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Scholarly journals, the electronic posting platform arXiv, and the open-access publishing platform F1000Research are three paper publishing systems currently available to researchers. These three systems all have their shortcomings. We introduce another option, a Paper Online Rating Platform (PORP), where all submissions are rated and none rejected. PORP has obvious advantages, we argue, over the other three paper publishing systems. We define PORP, describe its advantages, and discuss some challenges for its future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims for a better understanding of the perspectives of contributors to Spanish academic journals regarding open access, open peer review, and altmetrics. Specifically, it explores how age, gender, years of professional experience, and perception and use of social media influence authors' opinions of these developments in scholarly publishing. A sample of 295 contributors to Spanish academic journals participated in a survey about the aforementioned topics. They were found to hold a favourable opinion of open access but were more cautious about open peer review and altmetrics. The responses of younger and female scholars indicated more reluctance to accept open peer review practices. A positive attitude toward social networks did not necessarily translate into enthusiasm for emerging trends in scholarly publishing. Despite this, ResearchGate users were more aware of altmetrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in attention from the scholarly communications and research community to open access (OA) and open data practices. These are potentially related because journal publication policies and practices both signal disciplinary norms and provide direct incentives for data sharing and citation. However, there is little research evaluating the data policies of OA journals. In this study we analyse the state of data policies for OA journals by employing random sampling of the Directory of Open Access Journals and Open Journal Systems journal directories and applying a coding framework that integrates both previous studies and emerging taxonomies of data sharing and citation. This study, for the first time, reveals both the low prevalence of datasharing policies and practices in OA journals, which differs from the previous studies of commercial journals in specific disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the challenges of labour provision in the open-access online scholarly publishing environment. While the technological underpinnings of open access imply an abundance, it is also the case that the labour that remains necessary in publishing processes is based on a set of economics that are scarce: the availability of human time, effort, and expertise. I here argue, with a demonstration of some of the labours of XML typesetting, that we are unlikely to realize the transformations of an abundant proliferation of scholarship without a substantial change and redistribution of labour functions to authors, which is unlikely to be socially accepted. The resultant outputs from this process would also, I argue, be less likely to be machine readable and semantically rich, thereby conflicting with other imagined digital possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of open access publishing necessitates evaluating the quality of a plethora of new journals. The problem of ensuring quality is inherent in the benefits and goals of open access publishing, which attempts to establish a system for reporting research findings that is inclusive and expeditious. However, inclusivity and speed may run counter to the goals of quality and reliability, and the pressure for researchers to publish creates incentives to participate in a fraudulent system. This paper presents an alternative approach to evaluating the legitimacy of open access publications. Those concerned about the quality of open access publishing have attempted to evaluate journals based on criteria that refer to externally available information. The approach used here provides additional, internal information about participation in journals' review processes. This additional information, namely, documentation of the process from submission through review to acceptance, is crucial for evaluating potentially fraudulent open access journals that might appear legitimate based on publicly available information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to determine the impact of open access on the publishing policies of Spanish scholarly journals indexed by Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. The study sample was obtained in October 2013. After discarding those that were not published in Spain and those that were inactive, we were left with a total of 406 journals (392 in Scopus and 171 in WoS, with an overlap of 157). Seven key indicators were established: age, subject area, language, publisher, portals, type of access, and copyright. Most of the data were gathered by directly analyzing the websites of the journals. Information from the Dulcinea directory was also used. Most of the journals (63 per cent of the total) were first published after 1980. Universities and commercial publishers were the most significant publishers, accounting for 42 per cent and 31 per cent of all journals, respectively. Social sciences and health sciences were the most significant disciplines, accounting for 33 per cent each. Of the journals, 60 per cent were available free immediately after publication and 76 per cent granted permission for self-archiving a version of the manuscript. By combining the two results, we estimated that 48 per cent of all journals were open access (offering free access and permission for self-archiving). