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A formalised model of the scientific publication process
Abstract
The scientific publishing process has during the past few years undergone considerable changes. The socio-economic structures have, however, not changed much, and many academics and librarians view the current situation as highly unsatisfactory. This has triggered a number of initiatives to set up e-print repositories and electronic peer reviewed journals, which usually offer the full text for free on the Web. Serious in-depth research studying the way the scholarly communication system is affected by the Internet is needed. In this article a formal process model of the scientific publishing process is presented (the Scientific Publication Life-Cycle Model). The model has been developed in particular to provide a basis for studying the cost implications of different business models. It describes the life-cycle of the single publication, in particular the refereed journal article, from the research leading to it and writing it, to being read by other researchers years later or used as a catalyst for practical implementation. Conclusions are drawn about the usefulness of the modelling methodology for this particular purpose as well as of future uses of the model itself. In addition to providing a basis for cost studies the model could function as a road map for different types of open access initiatives.
... "Without publication, science is dead" (Day & Gastel, 2012, p. 18), making clear the general assumption that all data and results should be published (Jacot, 1937). Commonly, academic work is published in a monograph, conference paper, academic journal article, or miscellaneous form (Björk & Hedlund, 2004), with journal and conference proceedings frequently indexed in bibliographic databases. There are a large number of bibliographic databases available, however Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), which were both established for the specific aim of facilitating citation searching and bibliometric analysis, are broadly considered most popular (Alonso, Cabrerizo, Herrera-Viedma, & Herrera, 2009;Meho & Yang, 2007). ...
... Since the 1990s, the academic publication system has undergone considerable changes (Tenopir & King, 2009). For example, introduction of the Internet, technical advances with online journals (Björk & Hedlund, 2004), financial considerations for journal operations with the option of open access (Guerrero & Piqueras, 2010), and differential pricing of print and online subscriptions (Statzner & Resh, 2010) are changing the underlying publishing model of operators within the system. External drivers such as the use of quantity and quality measures of publications as institutional performance metrics in global university rankings (Hazelkorn, 2013) have manipulated both individual and institutional agendas since 2003. ...
... Since the 1990s, with the introduction of Internet, the academic publication system has undergone considerable change (Tenopir & King, 2009). One of the major changes that has occurred is the increase in the number of online journals (Björk & Hedlund, 2004). Additionally, the emergence of university ranking systems in 2002 refocused both institutional and individuals attention to publication metrics (Hazelkorn, 2009). ...
Since the publication of the first academic journal in 1665, the number of academic journal titles has grown steadily. In 2001, Mabe and Amin studied the pattern of growth in the number of academic journals worldwide, identifying three key development periods between 1900 and 1996. These three episodes are from 1900 to 1944, from 1944 to 1978, and from 1978 to 1996. The compound annual growth rates for each episode are 3.30, 4.68 and 3.31 % respectively. In this research, we seek to validate these findings, and extend on previous work to analyze journal growth patterns from 1986 to 2013. Our results show academic journals grew at an average rate of 4.7 % from 1986 to 2013, which is very similar to the growth rate during the Big Science period observed in the previous study. Our results also show that academic journals had an estimated 92 % Active rate, and 8 % Inactive rate annually. Out of all Active journals, approximately 43 % have high impact and reach JCR or SJR databases, and 26 % have relatively higher impact and are thus collected in the JCR database. The comparison results of Active/Inactive
SJR and JCR journals suggest that lower impact journals have a higher chance to become Inactive than higher impact journals. With the wide use of the Internet in academic science, our results expectedly show that the number of Print-Only journals is gradually decreasing while the number of Online-Only journals is increasing. The growth of Online-Only journals exceeds the growth of Print-Only journals in 2007, and the number of Online-Only journals exceeded the number of Print and Only journals in 2012. More than 30 % Newly Created journals provide Open Access. It is suggested that we are experiencing the second journal boom in history and Internet technology has changed the academic publication system.
... However, in many regions and subject areas these efforts often only reach a minority of researchers. Moreover, curation itself currently faces many uncertainties, not the least due to unknown costs [16,17,23,[32][33][34], plus several barriers and other difficulties [6,18,20,22,35,36]. There is also a particularly problematic interaction with Open Data. ...
... Published works are expected to remain available in the long term and this is also true for electronic publications. Yet, electronic publications face particular additional challenges in terms of acquisition, usage, e.g., [35,44,45], and preservation, e.g., [46]. Nevertheless, we believe that memory institutions such as libraries are in a reasonable position to warrant the curation of well defined content such as scientific publications regardless of their form, even if they only obtain it after its production is finished. ...
