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As scholarly publishing continues to expand its international dimension in the globalizing era, authors in non-Anglophone contexts today are increasingly confronted with the decision to publish nationally or internationally. Linguistic challenges aside, such a decision is complicated by the tension between local interests and international solidarity with changing conventions of scholarly publishing in the national context. This study investigated one facet of this tension by comparing national and international publishing activities in the humanities and social sciences based on the data collected from the websites of sixty Chinese-medium national journals and sixty English-medium international journals. The findings point to a complex interplay between local and international traditions, norms, and politics of knowledge production. What these changes mean and how they may bear on author choice is discussed with implications for understanding the dynamic landscape of scholarly publishing in non-Anglophone systems of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-publishing is common outside the academy, but faculty members rarely publish their own books. In this essay, a University of California professor explains why she chase to self-publish her book about academic writing and the costs and benefits of that choice.

Portwood-Stacer's book is a workbook, and working through it will deliver insights into the roles of book proposals and, perhaps even more importantly, the relationships that undergird scholarly publishing. After all, as any acquisitions editor will tell you, the book contract and the book manuscript, not the book proposal, are what matter more. [Extracted from the article]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is part one of a two-part study on the publishing behaviours of academics in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) at Australian universities. Our data consist of semi-structured interviews with twenty-one participants. Part one explores how current institutional pressures and the research funding environment are shaping academics' book publishing practices. In particular, we attend to the growing concerns of academics relating to the measurement and ranking of universities, which are driving performance expectations for publishing, and we examine how this trend is influenced by changes in governmental policy and the requirements of funding bodies. We found that Australian HSS academics face increasing pressure to publish journal articles rather than books, to publish books with prestigious international publishers, and to secure external funding for their research. These pressures could restrict their scholarly autonomy or even influence their research agenda. We contend that these developments have concerning implications for HSS in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is considerable merit in discounting self-citations when measuring the worth of a paper, a journal, or an author bibliometrically. However, excluding self-citations from the citation count for a paper or a researcher does not completely solve the problem of how to properly measure the interest generated by a paper or a researcher because other deficiencies in citation counts remain. One of these is associated self-citation. This occurs when a subset of the authors who published one paper go on to publish another paper in which they cite the previous one; any authors of the first paper whose names are not on the second paper receive a full citation credit (called here an associated self-citation), but the repeated authors do not because they are disqualified by self-citation. Associated self-citations, in which unrepeated authors receive citation credit, can skew a measure of bibliometric worth, but it is a deficiency that can be redressed. Additionally, there is propagation luck—where a paper becomes the reference to cite when there are other comparable and worthy candidates—which is a problem that can be only partially addressed. In this paper, the author analyzes these deficiencies with an example that compares the bibliometric success of two articles of which he was a co-author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief article, the author speculates on the possible negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on scholarship and scholarly output for academics who may already experience discrimination in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MIT Press published the eBook edition of Economics in the Age of COVID-19 by Joshua Gans in just over a month. This article describes the genesis of the project and how the MIT Press team was able to produce a book on an accelerated schedule. It then presents a series of factors for other publishers to consider when deciding whether and how to embark on similar rapid publication projects tied to current events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes actions recently taken by the government, scholarly publishers, and researchers to face the COVID-19 challenge in China. By promulgating new policies and funding new programs, the Chinese government at all levels has provided huge support for research on COVID-19. Guided by the new policies, Chinese scholarly book publishers have published 124 new titles on the subject of the coronavirus. Journal publishers have put out numerous calls for papers and launched open access platforms for COVID-19 research. Chinese researchers have produced 2021 English-language papers and 2837 Chinese papers on COVID-19. These activities have the potential to affect scholarly publishing in China and around the world in multiple ways: 1) by establishing a more reasonable academic evaluation system in China; 2) by bringing about a more balanced relationship between Chinese scholarly publishers' profit motive and their commitment to social welfare; and 3) by altering the communication channels that Chinese researchers use and the publishing choices they make. