Academic journal publishing reform

Main article: Academic journal publishing reform

Several models are being investigated, such as open publication models or adding community-
oriented features.[29] It is also considered that "Online scientific interaction outside the traditional
journal space is becoming more and more important to academic communication".[30] In addition,
experts have suggested measures to make the publication process more efficient in
disseminating new and important findings by evaluating the worthiness of publication on the
basis of the significance and novelty of the research finding.[31]

Scholarly paper
See also: Scientific literature § Scientific article, and Academic journal § Scholarly articles

In academic publishing, a paper is an academic work that is usually published in an academic

journal. It contains original research results or reviews existing results. Such a paper, also called
an article, will only be considered valid if it undergoes a process of peer review by one or
more referees (who are academics in the same field) who check that the content of the paper is
suitable for publication in the journal. A paper may undergo a series of reviews, revisions, and re-
submissions before finally being accepted or rejected for publication. This process typically takes
several months. Next, there is often a delay of many months (or in some fields, over a year)
before an accepted manuscript appears.[32] This is particularly true for the most popular journals
where the number of accepted articles often outnumbers the space for printing. Due to this, many
academics self-archive a 'preprint' or 'postprint' copy of their paper for free download from their
personal or institutional website.[citation needed]
Some journals, particularly newer ones, are now published in electronic form only. Paper journals
are now generally made available in electronic form as well, both to individual subscribers, and to
libraries. Almost always these electronic versions are available to subscribers immediately upon
publication of the paper version, or even before; sometimes they are also made available to non-
subscribers, either immediately (by open access journals) or after an embargo of anywhere from
two to twenty-four months or more, in order to protect against loss of subscriptions. Journals
having this delayed availability are sometimes called delayed open access journals. Ellison in
2011 reported that in economics the dramatic increase in opportunities to publish results online
has led to a decline in the use of peer-reviewed articles.[33]
Categories of papers
See also: Types of scientific journal articles

An academic paper typically belongs to some particular category such as:

 Concept paper[34][35]
 Research paper
 Case report or Case series
 Position paper
 Review article or Survey paper
 Species paper
 Technical paper
Note: Law review is the generic term for a journal of legal scholarship in the United States, often
operating by rules radically different from those for most other academic journals.

Peer review
Main article: Academic peer review

Peer review is a central concept for most academic publishing; other scholars in a field must find
a work sufficiently high in quality for it to merit publication. A secondary benefit of the process is
an indirect guard against plagiarism since reviewers are usually familiar with the sources
consulted by the author(s). The origins of routine peer review for submissions dates to 1752
when the Royal Society of London took over official responsibility for Philosophical
Transactions. However, there were some earlier examples.[36]
While journal editors largely agree the system is essential to quality control in terms of rejecting
poor quality work, there have been examples of important results that are turned down by one
journal before being taken to others. Rena Steinzor wrote:
Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the
identification of high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were initially rejected
by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as the editor of Philosophical
Transaction's1796 rejection of Edward Jenner's report of the first vaccination against smallpox.[37]
"Confirmatory bias" is the unconscious tendency to accept reports which support the reviewer's
views and to downplay those which do not. Experimental studies show the problem exists in peer
reviewing.[38]
There are various types of peer review feedback that may be given prior to publication, including
but not limited to:

 Single-blind peer review

 Double-blind peer review
 Open peer review
Rejection rate
The possibility of rejections of papers is an important aspect in peer review. The evaluation of
quality of journals is based also on rejection rate. The best journals have the highest rejection
rates (around 90–95%).[39] American Psychological Association journals' rejection rates ranged
"from a low of 35 per cent to a high of 85 per cent."[40] The complement is called "acceptance
rate".

