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The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study of scholarly communication behaviour among Arab scholars. The main objective of this study is to determine how Egyptian and Saudi Arabian social sciences and humanities scholars engage in scholarly communication practices. The study used a mixed‐methods approach. A questionnaire was answered by a sample of 104 participants, followed by interviews with 36 participants to gain insight into the scholarly communication behaviour of the Arab scholars. The analysis demonstrated that participants use different styles of scholarly communication approaches. Most of the participants do use informal (social media) channels to communicate their research findings (particularly ResearchGate and Facebook), although priority is given to formal over informal publication in peer reviewed journals. Responses showed that the promotional systems of both countries dictate publication choices of scholars, reducing the amount of collaboration by ranking co‐publications lower than sole publications and favouring printed journals over online‐only journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have investigated factors thought to affect the total number of citations in various academic disciplines, and some general trends have emerged. However, there are still limited data for many fields, including aquatic sciences. Using papers published in 2003–2005 (n = 785), we investigated marine and freshwater biology articles to identify factors that may contribute to the probability of citation and for cumulative citation counts over 10 years. We found no relationships with probability of citation; however, we found evidence that for those that were cited at least once, cumulative citations were related to several factors. Articles cited by books received more citations than those never cited by books, which we hypothesized to be indicative of the impact an article may have in the field. We also found that articles first cited within 2 years of publication received more cumulative citations than those first cited after 2 years. We found no evidence that self‐citation (as the first citation) had a significant effect on total citations. Our findings were compared with previous studies in other disciplines, and it was found that aquatic science citation patterns are comparable to fields in science and technology but less so to humanities and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis to examine the characteristics and evolutionary trends of open access (OA) publications in natural and social sciences. We use data recorded by Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Journal Citation Reports during 2001–2015 as the main source. We then comparatively analyse the characteristics of natural and social sciences in terms of historical evolution, main contributors, and distribution of OA journals and publications across different languages, disciplines, and impact factor quartiles. Our results suggest that both natural and social sciences experienced dramatic growth of OA journals since 2009, but the share of social science OA journals within journal impact factor quartile 1 is much lower than that of natural sciences. While natural and social sciences share some similarities in OA publishing activities, such as main countries of contribution, they differ greatly in dimensions such as OA ratio across specific disciplines, countries, and publishing languages. We acknowledge that OA publishing offers a level playing field for traditionally disadvantaged languages, countries, and scientific disciplines, but meanwhile, the advancement of high‐quality OA publishing needs more targeted and sophisticated approaches to tackle differences in natural and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of initiatives exist in European countries to support open scholarly communication in humanities and social sciences. This article looks at the work of Open Access in the European Research Area through Scholarly Communication (OPERAS), a consortium of 36 partners from all over Europe, including many university presses, that is working to build a future European infrastructure to address the challenges in open access publishing. Their initial study, OPERAS‐D, revealed a variety of models among the partners influenced by national cultures. Although the partners’ activities were found to be fragmented, they also reflect the ‘bibliodiversity’ that exists in European societies. To address the challenge of fragmentation, it is argued that, by following a cooperative model, European actors can benefit by sharing expertise, resources, and costs of development for the good of all. As a future infrastructure to support open scholarly communication across Europe, OPERAS aims to coordinate a range of publishers and service providers to offer researchers and societies a fully functional web of services to cover the entire research lifecycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key points The number of printed book reviews in the social sciences is currently declining. The number of online book reviews is currently increasing. There are ways of measuring the impact of book reviews so that they can be included in research assessment exercises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]