their own research works. A lack of awareness to publish in open access venues, and publication fees of open access journals were the key challenges faced by the Pakistani faculty members. The attitudes of faculty members towards open access were very positive in all contexts. Large readership, impact factor, free access to readers and no publication fee were the key motivational factors for the faculty members to publish in open access journals.

How commercial publishers play a role in developing a sustainable model for Open Access publishing

One of the objectives of the open access movement has been to upend the traditional model for scholarly publishing by making research findings freely available to anyone, anywhere. The trend emerged partly in response to the major publishing houses having become the gatekeepers of the dissemination of research findings and setting high prices for access to this material via subscriptions to scholarly journals.On the face of it, this state of affairs suggests that commercial actors have no place in the realm of open access publishing. However, an argument can be made to the effect that commercial companies have a part to play in transforming the way scientific publication works and contribute to making research freely available. Having numerous interested parties in the OA domain may contribute towards making research accessible, leading to a general increase in innovation. This is necessary in a field that by and large is in its infancy, technologically, politically and economically. An OA initiative that is part of a profit-driven organization does not preclude it from contributing to a sustainable publishing model, and a commercial approach is not necessarily incompatible with the principles. In this poster we offer NOASP as an example, and part of the wider context of commercial open access publishing. Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing is an open access publisher of scholarly journals and books in Scandinavia and a subdivision of Cappelen Damm Akademisk. NOASP was established in 2015 – and continues to grow. In our experience, meeting the very specific criteria for Open Access publishing requires substantial investments in technology and human resources. Publishers who choose to establish themselves in this niche area must have a long-term strategy and develop specific expertise. Competition between publishing houses and other actors provides incentives for staying abreast of new requirements and standards, technology and infrastructure. These strategic and economic factors directly and positively impact the quality of journals and publishing solutions, and ultimately contribute to innovation in the field. The economics of commercial publishing, by heightening competition between the services publishers provide, therefore leads to improvement of both technical platforms and editorial practices. In turn, this leads to higher quality of the end product and broader distribution of the freely available research, which should ultimately be the goal of the OA movement.

A Journal is a Club: A New Economic Model for Scholarly Publishing

AbstractA new economic model for the analysis of scholarly publishing – journal publishing in particular – is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In this model, publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion. A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense, a journal is a club. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities of a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against the negative externalities of crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal). A new economic model of a journal as a knowledge club is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and fin...

Traditional versus Open Access Scholarly Journal Publishing: An Economic Perspective

The debate surrounding open access journal publishing is part of a broader debate related to the electronic dissemination of information. Compared to print journals, electronic journals have lower publishing costs and allow for expanded access to scholarly research. However, open access publishing introduces an added cost of evaluating an ever-increasing number of published sources and the potential for misinformation. This paper analyses the traditional and open access scholarly publishing models from an economic perspective. Analysing the alternative market structures of these models can help to identify strategies to maximize net benefits in the scholarly publishing market.

Managing the transition to open access publishing: a psychological perspective

Abstract To manage the transition to the open access (OA) model of scholarly publishing, we need to understand better what enables, encourages and inhibits the adoption of OA publishing among scientists, and to appreciate individual differences within disciplines. The study adopts a psychological perspective to elucidate motivations, capabilities and opportunities for OA publishing among bioscientists in the UK. To identify differences within the discipline, bioscientists with starkly different past practices for disclosing research data and technologies were interviewed. The sampled bioscientists face similar obstacles and enablers in their physical environment, but that their motivations and experience of their social environments differ. One group is strongly motivated by their moral convictions and beliefs in benefits of OA and feels peer pressure related to OA. The other group expresses fewer pro-OA beliefs, holds beliefs demotivating OA publishing, but feels pressure from research funders to adopt it. The former group makes more frequent use of OA publishing, which suggests that only those with strong motivations will work to overcome the social and physical obstacles. The individual differences within the discipline suggest that bioscientists are unlikely to respond to OA policies in the same way and, thus, the appropriateness of one-size-fits-all OA policies is questioned.

A journal is a club: a new economic model for scholarly publishing

Abstract A new economic model for the analysis of scholarly publishing – journal publishing in particular – is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In this model, publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion. A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense, a journal is a club. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities of a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against the negative externalities of crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal). A new economic model of a journal as a knowledge club is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them.

Forerunners and Manifold: A Case Study in Iterative Publishing

Manifold rethinks the print model of scholarly publishing by offering an open-source platform where authors and publishers can produce iterative texts, powerful annotation tools, rich media support, and robust community dialogue. One aspect of iterative publishing is producing ‘grey literature’ texts. At the University of Minnesota Press, the Forerunners series offers authors a space to publish their creative, speculative thought quickly and accessibly. This allows authors to engage with the expertise of a university press at a much earlier stage than usual. In this piece, the authors discuss how this process affects the acquisitions and production workflows, and offer Forerunners as a case study for thinking through iterative scholarship.

Open Access 2020 – The final road to Open Access

Open Access 2020 is an international initiative that aims to induce the swift, smooth and scholarly-oriented transformation of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to open access publishing on a large scale. The last decades of the open access movement have made open access become strong as a principal- but weak in practice. With OA2020 we aim to move the focus to a new concrete goal: converting the default business model of scholarly publishing from subscription to open access. The poster outlines backgrounds as well as a roadmap of the initiative.

Technologies of Reading and Writing: Transformation and Subjectivation in Digital Times

Technologies of Reading and Writing: Transformation and Subjectivation in Digital Times

A model of scholarly publishing with hybrid academic journals

In April 2013, all of the major academic publishing houses moved thousands of journal titles to an original hybrid model, under which authors of accepted papers can choose between an expensive open access track and the traditional track available only to subscribers. This paper argues that authors might use publication strategy as a quality signaling device. The imperfect information game between authors and readers presents several types of Perfect Bayesian Equilibria, including a separating equilibrium in which only authors of high quality papers are driven toward the open access track. The publishing house will choose the open-access publication fee that supports the emergence of the highest return equilibrium. Journal structures will evolve over time according to the journals' accessibility - quality profiles.

Is Openness Enough?

Openness, applied in scholarly and research practices, has garnered increasing interest in recent years. With the broadening reach of Open Access as an alternative scholarly publishing model, there is anticipation that open scholarship practices will produce desirable outcomes for research and access to knowledge. The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly to highlight that Open Access is more than just the removal of paywalls, and that it is part of a wider set of open practices that can potentially yield a more collaborative and equitable global landscape of knowledge production. Secondly, to present the IDS Bulletin as a case study for an Open Access publication that has evolved to adapt to a changing scholarly publishing landscape. By critiquing prevalent discourse on openness alongside this case study, we hope that this article contributes to conversations on issues at the intersection of open scholarship, collaborative research and equitable access to knowledge.