Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses . The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called " grey literature ". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
113-625: Harvard University Press ( HUP ) is an academic publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University . It is a member of the Association of University Presses . Its director since 2017 is George Andreou. The press maintains offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard Square , and in London, England. The press co-founded the distributor TriLiteral LLC with MIT Press and Yale University Press . TriLiteral
226-539: 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,
339-410: A professional in the field, a researcher in another field, a journalist , a politician or civil servant , or an interested layperson. Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professionals are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available. Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has
452-538: 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
565-430: A ' preprint ' or ' postprint ' copy of their paper for free download from their personal or institutional website. 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
678-416: A case of academic misconduct and plagiarism, and could be pursued as such. There is no evidence that "scooping" of research via preprints exists, not even in communities that have broadly adopted the use of the arXiv server for sharing preprints since 1991. If the unlikely case of scooping emerges as the growth of the preprint system continues, it can be dealt with as academic malpractice. ASAPbio includes
791-489: A colour system. The most commonly recognised names are "green", "gold", and "hybrid" open access; however, several other models and alternative terms are also used. In the gold OA model, the publisher makes all articles and related content available for free immediately on the journal's website. In such publications, articles are licensed for sharing and reuse via Creative Commons licenses or similar. Many gold OA publishers charge an article processing charge (APC), which
904-476: A copy of their published articles available free for all on the web. Some important results in mathematics have been published only on arXiv . The Journal des sçavans (later spelled Journal des savants ), established by Denis de Sallo , was the earliest academic journal published in Europe. Its content included obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. The first issue appeared as
1017-438: 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
1130-401: 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. The fastest scientific output growth rate over
1243-555: 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
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#17327734010101356-589: A journal's impact factor. Some publishers (e.g. eLife and Ubiquity Press ) have released estimates of their direct and indirect costs that set their APCs. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is " double dipping ", where both authors and subscribers are charged. By comparison, journal subscriptions equate to $ 3,500–$ 4,000 per article published by an institution, but are highly variable by publisher (and some charge page fees separately). This has led to
1469-410: A journal, the archived version is called a " postprint ". This can be the accepted manuscript as returned by the journal to the author after successful peer review. Hybrid open-access journals contain a mixture of open access articles and closed access articles. A publisher following this model is partially funded by subscriptions, and only provide open access for those individual articles for which
1582-457: 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
1695-562: A key principle. Open access (mostly green and gratis) began to be sought and provided worldwide by researchers when the possibility itself was opened by the advent of Internet and the World Wide Web . The momentum was further increased by a growing movement for academic journal publishing reform, and with it gold and libre OA. The premises behind open access publishing are that there are viable funding models to maintain traditional peer review standards of quality while also making
1808-420: A merger to form an even bigger company named Springer Nature .) Available data indicate that these companies have profit margins of around 40% making it one of the most profitable industries, especially compared to the smaller publishers, which likely operate with low margins. These factors have contributed to the " serials crisis " – total expenditures on serials increased 7.6% per year from 1986 to 2005, yet
1921-527: A multitude of journal and conference styles, and sometimes spend months waiting for peer review results. The drawn-out and often contentious societal and technological transition to Open Access and Open Science/Open Research, particularly across North America and Europe (Latin America has already widely adopted "Acceso Abierto" since before 2000 ) has led to increasingly entrenched positions and much debate. The area of (open) scholarly practices increasingly sees
2034-423: A new discovery to be announced as a monograph , reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Isaac Newton and Leibniz used this approach. However, this method did not work well. Robert K. Merton , a sociologist, found that 92% of cases of simultaneous discovery in the 17th century ended in dispute. The number of disputes dropped to 72% in the 18th century, 59% by
2147-461: A new open access business model, to experiments with providing as much free or open access as possible, to active lobbying against open access proposals. There are many publishers that started up as open access-only publishers, such as PLOS, Hindawi Publishing Corporation , Frontiers in... journals, MDPI and BioMed Central. Some open access journals (under the gold, and hybrid models) generate revenue by charging publication fees in order to make
2260-425: 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
2373-476: 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. Academic authors cite sources they have used, in order to support their assertions and arguments and to help readers find more information on
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#17327734010102486-468: A role for policy-makers and research funders giving focus to issues such as career incentives, research evaluation and business models for publicly funded research. Plan S and AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America) caused a wave of debate in scholarly communication in 2019 and 2020. Subscription-based publishing typically requires transfer of copyright from authors to the publisher so that
2599-583: A series of hypothetical scooping scenarios as part of its preprint FAQ, finding that the overall benefits of using preprints vastly outweigh any potential issues around scooping. Indeed, the benefits of preprints, especially for early-career researchers, seem to outweigh any perceived risk: rapid sharing of academic research, open access without author-facing charges, establishing priority of discoveries, receiving wider feedback in parallel with or before peer review, and facilitating wider collaborations. The "green" route to OA refers to author self-archiving, in which
2712-448: 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. 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
2825-499: A time-stamp at the time of publication, which helps to establish the "priority of discovery" for scientific claims (Vale and Hyman 2016). This means that a preprint can act as proof of provenance for research ideas, data, code, models, and results. The fact that the majority of preprints come with a form of permanent identifier, usually a digital object identifier (DOI), also makes them easy to cite and track. Thus, if one were to be "scooped" without adequate acknowledgement, this would be
2938-546: A twelve-page quarto pamphlet on Monday, 5 January 1665, shortly before the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , on 6 March 1665. The publishing of academic journals has started in the 17th century, and expanded greatly in the 19th. At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was controversial and widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for
3051-627: A version of the article (often the peer-reviewed version before editorial typesetting, called "postprint") is posted online to an institutional and/or subject repository. This route is often dependent on journal or publisher policies, which can be more restrictive and complicated than respective "gold" policies regarding deposit location, license, and embargo requirements. Some publishers require an embargo period before deposition in public repositories, arguing that immediate self-archiving risks loss of subscription income. Embargoes are imposed by between 20 and 40% of journals, during which time an article
3164-466: A wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs. Diamond OA journals are available for most disciplines, and are usually small (<25 articles per year) and more likely to be multilingual (38%); thousands of such journals exist. The growth of unauthorized digital copying by large-scale copyright infringement has enabled free access to paywalled literature. This has been done via existing social media sites (e.g.