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though it is widely accepted that academic publishing has both communication and credentialing functions, there have been no systematic attempts to categorize journals according to their various socio-political aims since Toby Miller's intervention in the early 2000s. Yet one-third of all peer-reviewed academic journals currently in print did not even exist at the time of his writing. This article takes these new journals into account in order to develop a systematic typology of academic journals based on their intended social purpose, both within and beyond the academy. After an overview of similar typologies and their strengths and limitations, the author proposes a tripartite typology for academic journals: journals of (1) record, (2) transformational activism, and (3) professional legitimation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the symbiotic relationship between the academy and scholarly publishing and argues that, in the digital age, this relationship is as important as ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To learn about the current situation of open access (OA) in Chinese social science journals, 714 journals listed in the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) in 2012 to 2013 were chosen to investigate, and search engines were used to analyze the OA status of these journals and their articles. The results showed that 13.73 per cent of journals in the CSSCI are OA, their OA format is mostly PDF, and 84.69 per cent of their OA resources are gathered from the publishing years 2004 to 2012. The level of OA journals focusing on different subjects is unbalanced in China. Articles from each journal published in 2007 were selected according to different standards to study the relationship of OA and citation. The results showed that the OA level of highly cited articles is higher than that of low- and non-cited articles. Factors that may restrict OA development in China were analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The open-access (OA) journals among the 1003 journals sponsored by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) were identified. Information about the following aspects of the journals were collected and analysed: when each journal was established, its publication cycle, its system model, its region, its discipline, the time between an issue's publication and the posting of the online version, the number of issues that have been made OA, and length of time that it has had an OA policy. On the basis of these results, problems associated with OA journals sponsored by CAST were found and relevant approaches that can promote OA publication in China were recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's peer-review process for scientific articles is unnecessarily opaque and offers few incentives to referees. Likewise, the publishing process is unnecessarily inefficient, and its results are only rarely made freely available to the public. This article outlines a comparatively simple extension of arXiv.org, an online preprint archive widely used in the mathematical and physical sciences, that addresses both of these problems. Under the proposal, editors invite referees to write public and signed reviews to be attached to the posted preprints, and then elevate selected articles to 'published' status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of current developments are creating questions over present models of publishing and scholarly communication. Will new journals continue to be launched? Will open-access developments such as subject or institutional repositories reach a tipping point at which libraries will start to cancel journal subscriptions? Is the journal article too static a mechanism, by comparison to the ways in which scholars are able to interact using blogs and wikis? Steadily emerging is a new future for the journal as part of an overall network of knowledge creation and scholarly communication. We are moving away from a world in which a few producers generate content to transmit to a set of users. Instead, the world of knowledge creation has a variety of routes through which research can be disseminated and feedback mechanisms facilitated by a range of collaborative tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study described in this report grew from recommendations for an investigation into journal economics by the National Humanities Alliance Task Force on Open Access and Scholarly Communications. Since experiments are underway to understand and enable a range of options for a shift to an open access (OA) business model for publishing some scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals, the question arises, Do these same options exist for a similar shift within humanities and social science (HSS) journals? Findings are reported from detailed analyses of the publishing economics, including all revenues and all costs, of eight flagship US journals across a number of different HSS disciplines. Using actual business information from their association publishers for each of the years 2005, 2006, and 2007, these findings clarify that for this sample of journals, an OA business model based only on revenue from the research article author or producer would not be sufficient to sustain these journals. The research articles published in these journals were longer than typical STM journal articles, and the percentage of non-article content (e.g., book reviews and other scholarly content) was greater. Information-gathering tools and methodologies that enable like-for-like comparison of journal revenues and costs were developed and are described in the report. As an initial in-depth business review of a sample of HSS journals, the report further clarifies some of the key differences between STM and HSS journals, articulates recent journal performance, makes tentative conclusions based on this sample, and proposes further questions that need to be answered to support a shift to OA business models that are sustainable across HSS journal publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]