Open Access Scholarly Journal Publishing in Chinese

Status of open access scholarly journal publishing in Pakistan

Open access (OA) scholarly journal publishing is a recently emerged phenomenon of scholarly publishing in Pakistan. This study has been designed to find out the current status of open access (OA) scholarly journal publishing in Pakistan. A quantitative research method was used to evaluate the contents of the websites of 329 Pakistani journals on a checklist of 12 items. OA publishing paradigm has emerged in Pakistan as a majority (90%) of Pakistani scholarly journals are following the OA publishing paradigm. More than two-thirds (69%) of journals are following the Diamond OA model, followed by Gold OA (26%) and Crowdfunding OA (3%). The majority (97%) of journals belongs to the Y (the lowest) category of journals and the majority (97%) of journals do not have an impact factor. Indexing in Scopus and Web of Science is 24 (16%) and 20 (13%), respectively. Average article processing charges (APCs) per article in Sciences and Social Sciences journals of Pakistan are 46 $ and 90 $, respectively. In terms of ranking, Pakistani journals are in the stage of infancy. The present study is the first comprehensive exploration to explore the current status of OA scholarly journal publishing in Pakistan. This study may help to come up with recommendations to strengthen the credibility of OA journals in Pakistan. This study may be generalized to developing countries that have similar circumstances to Pakistan.

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers. This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres. This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling  scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies. They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

Charting the Open Access scholarly journals landscape in the UAE

The purpose of this study is to chart the scholarly journal landscape in the UAE in order to provide a scientific perspective on research productivity, distribution, and access in the country and lay the foundations for further research in this area. The study aims also to contribute to research endeavoring to paint a global picture of scholarly publishing. We carried out a mapping of scholarly journals published in the UAE compiled from international and local sources. The resulting journal list was studied focusing on the share of OA titles, language of publication, discipline, and type of publisher. Our results show that: (1) 534 journals are published in the UAE and that the share of OA is quite noteworthy with about 64% of all online journals; (2) the APC-based OA model is prevalent with around 75% of OA journals levying a publication fee; (3) UAE journals are predominantly in English while the number of Arabic-language journals is marginal; (4) science, technology and medicine prevail as the most prevalent subject areas of the journals; and (5) commercial publishers control most of the publications especially in the medical field. The study lays a foundation for further studies on scholarly journals in the UAE. The combination of regional indexes and international directories to measure the country’s scholarly journal output can also be replicated and built upon for other countries where the major international bibliometric databases do not provide a comprehensive representation of scholarly publishing activities.

Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures

Digital scholarship and electronic publishing within scholarly communities change when metrics and open infrastructures take center stage for measuring research impact. In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories as a new model of scholarly publishing over the last three decades has been one of the major developments. As it unfolds, the landscape of scholarly communication is transitioning—with much being privatized as it is made open—and turning towards alternative metrics, such as social media attention, author-level, and article-level metrics. Moreover, the granularity of evaluating research impact through new metrics and social media changes the objective standards of evaluating research performance. Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. Moves towards scholarly web development and publishing on the semantic and social web with open infrastructures, citations, and alternative metrics—how preprints advance building the web as data—is discussed. We determine that this will viably demonstrate new metrics and, by enhancing research publishing tools in the scholarly commons, facilitate various communities of practice. However, for preprint repositories to be sustainable, scholarly communities and funding agencies should support continued investment in open knowledge, alternative metrics development, and open infrastructures in scholarly publishing.