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When COVID-19 caused a full season of book events to be cancelled in spring 2020, the MIT Press decided immediately to take its author events online instead. This article describes the process of making a swift transition from festivals, book tours, launches, and conferences to a fully digital events landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is twofold: a) to analyse the current situation of Chinese academic book exports from a publisher's perspective, including models, channels, motivation, and performance; b) to identify the challenges that Chinese scholarly publishers are facing and explain their causes. In all, fifteen publishers from state presses, local presses, and university presses were interviewed. Desk research supplemented the interview data. We found that co-publishing, copyright transfer, and physical book export are the main models and that publishers prefer co-publishing and copyright transfer to exporting actual books. Book fairs and copyright agents are still important channels for negotiating export deals. Applying for funding programs and achieving evaluative benchmarks are the principal motivators for publishers. Surprisingly, over half the publishers interviewed do not profit much from exportation. Nevertheless, supervising departments and chief managers still attach much importance to it. At present, Chinese scholarly publishers are confronted with the challenges of a quality gap, state subsidy substituting for a real market, and information asymmetry. Unreasonable systems of academic evaluation and quality control, state-owned property rights, limited qualified manpower, and rare cooperation are key causes of these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic historians need to publish books in their respective specializations. Only a very few of these historians, however, are honoured with an American Historical Association (AHA) award for their monograph. This exploratory examination of selected AHA awards situates the award-winning monographs vis-à-vis the constellation of scholarly publishers that produced them. We sorted past AHA award winners by the press that published them, the gender of their author, and their area of specialization. The publishers most likely to publish an AHA-award-winning book constitute a small publishing core, yet there is room for a diverse group of publishers in the market for historical monographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly writing is an expectation for faculty at many universities because this writing is intended to advance knowledge and innovation. However, many professionally focused teaching universities do not have minimal faculty requirements for scholarly publication. This is a problem because faculty at these universities can contribute to the literature with research on teaching and on the practical application of theory. As faculty at a professionally focused teaching university that does not have a "publish or perish" policy, we desired to contribute scholarly writing beyond the university's expectations. This contribution became increasingly difficult to make on account of the fast-paced, innovative nature of our institution. Given this context, we formed a multi-disciplinary Intellectual Community of Practice, which we define as a group of intellectual practitioners who share a common goal, concern, or passion for learning through organized regular interactions. The goal of our group was to provide peer support for writing individually in our respective fields. In this article, we describe how we formed our group, how the group developed over time, and what positive outcomes have resulted from our interactions. We conclude the article with reflections on the process and recommendations to others for how to form an Intellectual Community of Practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first issue of Scholarly Publishing came out in October 1969. Now, in October 2019, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing celebrates fifty years of quarterly publication by the University of Toronto Press. To mark the journal's golden anniversary, this compilation features reminiscences written by contributors to JSP, covers from its back issues, and lists of its past editors and its twenty most-cited articles from 2004 to 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a prevalent myth, even in scholarly literature, that peer review was born, fully formed, with the advent of the first scientific journals in the seventeenth century. Recent work has shown this to be false. Many of the practices we call peer review are much newer—as new as the second half of the twentieth century. Some essential elements of peer review, however, are much older than the seventeenth century—a fact that has been neglected, both by those who have propagated the myth and also by those who have more recently sought to dispel it. This paper provides three examples of scholarly review from history. The first is an example of editorial review in ancient Rome. The second is an example of post-publication peer review involving scholia, beginning in the fourth century. The third is an example of pre-publication review by censors in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. I join with those authors who seek to bust the myth about the origins of scholarly review but do so by extending their work in the opposite direction chronologically. What we now give the name peer review is really a group of things that has evolved over time. If we want to learn from the history of scholarly review, then we should take a broader and longer view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishers of academic books in Australia have evolved in response to the crisis in scholarly publishing by adapting to the opportunities afforded by digital technologies for faster, cheaper, and more dynamic publishing approaches. Academic authors