Publishing process
The process of academic publishing, which begins when authors submit a manuscript to a
publisher, is divided into two distinct phases: peer review and production.
The process of peer review is organized by the journal editor and is complete when the content
of the article, together with any associated images, data, and supplementary material are
accepted for publication. The peer review process is increasingly managed online, through the
use of proprietary systems, commercial software packages, or open source and free software. A
manuscript undergoes one or more rounds of review; after each round, the author(s) of the article
modify their submission in line with the reviewers' comments; this process is repeated until the
editor is satisfied and the work is accepted.
The production process, controlled by a production editor or publisher, then takes an article
through copy editing, typesetting, inclusion in a specific issue of a journal, and then printing and
online publication. Academic copy editing seeks to ensure that an article conforms to the
journal's house style, that all of the referencing and labelling is correct, and that the text is
consistent and legible; often this work involves substantive editing and negotiating with the
authors.[41] Because the work of academic copy editors can overlap with that of authors' editors,
[42]
editors employed by journal publishers often refer to themselves as "manuscript editors".
[41]
During this process, copyright is often transferred from the author to the publisher.
In the late 20th century author-produced camera-ready copy has been replaced by electronic
formats such as PDF. The author will review and correct proofs at one or more stages in the
production process. The proof correction cycle has historically been labour-intensive as
handwritten comments by authors and editors are manually transcribed by a proof reader onto a
clean version of the proof. In the early 21st century, this process was streamlined by the
introduction of e-annotations in Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, and other programs, but it still
remained a time-consuming and error-prone process. The full automation of the proof correction
cycles has only become possible with the onset of online collaborative writing platforms, such
as Authorea, Google Docs, Overleaf, and various others, where a remote service oversees
the copy-editing interactions of multiple authors and exposes them as explicit, actionable historic
events. At the end of this process, a final version of record is published.
From time to time some published journal articles have been retracted for different reasons,
including research misconduct.[43]

Citations
Main article: Citation

Academic authors cite sources they have used, in order to support their assertions and
arguments and to help readers find more information on the subject. It also gives credit to
authors whose work they use and helps avoid plagiarism. The topic of dual publication (also
known as self-plagiarism) has been addressed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE),
as well as in the research literature itself.[44][45][46]
Each scholarly journal uses a specific format for citations (also known as references). Among the
most common formats used in research papers are the APA, CMS, and MLA styles.
The American Psychological Association (APA) style is often used in the social sciences. The
Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is used in business, communications, economics, and social
sciences. The CMS style uses footnotes at the bottom of page to help readers locate the
sources. The Modern Language Association (MLA) style is widely used in the humanities.

Publishing by discipline
Natural sciences
Main articles: Scientific literature, Technical literature, and Medical literature

Shares of the top five STM publishers in 2010

and 2020
Scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature is a large industry which generated $23.5
billion in revenue in 2011; $9.4 billion of that was specifically from the publication of English-
language scholarly journals.[47] The overall number of journals contained in the WOS database
increased from around 8,500 in 2010 to around 9,400 in 2020, while the number of articles
published increased from around 1.1 million in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2020.[48]
Most scientific research is initially published in scientific journals and considered to be a primary
source. Technical reports, for minor research results and engineering and design work (including
computer software), round out the primary literature. Secondary sources in the sciences include
articles in review journals (which provide a synthesis of research articles on a topic to highlight
advances and new lines of research), and booksfor large projects, broad arguments, or
compilations of articles. Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended
for broad public consumption or academic libraries.
A partial exception to scientific publication practices is in many fields of applied science,
particularly that of U.S. computer science research. An equally prestigious site of publication
within U.S. computer science are some academic conferences.[49] Reasons for this departure
include a large number of such conferences, the quick pace of research progress, and computer
science professional society support for the distribution and archiving of conference proceedings.
[50]

Social sciences
Publishing in the social sciences is very different in different fields. Some fields, like economics,
may have very "hard" or highly quantitative standards for publication, much like the natural
sciences. Others, like anthropology or sociology, emphasize field work and reporting on first-
hand observation as well as quantitative work. Some social science fields, such as public
health or demography, have significant shared interests with professions like law and medicine,
and scholars in these fields often also publish in professional magazines.[51]
Humanities
Publishing in the humanities is in principle similar to publishing elsewhere in the academy; a
range of journals, from general to extremely specialized, are available, and university
presses issue many new humanities books every year. The arrival of online publishing
opportunities has radically transformed the economics of the field and the shape of the future is
controversial.[52] Unlike science, where timeliness is critically important, humanities publications
often take years to write and years more to publish. Unlike the sciences, research is most often
an individual process and is seldom supported by large grants. Journals rarely make profits and
are typically run by university departments.[53]
The following describes the situation in the United States. In many fields, such as literature and
history, several published articles are typically required for a first tenure-track job, and a
published or forthcoming book is now often required before tenure. Some critics complain that
this de facto system has emerged without thought to its consequences; they claim that the
predictable result is the publication of much shoddy work, as well as unreasonable demands on
the already limited research time of young scholars. To make matters worse, the circulation of
many humanities journals in the 1990s declined to almost untenable levels, as many libraries
cancelled subscriptions, leaving fewer and fewer peer-reviewed outlets for publication; and many
humanities professors' first books sell only a few hundred copies, which often does not pay for
the cost of their printing. Some scholars have called for a publication subvention of a few
thousand dollars to be associated with each graduate student fellowship or new tenure-track hire,
in order to alleviate the financial pressure on journals.