3277-558: 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. While journal editors largely agree
3390-477: 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. 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. Most scientific research
3503-410: Is a prohibition on data mining . For this reason, many big data studies of various technologies performed by economists ( as well as machine learning by computer scientists ) are limited to patent analysis , since the patent documents are not subject to copyright at all. FAIR is an acronym for 'findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable', intended to more clearly define what is meant by
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3616-432: Is also a tendency for existing journals to divide into specialized sections as the field itself becomes more specialized. Along with the variation in review and publication procedures, the kinds of publications that are accepted as contributions to knowledge or research differ greatly among fields and subfields. In the sciences, the desire for statistically significant results leads to publication bias . Academic publishing
3729-434: Is also considered that "Online scientific interaction outside the traditional journal space is becoming more and more important to academic communication". 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. In academic publishing,
3842-418: 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%). American Psychological Association journals' rejection rates ranged "from a low of 35 per cent to a high of 85 per cent." The complement is called "acceptance rate". The process of academic publishing, which begins when authors submit
3955-490: 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). In several regions, including the Arab world , the majority of university academics prefer open access publishing without author fees, as it promotes equal access to information and enhances scientific advancement, a previously unexplored but crucial topic for
4068-752: Is consistent with the Green Open Access model. A persistent concern surrounding preprints is that work may be at risk of being plagiarised or "scooped" – meaning that the same or similar research will be published by others without proper attribution to the original source – if publicly available but not yet associated with a stamp of approval from peer reviewers and traditional journals. These concerns are often amplified as competition increases for academic jobs and funding, and perceived to be particularly problematic for early-career researchers and other higher-risk demographics within academia. However, preprints, in fact, protect against scooping. Considering
4181-514: 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. The following describes the situation in the United States. In many fields, such as literature and history, several published articles are typically required for
4294-437: 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 . 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 . Since 2022,
4407-680: 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 books for 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
4520-479: Is made available free for all on the web by the publisher at the time of publication. Both open and closed journals are sometimes funded by the author paying an article processing charge , thereby shifting some fees from the reader to the researcher or their funder. Many open or closed journals fund their operations without such fees and others use them in predatory publishing . The Internet has facilitated open access self-archiving , in which authors themselves make
4633-656: Is maximised because, quoting the Library of Trinity College Dublin: 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,
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4746-403: 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
4859-458: Is one of the most permissive, only requiring attribution to be allowed to use the material (and allowing derivations and commercial use). A range of more restrictive Creative Commons licenses are also used. More rarely, some of the smaller academic journals use custom open access licenses. Some publishers (e.g. Elsevier ) use "author nominal copyright" for OA articles, where the author retains copyright in name only and all rights are transferred to
4972-606: Is paywalled before permitting self-archiving (green OA) or releasing a free-to-read version (bronze OA). Embargo periods typically vary from 6–12 months in STEM and >12 months in humanities , arts and social sciences . Embargo-free self-archiving has not been shown to affect subscription revenue , and tends to increase readership and citations. Embargoes have been lifted on particular topics for either limited times or ongoing (e.g. Zika outbreaks or indigenous health ). Plan S includes zero-length embargoes on self-archiving as
5085-600: Is the Subscribe to Open publishing model introduced by Annual Reviews ; if the subscription revenue goal is met, the given journal's volume is published open access. Advantages and disadvantages of open access have generated considerable discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers , editorial staff and society publishers. Reactions of existing publishers to open access journal publishing have ranged from moving with enthusiasm to
5198-596: Is the publisher of the I Tatti Renaissance Library , the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library , and the Murty Classical Library of India . It is distinct from Harvard Business Press , which is part of Harvard Business Publishing , and the independent Harvard Common Press . Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act by Joe Roman , published in 2011, received the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from
5311-424: Is typically paid through institutional or grant funding. The majority of gold open access journals charging APCs follow an "author-pays" model, although this is not an intrinsic property of gold OA. Self-archiving by authors is permitted under green OA. Independently from publication by a publisher, the author also posts the work to a website controlled by the author, the research institution that funded or hosted
5424-472: Is undergoing major changes as it makes the transition from the print to the electronic format. Business models are different in the electronic environment. Since the early 1990s, licensing of electronic resources , particularly journals, has been very common. An important trend, particularly with respect to journals in the sciences, is open access via the Internet. In open access publishing, a journal article