Research as a digital enterprise has created new, often poorly addressed challenges for the management and curation of research to ensure continuity, transparency, and accountability. There is a common misunderstanding that curation can be considered at a later point in the research cycle or delegated or that it is too burdensome or too expensive due to a lack of efficient tools. This creates a curation gap between research practice and curation needs. We argue that this gap can be narrowed if curators provide attractive support that befits research needs and if researchers consistently manage their work according to generic concepts consistently from the beginning. A rather uniquely long-term case study demonstrates how such concepts have helped to pragmatically implement a research practice intentionally using only minimalist tools for sustained, self-contained archiving since 1989. The paper sketches the concepts underlying three core research activities. (i) handling of research data, (ii) reference management as part of scholarly publishing, and (iii) advancing theories through modelling and simulation. These concepts represent a universally transferable best research practice, while technical details are obviously prone to continuous change. We hope it stimulates researchers to manage research similarly and that curators gain a better understanding of the curation challenges research practice actually faces.
... According to Bjork and Hedlund (2004) a breakdown of the costs of producing and delivering a typical refereed journal paper indicates that perhaps as much as 90% of the cost consists of the actual research work preceding the writing of the paper. The research work is usually financed by public bodies and the costs are in no way recuperated through the sales of publications (as would be the case for commercial products such as books, music compact disks, movies, and so forth). ...
... Furthermore, Bjork and Hedlund (2004) argue that a breakdown of the costs of producing and delivering a typical refereed journal paper indicates that perhaps as much as 90% of the cost consists of the actual research work preceding the writing of the paper. This research work is usually financed by public bodies and the costs are in no way recouped through the sales of publications (as would be the case for commercial products such as books, music compact disks, movies, and so forth). ...
... The scholarly communication lifecycle model developed by Björk. This model was developed by building on a previous model by Björk and Hudlund (2004). It consists of 33 separate diagrams, arranged in a hierarchy up to seven levels deep Björk (2007). ...
This article seeks to give academic librarians insight and guidelines into the provision of an effective scholarly communication guidance to doctoral students. The findings of the study showed that doctoral students had not received much training and guidance on research and scholarly communication practices from their supervisors and academic librarians. The study adopted a case study research design with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) as the research site and sequential explanatory mixed method approach. A proposed scholarly communication guidance model to be used by the academic library is presented. The model proposes that scholarly communication guidance should be offered to doctoral students immediately they enrol for their programmes, throughout their research process, and finally when the research is completed since they are expected to conduct original research. The model will guide the drafting of policies and the academic library in developing tailor-made channels and contents for scholarly communication guidance to doctoral students. The study has contributed to the body of knowledge on scholarly communication guidance by the academic library to doctoral students as previous studies recorded in the literature pertains mostly to faculty and not to students – particularly doctoral students.
... Research collaboration patterns have changed over recent decades (Corley & Sabharwal, 2010;Gu & Blackmore, 2017;Henriksen, 2016). The reasons for these changes are diverse, but are principally attributed to a combination of technological advancement (Bar-Ilan, 2008;Björk & Hedlund, 2004;Nisonger, 1998;Statzner & Resh, 2010), increased participation in the academia (Hugo, 2008), and changing higher education policies and frameworks (Hazelkorn, 2009(Hazelkorn, , 2013. ...
The impact of university rankings has driven scholars to increase productivity, and expanding collaboration has dramatically changed the publishing patterns in the academic publication system. The aim of this study was to develop a scholar classification scheme from publication patterns in academic science. Classification schemes are ways of describing groups that display different clusters of behaviors, approaches, or perspectives, and useful in the development of typologies. In this research, sample data are selected from three representative universities, considered a leading university, a middle‐tier university, and a noncomprehensive university. A final set of 11,427 effective scholars and their 284,128 journal publication records were used to develop the classification scheme via cluster analysis. The results identify six types of scholars, labeled as: singleton (8%), small‐team low performer (16%), small‐team high performer (17%), big‐team strategist (22%), free‐style follower (21%), and life‐time warrior (17%). These six scholar types demonstrate different approaches to publishing that can be used to understand both individual and research team performance across different institutional settings. Additionally, possible future work was identified that uses the scholar classification scheme to define the behavior for agents in an agent‐based model to simulate the strategic‐behavior‐driven academic publication system.