Open access journals

Main article: Open access journal

Under Open Access, the content can be freely accessed and reused by anyone in the world
using an Internet connection. The terminology going back to Budapest Open Access
Initiative, Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities,
and Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. The impact of the work available as Open
Access is maximised because, quoting the Library of Trinity College Dublin: [54]

 Potential readership of Open Access material is far greater than that for publications
where the full-text is restricted to subscribers.
  Details of contents can be read by specialised web harvesters.
 Details of contents also appear in normal search engines like Google, Google
Scholar, Yahoo, etc.
Open Access is often confused with specific funding models such as Article Processing Charges
(APC) being paid by authors or their funders, sometimes misleadingly called "open access
model". The reason this term is misleading is due to the existence of many other models,
including funding sources listed in the original the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration:
"the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that
employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open
access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or
cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions
from the researchers themselves". For more recent open public discussion of open access
funding models, see Flexible membership funding model for Open Access publishing with no
author-facing charges.
Prestige journals using the APC model often charge several thousand dollars. Oxford University
Press, with over 300 journals, has fees ranging from £1000-£2500, with discounts of 50% to
100% to authors from developing countries.[55] Wiley Blackwell has 700 journals available, and
they charge different amounts for each journal.[56] Springer, with over 2600 journals, charges
US$3000 or EUR 2200 (excluding VAT).[57] A study found that the average APC (ensuring open
access) was between $1,418 and $2,727 USD.[58]
The online distribution of individual articles and academic journals then takes place without
charge to readers and libraries. Most open access journalsremove all the financial, technical, and
legal barriers Archived 2021-05-06 at the Wayback Machine that limit access to academic
materials to paying customers. The Public Library of Science and BioMed Central are prominent
examples of this model.
Fee-based open access publishing has been criticized on quality grounds, as the desire to
maximize publishing fees could cause some journals to relax the standard of peer review.
Although, similar desire is also present in the subscription model, where publishers increase
numbers or published articles in order to justify raising their fees. It may be criticized on financial
grounds as well because the necessary publication or subscription fees have proven to be higher
than originally expected. Open access advocates generally reply that because open access is as
much based on peer reviewing as traditional publishing, the quality should be the same
(recognizing that both traditional and open access journals have a range of quality). It has also
been argued that good science done by academic institutions who cannot afford to pay for open
access might not get published at all, but most open access journals permit the waiver of the fee
for financial hardship or authors in underdeveloped countries. In any case, all authors have the
option of self-archiving their articles in their institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories in
order to make them open access, whether or not they publish them in a journal.
If they publish in a Hybrid open access journal, authors or their funders pay a subscription journal
a publication fee to make their individual article open access. The other articles in such hybrid
journals are either made available after a delay or remain available only by subscription. Most
traditional publishers (including Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford University Press, and Springer
Science+Business Media) have already introduced such a hybrid option, and more are following.
The fraction of the authors of a hybrid open access journal that makes use of its open access
option can, however, be small. It also remains unclear whether this is practical in fields outside
the sciences, where there is much less availability of outside funding. In 2006, several funding
agencies, including the Wellcome Trust and several divisions of the Research Councils in the UK
announced the availability of extra funding to their grantees for such open access
journal publication fees.
In May 2016, the Council for the European Union agreed that from 2020 all scientific publications
as a result of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally
reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-
founded reasons for not doing so, for example, intellectual property rights or security or privacy
issues.[59][60]
Growth

Scholia has a profile for growth of scholarly literature (Q107292942).

