scholarly journals What Are the Characteristics of Canadian Independent, Scholarly Journals? Results from a Website Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Lange ◽  
Sarah Severson

The dominance of commercial publishers (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015) has led to a discussion in Canada focusing on alternative models for supporting independent, non-commercial, scholarly journals. Although small in number, these journals represent an important contribution to Canadian and global scholarship. They also act as a counterbalance to the increasingly for-profit nature of scholarly publishing. Despite their importance, there exists no definitive list of journals of this nature in Canada, making analysis and understanding of their characteristics difficult.In order to address this gap, the researchers undertook an analysis of the websites of 485 Canadian, independent, scholarly journals. Independent was defined as journals which are not affiliated with a commercial publisher. The researchers gathered data for each journal on their access type (e.g., closed, open access), subject area, size and composition of the editorial team, and any affiliation(s). This data was then analyzed to create a portrait of these journals with these themes. The researchers found that most of these journals were affiliated with at least one organization, with over half being associated with two or more. They also discovered that affiliations varied depending on the discipline and that the size of the editorial team was correlated to the access type. Journals were predominantly in the humanities and social sciences, and the majority were open access (OA) without article processing charges (APCs).While the focus of this study is on Canadian journals, this article provides a framework for other researchers to examine non-commercial, independent publishing in their own countries. Its results also provide preliminary data which may inspire future avenues of research, particularly into models for non-APC, open access journals as well as the editorial board structure and size for independent journals.

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Dalton

Objective – To determine the extent to which the open access (OA) status of a journal influences authors in their journal selection decisions and to analyze the sources of funding for the article-processing charges (APCs) applied in professional OA publishing. Design – Survey questionnaire. Setting – The international open access scholarly publishing sector. Subjects – 1,038 researchers across all academic disciplines who have recently published work in open access journals that charge APCs. Methods – Journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals were stratified into seven discipline clusters, and systematic random sampling was used where possible to collect a sample of up to 15 journals per cluster that levy APCs. For each individual journal, the authors of the 15 most recently published articles (working from 2010 backwards) were invited to complete a web-based questionnaire on the factors influencing their choice of journal and the source(s) used to fund processing charges. Additional background information about the authors and journals was also collected and merged with the survey responses. Main Results – The results of the survey identified the fit of the article with the journal’s subject area, the perceived quality or impact of the journal, and the speed of the peer-review and publishing process as the dominant factors in the journal selection decision of authors. All three aspects were judged as either “very important” or “important” by 80% or more of respondents – significantly higher than the corresponding figure of 60% in relation to the open access status of the journal. The analysis also indicated that two key elements appear to influence how APCs are funded: the research discipline and the country of origin of the author. The use of research grants to fund charges is more prevalent in scientific disciplines than in the humanities, whilst researchers based in lower-income countries more frequently identify APCs as a barrier than those in higher-income countries. Grants and institutional funding tend to be the primary sources of funding for journals with higher APCs, whilst personal funding is utilised more often in cases where the fee is less than $500. Conclusion – Despite the increasing focus on the accessibility and visibility of research, academics still appear to place a greater value on ‘who’ rather than ‘how many’ readers access their research, and consequently traditional factors still persist as the main determinants in an author’s choice of journal. The future success of the APC model, compared with the traditional subscription-based or hybrid models, will ultimately depend on the ability of authors to obtain the necessary funding to pay such charges, combined with the extent to which the quality of services offered by open access publishers is perceived as being commensurate with the associated publishing fees.


2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 155-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammadamin Erfanmanesh

Purpose This study aims to provide an extensive overview of OA journals’ status and quality in 27 research areas based on all Scopus-indexed journals. It shows the volume of OA journals, proportion of publications in OA journals and the quality of these journals in comparison with subscription-based counterparts. Design/methodology/approach This research investigated 22,256 active peer-reviewed journals indexed by Scopus in 2015. Data were gathered using the Journal Metrics website. The current research adopted four indicators to compare the quality of OA and non-OA journals indexed in Scopus under each subject area, namely citedness rate, CiteScore, SNIP and SJR. Findings OA journals comprised approximately 17 per cent out of the total journals indexed by Scopus in 2015. The results revealed an uneven spread of OA journals across disciplines, ranged from 5.5 to 28.7 per cent. Studying the quality of journals as measured by CiteScore, SJR SNIP leads us to the finding that, in all research areas, except for health profession and nursing, non-OA journals attain statistically significant higher average quality than do OA journals. Originality/value Although OA publishing improves the visibility of scholarly journals, this increase is not always coupled with increase in journals’ impact and quality.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
Heather Morrison