... Since the publication of the first modern academic journal 350 years ago (Solomon 2007), the number of active academic titles has grown by an average of 3.3% per year (Mabe and Amin 2001). More recently, new technologies have led to major changes in the scholarly publishing system (Nisonger 1998): online journals (Björk and Hedlund 2004;Statzner and Resh 2010), large full-text databases (Bar-Ilan 2008), digital submission systems, e-repositories (Statzner and Resh 2010), open access journals and archives (Guerrero and Piqueras 2010), and research-focused search engines such as Google Scholar (Larsen and von Ins 2010). The increased connectivity of the scholarly community has also brought greater international collaboration among authors and journal editors (Lee and Bozeman 2005;Statzner and Resh 2010). ...
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Innovations in scholarly publishing have led to new possibilities for academic journals (e.g., open access), and provided scholars with a range of indicators that can be used to evaluate their characteristics and their impact. This study identifies and evaluates the journal characteristics reported in five databases: Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (Ulrichs), Journal Citation Reports (JCR), SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR), Google Scholar Metrics (GS), and Cabell’s Periodical Directory (Cabells). It describes the 13 indicators (variables) that are available through these databases—scholarly impact, subject category, age, total articles, distribution medium, open access, peer review, acceptance rate, pricing, language, country, status, and issue frequency—and highlights the similarities and differences in the ways these indicators are defined and reported. The study also addresses the ways in which this kind of information can be used to better understand particular journals as well as the scholarly publishing system.
... The study of scholarly communication is itself an academic field of study. Traditionally, discussing and studying scholarly communications and publishing and OA have occurred in parallel in the sociology of science, communication, and librarianship and information sciences disciplines (Crane, 1972;Garvey & Griffith, 1972;Garvey, 1979;Latour & Woolgar, 1986;Latour, 1987;Odlyzko, 1996;Odlyzko, 2002;Björk, 2004;Bjork & Hedlund, 2004;Björk, 2005;Borgman, 2007;Laakso & Björk, 2012;Suber, 2012). The specific area of OA began with Stevan Harnad's subversive proposal originally circulated in 1991 (Okerson & O'Donnell, 1995) when the Internet's potential became clear. ...
In this paper, we respond to five rebuttals to Kingsley and Kennan (2015). Four researchers in the information
systems field and a university library director of research infrastructure provided these rebuttals. Almost without exception, the rebuttals from the information systems researchers take an analytical approach to the question of scholarly communication in their field. However, in undertaking their individual analyses of scholarly publishing or communication, they do not directly address the issues raised in our original debate piece. The rebuttal from the university library administrator (Groenewegen, 2015) alone directly addresses the discussion points raised in the original debate. As researchers in the field of scholarly communications, while this was not how we originally envisioned the debate, the rebuttals as a body of work have opened up some interesting themes, which we explore in addition to responding to the individual rebuttals.
... The study of scholarly communication is itself an academic field of study. Traditionally, discussing and studying scholarly communications and publishing and OA have occurred in parallel in the sociology of science, communication, and librarianship and information sciences disciplines (Crane, 1972;Garvey & Griffith, 1972;Garvey, 1979;Latour & Woolgar, 1986;Latour, 1987;Odlyzko, 1996;Odlyzko, 2002;Björk, 2004;Bjork & Hedlund, 2004;Björk, 2005;Borgman, 2007;Laakso & Björk, 2012;Suber, 2012). The specific area of OA began with Stevan Harnad's subversive proposal originally circulated in 1991 (Okerson & O'Donnell, 1995) when the Internet's potential became clear. ...
In this paper, we respond to five rebuttals to Kingsley and Kennan (2015). Four researchers in the information
systems field and a university library director of research infrastructure provided these rebuttals. Almost without exception, the rebuttals from the information systems researchers take an analytical approach to the question of scholarly communication in their field. However, in undertaking their individual analyses of scholarly publishing or communication, they do not directly address the issues raised in our original debate piece. The rebuttal from the university library administrator (Groenewegen, 2015) alone directly addresses the discussion points raised in the original debate. As researchers in the field of scholarly communications, while this was not how we originally envisioned the debate, the rebuttals as a body of work have opened up some interesting themes, which we explore in addition to responding to the individual rebuttals.
