Author Choice of Journal Type Based on Income Level of Country

Readers can access open access articles for free, but authors or research funders pay article-processing charges to publish them. This requirement may deter authors in low-income countries from publishing in open access. This study investigates the choices that authors make among three types of open access journal and closed (subscription) journals in history, economics, science, and technology based on their countries’ income level. The sample comprises research articles published in journals in English in 2020 and indexed in Scopus. The results show that authors in low-income countries publish more in gold open access than do authors in lower-middle- and upper-middle-income countries, who tend not to publish in hybrid open access and to favour closed journals. Authors from high-income countries publish more in hybrid open access than do authors in the other groups of countries. Although major publishers waive their article-processing charges for authors in low-income countries, these authors amount to less than 1 per cent of the total. Improving the effectiveness of publishers’ waiver policies is necessary.

Why I Review Unimpressive Books

Unimpressive books fail to make effective, distinctive, or otherwise substantive contributions. Yet their reviews can be useful to potential readers (as caveats), to publishers (as quality-control checks), to authors working on similar book projects (as models of what to avoid), and even to the reviewers themselves (as exercises for developing connoisseurship within a specific field). By articulating the implications and transferability of evaluative criteria, this essay explores the value and utility of such reviews.

What I’ve Learned about Writing a Second Book

Much has been written to inform academics about revising a dissertation and completing a book, but most of this advice focuses on first-time authors. By contrast, there is little advice directed toward more experienced academic authors that considers the conditions they confront when writing a second book, such as increased demands on them to provide institutional and professional service. Second-time authors may also enjoy the assurance that comes from having established a relationship with a publisher or having achieved tenure. This article offers three lessons about how writing a second book is different from writing the first. It considers how experienced authors’ relationships with publishers may change with a second book, and it examines ways to situate a second book in the course of a long academic career.

The Role of the Editor of an Academic Publication Blog

Academic blogging is now a widely used medium for scholarly communication. A substantial body of literature exists on the potential opportunities and challenges that blogging affords to scholars, yet the role of blog editors in facilitating research dissemination and public engagement remains largely overlooked. This paper draws on insights from the development of academic blogs by the London School of Economics between 2010 and 2020. It discusses the demands on blog editors and sets forth a framework for academic institutions and scholars to support editors in their efforts to realize the benefits of academic blogging.

The Internationalization of Chinese English-Language Humanities and Social Science Journals

This paper surveys the status of Chinese English-language journals in the humanities and social sciences (HSS-CELJs). HSS-CELJs are an important vehicle for disseminating Chinese scholarly voices and culture throughout the world. We used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the status of HSS-CELJs according to a number of attributes: growth rate over time, type of publisher, discipline, region of publication, publishing frequency, independence versus co-publication, and inclusion in citation indexes. We discuss some of the challenges facing HSS-CELJ publishing and highlight several contradictions of internationalization in the Chinese context. As of March 2020, eighty-seven HSS-CELJs covered nineteen disciplines, among which economics (17 per cent) and law (13 per cent) accounted for the highest proportions. The establishment of HSS-CELJs has increased significantly since 2004. Fifty-two per cent of HSS-CELJs were jointly operated with international publishers under two different models of cooperation, and twenty-eight (32 per cent) were indexed in international databases.