are at the core of the scholarly publishing landscape, so publishers need to understand their motives and needs. This paper examines data from a survey of academic authors in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) in Australia. Our aim for the survey was to understand the publishing experiences, behaviours, and perceptions of these authors. We discovered their expectations for publishers are high. They want fast turnaround, high-quality editing and production values, and cheaper books, which run up against three principal constraints for all scholarly publishers: quality, time, and cost. The prestige and reputation of a publisher are critical, and authors are primarily interested in traditional success measures of academic performance. Societal impact or engagement with research end-users was seen as less important. The findings of this project highlight a number of contradictions and tensions within the scholarly publishing landscape, and they have tangible implications for practices in HSS for authors and publishers, as well as for grant funders and university administrators who adopt policies and assign criteria for research evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

JSP was founded fifty years ago from the vision of Marsh Jeanneret and the pragmatism of Eleanor Harman, director and assistant director, respectively, of the University of Toronto Press. It was conceived in a golden age of scholarly publishing as a journal primarily of practical advice, for authors as well as publishers, presented in an elegant design. Rigorous research into its subject had not yet begun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of library-based digital scholarly publishing creates new opportunities to meet scholars' evolving publishing needs. This article presents findings from a national survey of humanities scholars on their attitudes toward digital publishing, the diversification of scholarly products, changing perceptions of authorship, and the desire to reach new audiences. Based on survey findings, the authors offer recommendations for how library publishers can make unique contributions to the scholarly publishing ecosystem and support the advancement of digital scholarship in the humanities by accommodating and sustaining more diverse products of digital scholarship, supporting new modes of authorship, and helping scholars reach broader audiences through interdisciplinary and open access publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dually authored first-person essay offers a narrative account of the far-ranging writing experiences of two well-established academics who, like many others working in higher education, contribute writing to mainstream publications as well as to scholarly ones. The essay considers the implications for professional and personal reputations when material targeted at one kind of audience is easily accessible by another through internet 'context collapse.' It argues for an inextricable connection between authorial ethics and the essential rigour of all good writing, and it encourages scholar-writers to invest their energies in non-scholarly writing for its value to society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When looking for journals to acquire, publishers will find many specialized academic journals that are managed outside university presses. Some are run by individual editorial offices, others by associations, and some under other arrangements. While these journals may not have large circulation numbers, they often have a faithful readership. Understanding the differences between the way a journal was managed in the past and the way a university press can manage it going forward will help the parties involved—publishers and editors—make an orderly transition through acquisition. A press planning to acquire a small, specialized journal should set at least four goals that will enable the journal to gain greater stability and prestige: 1) modifying or even overhauling the existing budget to improve its financial health, 2) amplifying its scholarly reputation, 3) designing it appropriately, and 4) marketing it more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay the author considers the purpose and value of post-publication reviews of scholarly books from the standpoint of a journal editor who publishes them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the publishers, publishing regions, disciplines, and open access status of recently established English-language journals in science and technology in China over a five-year period, 2012–16. It discusses the impetus for launching the journals and the challenges they face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book review is a remarkably durable form of criticism. It has survived perhaps threehundred years of cultural upheaval and philosophical turbulence with almost no alteration of spirit or basic format. We're so used to this piece of cultural furniture in its accustomed place that we neglect to ask the obvious questions. What is this thing? Is it functional or decorative or pointless? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas book reviews in mainstream media outlets reach huge audiences, and their effects are obvious, the effects of reviews in scholarly outlets—and therefore the reason publishers do the work to land them—are harder to quantify. Yet scholarly book reviews play an important role in the long-term perception of a scholarly work and in the larger ecology of scholarship. This essay explains a bit about how scholarly book reviews work and why publishers believe they are valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The printed book has endured a great deal in the last fifteen years. COVID-19 has changed some things in the industry, but the printed book is still alive and well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles published within the issue on topics like book publishing, research, and the works of academic librarians.