Introduction. A formal graphical model of the scientific communication process is presented in this paper. Purpose. The purpose of the model is to act as a road map for policy discussions and research concerning the process. In comparison to earlier models found in the literature this model is more detailed, hierarchical and includes more modelling constructs (activities, inputs, outputs, controls, mechanisms). Methodology. The modelling methodology used is IDEF0, a process modelling method, which previously has mainly been used for business process reengineering in the manufacturing industry. The current version of the model consists of thirty-three diagrams, with 113 different activities and over 200 different inputs, outputs, controls and mechanisms. Scope. The scope of the model is the whole communication value chain, from initial research to the assimilation of research results to improve every-day life. The model treats both informal and formal communication, as well as the publishing of data, but the major focus is on modelling the publishing and indexing of traditional peer reviewed journal articles, as well as the activities of readers to find out about them and access them. The new business models and parallel functions enabled by the Internet, such as open access journals and e-print repositories, are also in focus.
pp. 239-256 in Actes du colloque H2PTM 13
This article wants to analyze the tendencies, the projects and the initiatives, that leads to a model open to the scientific literature. We show the different experiences and models done around the evaluation process by Peer–review experts in the field of the editorial processes of well–known institutions: Nature, The Lancet, Pub Med Central, American Educational Research Association, Elsevier, etc. In the same way we review the digital journals impact in the communication models OA. To reach the proposed objectives we analized the indicators: evaluation processes and access level. We finished recognizing the influence of three models, open to science information evaluation process and a mixed model Peer–review that leads to a bigger transparency in the evaluation process. Also we note an alternative model: autor–pays– model.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to present findings from the research of aspects of journal publishing in the field of social sciences in Croatia in changing working conditions caused by the rapid development of information and communication technology.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper is based on an online survey of 79 journals in the field of social sciences in Croatia.
Findings
– Findings indicate a dual publishing nature of the scientific journals as they exist both in the traditional paper based and in the electronic environment. In addition to slow shift towards publishing exclusively in the electronic environment, editorial teams cope with insufficient financial support for the publication of printed versions of their journals, low‐quality of article submissions, badly formatted articles, lack of help to the editor, etc. Researched journals use the internet for the improvement of the interaction with authors, reviewers and readers and digital repositories for long‐term storage of articles. To remain relevant to the scientists in Croatia, researched journals must be led by professional editorial teams whose only job will be management of the journal they work for.
Originality/value
– The paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge about current developments in scientific journal publishing under the influence of information and communication technology.
A review of the impressive outpouring of journal articles and books on scholarly communications, covering the years 2001–2005, provides readers with a substantive understanding of the pivotal issues, concerns, and problems confronting a wide array of academics, administrators, and librarians in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While much of this scholarly literature addresses ‘traditional’ issues and problems confronting academics in the humanities, the social sciences, and the diverse scientific–technological areas, an extraordinary number of these papers deals with the nature of ‘change,’ specifically the changing world of research and libraries, the transformation of information, and the rapid emergence of the Open Access movement. Some of the major research studies and themes in this bibliography include the following: Numerous papers confronting the often daunting (if not downright convoluted) problem of the price of information were rather intriguing. Anglada and Comellas pondered the issue of ‘‘fairness’’ in the prevalent pricing models of journals in an electronic era, issues also addressed successfully by Ball as well as Lawal; McCabe’s work on this issue is especially noteworthy because of his analysis of substantive issues. The evaluation of a scholar’s output was a frequent and intriguing thread in the literature. Baumgartner and Pieters evaluated the use and usefulness of journal citation indices, issues also addressed: by Hamermesh and Oster; by Norris and Oppenheim; and by Goodrum, McCain, Lawrence, and Giles. Erkut seeks to evaluate the research output of Canadian academics. Cronin, on the other hand, grapples with the thorny issue of effective academic writing. While Peters studies usage statistics and Rowlands concentrates on research
Scientific publishing has undergone a number of paradigm shifts triggered by new technologies. The last technology leap, the world wide web, has made possible a new form of publishing called open access (OA), which places scholarly publications freely accessible for anyone on the web, using voluntary work and a variety of revenue models (other than subscription income) for sustaining the publishing activities. OA is eminently in line with the basic openness principles of science and the status of scientific results as a public good, and it is also cost effective for society as a whole. Despite its evident advantages OA publishing is still only in its infancy and has had a big impact in only a few scientific communities, such as high-energy physics. In civil engineering, and in construction information technology (IT) research, OA is still a relatively rare form of publishing. In the European Commission funded SciX project a generic system for scientific OA publishing was developed and was tested for running a number of services intended for the IT in architecture and civil engineering research communities. In addition the barriers for more widespread use of OA were studied. In this paper the different forms of open access: the peer-reviewed electronic journal, subject-specific, and institutional repositories, are first presented. After that the paper presents some of the results from the theoretical part of the project. Finally the paper briefly describes the architecture of the publishing platform and illustrates it with some of the pilots from the construction IT domain. It concludes with a discussion of the experiences obtained in setting up the pilots.