The current state of scholarly communication is presented as one of contest between an increasingly commercial system that is dysfunctional and incompatible with the basic aims of scholarship, and emerging alternatives, particularly open access publishing and open access archiving. Two approaches to facilitating global participation in scholarly communication are contrasted; equity is seen as a superior goal to the donor model, which requires poverty or inequity to succeed. The current state of scholarly communication within the discipline of communication is examined. A relatively healthy percentage of not-for-profit publishers and at least 76 fully open access journals suggest strong potential for emancipating scholarship in communication from commercial imperatives. Specific sites of struggle and actions for scholars, including developing open access journals and self-archiving, are presented.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Marilyn Kirshbaum, Editor-in-Chief

I am absolutely thrilled to have such an opportunity to make a unique contribution to my profession and the wider community. At heart, I have been a nurse for a very long time. I have spent many years in clinical practice and have been fortunate to have personally thrived in the pursuit of scientific inquiry, analysis, reporting and scholarship in nursing. As this is the first editorial of Nursing Reports, I would like to share my vision. An open access journal of this kind is intended, first and foremost, to provide a communication platform from which all levels of credible knowledge relative to nursing, from all reaches of the world, could be disseminated, diffused and debated. A key objective is to make rigorously conducted research accessible to the full spectrum of practicing nurses, academics, educators and interested members of the public. It will be the job of the editorial team to ensure that high academic and ethical standards for research and reporting are reached so that we can build a strong and sound reputation; we want the journal to be widely read and influential within the broad fields of nursing, health and social care. A second objective relates to the relatively new paradigm of open access journals; there is huge scope here to reach out to nurses in the world, not only those who have subscriptions or affiliated with academic or health service libraries. The focus of the journal is to present a global perspective of nursing, its advances and issues of current concern. As nurses we are committed to the health of communities – our personal contribution may be clinical, political, educative or academic. Therefore submissions on all areas relevant to nursing are requested, whether they are in the form of empirical reports, reviews of literature, conceptual analyses, debates, short reports from around the globe or open letters that are of concern to the international community. I believe that this journal could be so vibrant and dynamic! Our esteemed associate editors and editorial board currently includes experts in mental health, cancer care, aging, public health and family, acute care, palliative care, social sciences, health promotion, empowerment, disadvantaged groups and education – and statistics. A huge welcome to ALL! Now, let’s get writing and communicating!!


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-27
Author(s):  
Nina Schönfelder

With the ongoing open-access transformation, article processing charges (APCs) are gaining importance as one of the main business models for open-access publishing in scientific journals. This paper analyzes how much of APC pricing can be attributed to journal-related factors. With UK data from OpenAPC (which aggregates fees paid for open-access articles by universities, funders, and research institutions), APCs are explained by the following variables: (a) the “source normalized impact per paper” (SNIP), (b) whether the journal is open access or hybrid, (c) the publisher of the journal, (d) the subject area of the journal, and (e) the year. The results of the multivariate linear regression show that the journal’s impact and hybrid status are the most important factors for the level of APCs. However, the relationship between APC and SNIP is different for open-access journals and hybrid journals. APCs paid to open-access journals were found to be strongly increasing in conjunction with higher journal citation impact, whereas this relationship was observed to be much looser for articles in hybrid journals. This paper goes beyond simple statistics, which have been discussed so far in the literature, by using control variables and applying statistical inference.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Luiz APPEL ◽  
Sarita ALBAGLI

Abstract Different funding and business model alternatives for Open Access to scientific publication have been discussed and tried, either by Gold open access journals or by the ‘hybrid’ ones. A growing number of both types of scholarly journals have adopted a publication fee – more specifically an Article Processing Charge – as their open access business model, a procedure that has been the subject of controversies. The objective of this study is to characterize Brazilian open access journals that adopt article processing charges. The main contribution of this study is to audit and support decision making of editorial policies and business models for open access that are being proposed by and for Brazilian journals. We defined a sample of Brazilian open access journals using article processing charges extracted from the Directory of Open Access Journals database in April 2018 along with their classification in the Scimago Journal Ranking, Journal Citation Reports and Qualis Capes system, considered as an indicator of prestige of academic journals. The study reveals that a small number of Brazilian open access journals are currently applying article processing charges, with practices varying mainly according to fields of study, types of organization and classification according to the Qualis system.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matheus Pereira Lobo

A huge collaborative open science model is proposed. Many authors collaborating in a paper leads to a substantial reduction for the Article Processing Charges (APCs) in the Open Access Journals. This can significantly stimulate research within a healthier citizen and open science culture.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Гульдар Фанисовна Ибрагимова ◽  
Ольга Алексеевна Ковалевич ◽  
Раиса Николаевна Афонина ◽  
Елена Алексеевна Лесных ◽  
Яна Игоревна Ряполова ◽  
...  