Despite sporadic reports on the publishing experiences in English of Chinese academics in Hong Kong and in mainland China (mainly doctoral students), little research has been conducted on a large scale to reveal how mainland Chinese academics perceive international publishing in English and what challenges they face. This study intends to fill this research gap. The findings we report come from a large-scale research project involving an online survey of 118 academics at eighteen universities in Shanghai, China. By analysing participant responses to the survey and interviews with eight academics, we show how the motivations of these academics contribute to their language choice for academic publishing. We discuss the implications of these findings for the wider academic community with regard to writing and publishing research articles in English as an international language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research into the scholarly communication attitudes and behaviours of Chinese early-career researchers (ECRs). This research comes from year two of a projected three-year-long study of ECRs from seven countries (China, France, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US), for which semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with study participants. For the findings reported in this paper, fourteen Chinese ECRs from science and social science disciplines at six different universities were interviewed during the period from March to May 2017. The interview record was compared with the previous year's (2016) record to identify changes in interviewees' responses to a battery of questions. In addition, contextual data were obtained from the CVs of the ECRs. Our findings indicate that the scholarly communication attitudes and behaviours of Chinese ECRs have changed from year one to year two. We observed noteworthy changes in Chinese ECRs' attitudes and behaviours regarding open access publishing and peer review. As compared with data from 2016, the ECRs are more positive about open access journals but more negative about the peer-review system. Social media and online communities are now more frequently used as supplementary channels for scholarly communication, and WeChat is becoming very popular for Chinese ECRs. Authorship policies, the academic evaluation system, and the prevalent use of social media are the most important factors bringing about the changes we observed. What remains unchanged for the Chinese ECRs is the persistent pressure they feel to publish papers in select journals in order to advance their careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enabled by technology, brought into being in response to a crisis in scholarly communication, and increasingly driven by governmental regulations, mandates of funding bodies, and universities' policies, open access (OA) is one of the fundamental issues that need to be considered as part of a publishing strategy and business model at a new university press. By considering the attitudes toward OA among the stakeholders of Australian university presses, I propose that a university press should take a hybrid approach to the OA publishing model to ensure diversified funding and income streams, editorial independence, and sustainability. At the same time, the press needs to maintain rigorous peer review, high-quality editing and production, and effective marketing while developing a focused publishing program in areas that are distinctive to the press and strategically aligned with the goals of its parent university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishing professionals concern themselves with the textual and graphic details of the content they publish. Editors, specifically, are responsible for checking and correcting the details of language, style, format, and typography. As precise as editors are paid to be, the nomenclature employed by editing professionals to identify the type of editing required by manuscripts, to communicate about editorial activity, and to evaluate editorial work is, ironically, imprecise. This article identifies the nomenclature used in the publishing industry, the scholarly publishing sector specifically, to label, describe, and discuss editorial activity. It provides an overview of terminology and definitions garnered from a review of literature on the subject of editing. It also presents the results of an original survey of editorial professionals, conducted online, which solicited responses to questions about terms and valuations in the practice of copy-editing. Based on these data, the article draws conclusions and makes suggestions about potential courses of action for standardizing editorial nomenclature in the publishing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides an introduction to publishing in the humanities for junior scholars at the start of their careers and beyond. It reflects on how our relationships to publishing change along our career paths. Indeed, while the focus on publications is significant during our junior years and continues after tenure, the pressure feels more intense and the possibility of publishing for promotion to full professor seems more elusive at the same time. The author confesses her own struggle in writing a second book. Transcending that hurdle--from associate to full--is, arguably, the most difficult challenge for most academics, particularly for women of colour, whose numbers remain abysmal at the rank of full professor. The essay provides a number of insights and strategies, taken from the author's experiences, discussions with other academics, and research, for successful publishing and promotion in the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]