Purpose
With the proliferation of electronic information via the web a further distension of the unique characteristics of information has been witnessed. With seismic developments occurring in such a short period of time, it seems prudent to consider the very nature of information and to assess whether this accelerated growth has implications for the work of the informatics community and the information society.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper begins by revisiting and refreshing the unique characteristics of information via a reappraisal of the relevant literature. These characteristics are then contextualised within the new economy and traditional economic theory. Once these unique characteristics have been examined, the author discusses how the nature of information in the twenty‐first century presents the informatics community with new and difficult challenges.
Findings
The challenges posed by the unique nature of information demand a definite response on the part of the informatics community, including the creation of innovative new models to accommodate information's inherent characteristics. Additionally, as the nature of information evolves yet further and ICT innovations accelerate, ever more adaptable skills will be required by the end user in order that value be derived from information.
Practical implications
Outcomes and conclusions addressed in the paper may inform the informatics community generally, but will specifically inform the practice of information managers and librarians, and offer ways of assisting them in arriving at holistic decisions with respect to service provision.
Originality/value
The paper is a contribution to the debate on the precise nature of information and offers new perspectives on how the informatics community should view information in the twenty‐first century.
A formal model of the scientific communication process is presented using the IDEF0 notation. The model provides a roadmap for policy discussions and further research. In comparison to earlier models it is more detailed and hierarchical, and includes more modelling constructs. It includes the whole communication value chain, from initial research to the assimilation of research results to everyday practice. Although the model treats both informal and formal communication, as well as the publishing of data, its focus is on modelling the publishing and indexing of traditional peer-reviewed journal articles, and finding and retrieving them. New developments enabled by the Internet, such as open access journals and e-print repositories, are also included.
The production of scientific publications is a cooperative activity that usually involves several authors. Current solutions of cooperative editors do not contemplate features such as references management and publications deposit. In this context, the authors have previously developed the PaperFlow platform that integrates the three main functionalities required to produce scientific publications: a cooperative text editor, a cooperative reference manager and a connector to scientific digital repositories. However, this approach did not included tools for a previous important stage: the conception of the scientific publications. This paper proposes an evolution of the original platform to accommodate the conception stage. For this purpose, the specification of PaperFlow/R includes new functionalities such as whiteboards, communication tools and versioning control that improve the cooperation abilities of the platform.
Keywords:open access publications;scholarly publishing;information dissemination;economics of information;copyright
The open access (OA) model for journals is compared to the open source principle for computer software. Since the early 1990s nearly 1,000 OA scientific journals have emerged – mostly as voluntary community efforts, although recently some professionally operating publishers have used author charges or institutional membership. This study of OA journals without author charges shows that their impact is still relatively small, but awareness of it is increasing. The average number of research articles per year is lower than for major scientific journals but the publication times are shorter.
Chemists communicate in structures. The nature of information available to chemists therefore has to take this into account. With the migration from print to electronic publication nearly complete, the Internet offers the chemical information user many advantages. Journal articles are accessible quickly and easily from the desktop, long before their appearance in paper form. Additionally, research papers can now be uploaded to preprint servers before they even enter the publishing process. This paper discusses the many advantages this brings with it for chemists, but also discusses the disadvantages some may see as a possible result.
The European Mathematical Information Service (EMIS) is a cooperative venture between several international partners under the umbrella of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). The main purpose of EMIS is to provide access to freely available information on mathematics in the Web. As an important part of EMIS an electronic library is stored on the main server and its mirrors, collecting all freely accessible electronic journals in mathematics combined with electronic versions of printed journals. It also contains electronic proceedings, volumes and monographs. This core content is embedded in, and linked with, an environment of comprehensive facilities for accessing mathematical research papers: literature information databases, projects for one-stop shopping sites for mathematics on the Web, freely available digital content of classical mathematical publications and access to electronic grey literature. The aim of this article is to describe this part of EMIS in some detail.