In recent decades there has been a growth in academic publishing in developing countries as
they become more advanced in science and technology. Although the large majority of scientific
output and academic documents are produced in developed countries, the rate of growth in
these countries has stabilized and is much smaller than the growth rate in some of the
developing countries.[citation needed] The fastest scientific output growth rate over the last two decades
has been in the Middle East and Asia with Iran leading with an 11-fold increase followed by the
Republic of Korea, Turkey, Cyprus, China, and Oman.[61] In comparison, the only G8 countries in
top 20 ranking with fastest performance improvement are, Italy which stands at tenth
and Canada at 13th globally.[62][63]
By 2004, it was noted that the output of scientific papers originating from the European
Union had a larger share of the world's total from 36.6% to 39.3% and from 32.8% to 37.5% of
the "top one per cent of highly cited scientific papers". However, the United States' output
dropped from 52.3% to 49.4% of the world's total, and its portion of the top one percent dropped
from 65.6% to 62.8%.[64]
Iran, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa were the only developing countries among the 31
nations that produced 97.5% of the most cited scientific articles in a study published in 2004. The
remaining 162 countries contributed less than 2.5%.[64] The Royal Society in a 2011 report stated
that in share of English scientific research papers the United States was first followed by China,
the UK, Germany, Japan, France, and Canada. The report predicted that China would overtake
the United States sometime before 2020, possibly as early as 2013. China's scientific impact, as
measured by other scientists citing the published papers the next year, is smaller although also
increasing.[65] Developing countries continue to find ways to improve their share, given research
budget constraints and limited resources.[66]

Role for publishers in scholarly communication

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There is increasing frustration amongst OA advocates, with what is perceived as resistance to

change on the part of many of the established academic publishers. Publishers are often
accused of capturing and monetising publicly-funded research, using free academic labour for
peer review, and then selling the resulting publications back to academia at inflated profits.
[67]
Such frustrations sometimes spill over into hyperbole, of which "publishers add no value" is
one of the most common examples.[68]
However, scholarly publishing is not a simple process, and publishers do add value to scholarly
communication as it is currently designed.[69] Kent Anderson maintains a list of things that journal
publishers do which currently contains 102 items and has yet to be formally contested from
anyone who challenges the value of publishers.[70] Many items on the list could be argued to be of
value primarily to the publishers themselves, e.g. "Make money and remain a constant in the
system of scholarly output". However, others provide direct value to researchers and research in
steering the academic literature. This includes arbitrating disputes (e.g. over ethics, authorship),
stewarding the scholarly record, copy-editing, proofreading, type-setting, styling of materials,
linking the articles to open and accessible datasets, and (perhaps most importantly) arranging
and managing scholarly peer review. The latter is a task that should not be underestimated as it
effectively entails coercing busy people into giving their time to improve someone else's work
and maintain the quality of the literature. Not to mention the standard management processes for
large enterprises, including infrastructure, people, security, and marketing. All of these factors
contribute in one way or another to maintaining the scholarly record.[68]
It could be questioned though, whether these functions are actually necessary to the core aim of
scholarly communication, namely, dissemination of research to researchers and other
stakeholders such as policy makers, economic, biomedical and industrial practitioners as well as
the general public.[71]Above, for example, we question the necessity of the current infrastructure
for peer review, and if a scholar-led crowdsourced alternative may be preferable. In addition, one
of the biggest tensions in this space is associated with the question if for-profit companies (or the
private sector) should be allowed to be in charge of the management and dissemination of
academic output and execute their powers while serving, for the most part, their own interests.
This is often considered alongside the value added by such companies, and therefore the two
are closely linked as part of broader questions on appropriate expenditure of public funds, the
role of commercial entities in the public sector, and issues around the privatisation of scholarly
knowledge.[68]
Publishing could certainly be done at a lower cost than common at present. There are significant
researcher-facing inefficiencies in the system including the common scenario of multiple rounds
of rejection and resubmission to various venues as well as the fact that some publishers profit
beyond reasonable scale.[72] What is missing most[68] from the current publishing market, is
transparency about the nature and the quality of the services publishers offer. This would allow
authors to make informed choices, rather than decisions based on indicators that are unrelated
to research quality, such as the JIF.[68] All the above questions are being investigated and
alternatives could be considered and explored. Yet, in the current system, publishers still play a
role in managing processes of quality assurance, interlinking and findability of research. As the
role of scholarly publishers within the knowledge communication industry continues to evolve, it
is seen as necessary[68] that they can justify their operation based on the intrinsic value that they
add,[73][74] and combat the perception that they add no value to the process.