Conference paper Covered by Leading Indexing DatabasesOpen European Academy of Public Sciences aims to have all of its journals covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus and Web of Science indexing systems. Several journals have already been covered by SCIE for several years and have received official Impact Factors. Some life sciencerelated journals are also covered by PubMed/MEDLINE and archived through PubMed Central (PMC). All of our journals are archived with the Spanish and Germany National Library.All Content is Open Access and Free for Readers Journals published by Open European Academy of Public Sciences are fully open access: research articles, reviews or any other content on this platform is available to everyone free of charge. To be able to provide open access journals, we finance publication through article processing charges (APC); these are usually covered by the authors’ institutes or research funding bodies. We offer access to science and the latest research to readers for free. All of our content is published in open access and distributed under a Creative Commons License, which means published articles can be freely shared and the content reused, upon proper attribution.Open European Academy of Public Sciences Publication Ethics StatementOpen European Academy of Public Sciences is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peerreview together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications.Mission and ValuesAs a pioneer of academic open access publishing, we serve the scientific community since 2009. Our aim is to foster scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. In addition to being at the root of Open European Academy of Public Sciences and a key theme in our journals, we support sustainability by ensuring the longterm preservation of published papers, and the future of science through partnerships, sponsorships and awards.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elke Maurer ◽  
Nike Walter ◽  
Tina Histing ◽  
Lydia Anastasopoulou ◽  
Thaqif El Khassawna ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Along with emerging open access journals (OAJ) predatory journals increasingly appear. As they harm accurate and good scientific research, we aimed to examine the awareness of predatory journals and open access publishing among orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Methods In an online survey between August and December 2019 the knowledge on predatory journals and OAJ was tested with a hyperlink made available to the participants via the German Society for Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery (DGOU) email distributor. Results Three hundred fifty orthopaedic and trauma surgeons participated, of which 291 complete responses (231 males (79.4%), 54 females (18.6%) and 5 N/A (2.0%)) were obtained. 39.9% were aware of predatory journals. However, 21.0% knew about the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ) as a register for non-predatory open access journals. The level of profession (e.g. clinic director, consultant) (p = 0.018) influenced the awareness of predatory journals. Interestingly, participants aware of predatory journals had more often been listed as corresponding authors (p < 0.001) and were well published as first or last author (p < 0.001). Awareness of OAJ was masked when journal selection options did not to provide any information on the editorial board, the peer review process or the publication costs. Conclusion The impending hazard of predatory journals is unknown to many orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Early stage clinical researchers must be trained to differentiate between predatory and scientifically accurate journals.


Author(s):  
Fayaz Ahmad LOAN ◽  
Refhat- UN-NISA ◽  
Asmat ALI

The main purpose of the paper is to study the publishing trends of the open access business and economics journals available in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The online survey was conducted for collection of data and quantitative method was applied for data analysis. The data were collected from the December 10-20, 2013 about more than six hundred business and economic journals and later presented in tabular forms to reveal the findings in accordance with desired objectives. The findings show that 607 business and economics journals are listed in the DOAJ and are published fromthe 67 countries of the world. The maximum number of journals (88, 14.50%) is published from Brazil, and during the first decade (2001-2010) of the 21st century (382, 62.93%). The linguistic assessment shows that the open access business and economics journals are mostly monolingual (405, 66.72%) and the majority of these are published in English language (498, 82.04%). The results also reveal that the majority of the business and economics journals (415, 68.37%) doesn’t charge publication fees to authors whereas almost one-fourth (147, 24.22%) of the journals demand article processing charges. The study does not explore the whole World Wide Web, but only the DOAJ and therefore, figures do not represent the actual number of the open access business and economics journals available online. The study is very beneficial for the business and economics scientists, academicians, researchers, information experts and open access advocates across the globe.


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