5537-477: Is usually other researchers. Open access helps researchers as readers by opening up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to. All researchers benefit from open access as no library can afford to subscribe to every scientific journal and most can only afford a small fraction of them – this is known as the " serials crisis ". Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle. An open access article can be read by anyone –
5650-415: The #ICanHazPDF hashtag) as well as dedicated sites (e.g. Sci-Hub ). In some ways this is a large-scale technical implementation of pre-existing practice, whereby those with access to paywalled literature would share copies with their contacts. However, the increased ease and scale from 2010 onwards have changed how many people treat subscription publications. Similar to the free content definition,
5763-515: 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 . Scientific, technical, and medical ( STM ) literature
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#17327734010105876-477: 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%. Iran, China, India , Brazil , and South Africa were the only developing countries among
5989-681: The Free Journal Network . APC-free journals tend to be smaller and more local-regional in scope. Some also require submitting authors to have a particular institutional affiliation. A " preprint " is typically a version of a research paper that is shared on an online platform prior to, or during, a formal peer review process. Preprint platforms have become popular due to the increasing drive towards open access publishing and can be publisher- or community-led. A range of discipline-specific or cross-domain platforms now exist. The posting of pre-prints (and/or authors' manuscript versions)
6102-405: 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. Unlike science, where timeliness
6215-473: 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
6328-432: The 2010s, libraries began more aggressive cost cutting with the leverage of open access and open data . Data analysis with open source tools like Unpaywall Journals empowered library systems in reducing their subscription costs by 70% with the cancellation of the big deal with publishers like Elsevier . Several models are being investigated, such as open publication models or adding community-oriented features. It
6441-574: 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%. 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
6554-454: 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. Wiley Blackwell has 700 journals available, and they charge different amounts for each journal. Springer, with over 2600 journals, charges US$ 3000 or EUR 2200 (excluding VAT). A study found that
6667-711: The ARL found that in "1986, libraries spent 44% of their budgets on books compared with 56% on journals; twelve years later, the ratio had skewed to 28% and 72%." Meanwhile, monographs are increasingly expected for tenure in the humanities. In 2002 the Modern Language Association expressed hope that electronic publishing would solve the issue. In 2009 and 2010, surveys and reports found that libraries faced continuing budget cuts, with one survey in 2009 finding that 36% of UK libraries had their budgets cut by 10% or more, compared to 29% with increased budgets. In
6780-689: The Belgian web portal Cairn.info is open to STM. 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 . Publishing in
6893-709: The Belknap Press imprint , which it inaugurated in May 1954 with the publication of the Harvard Guide to American History . The John Harvard Library book series is published under the Belknap imprint, which was established through an endowment from the estate of art historian and Harvard alumnus Waldron Phoenix Belknap Jr. Harvard University Press distributes the Loeb Classical Library and
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#17327734010107006-666: The Philosopher's Stone with a free-domain alternative, such as A Voyage to Lilliput , an emergency room physician treating a patient for a life-threatening urushiol poisoning cannot substitute the most recent, but paywalled review article on this topic with a 90 year-old copyright-expired article that was published before the invention of prednisone in 1954. 2) the authors of research papers are not paid in any way, so they do not suffer any monetary losses, when they switch from behind paywall to open access publishing, especially, if they use diamond open access media. 3)
7119-759: The Society of Environmental Journalists. Harvard University Press joined The Association of American Publishers trade organization in the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit which resulted in the removal of access to over 500,000 books from global readers. 42°22′58.8″N 71°7′37.3″W / 42.383000°N 71.127028°W / 42.383000; -71.127028 Academic publishing Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, although many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary , and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. There
7232-674: 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. In recent decades there has been
7345-454: The apparent crisis has to do with the combined pressure of budget cuts at universities and increased costs for journals (the serials crisis ). The university budget cuts have reduced library budgets and reduced subsidies to university-affiliated publishers. The humanities have been particularly affected by the pressure on university publishers, which are less able to publish monographs when libraries can not afford to purchase them. For example,
7458-522: 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
7571-457: The assessment that there is enough money "within the system" to enable full transition to OA. However, there is ongoing discussion about whether the change-over offers an opportunity to become more cost-effective or promotes more equitable participation in publication. Concern has been noted that increasing subscription journal prices will be mirrored by rising APCs, creating a barrier to less financially privileged authors. The inherent bias of
7684-460: 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
7797-662: The authors (or research sponsor) pay a publication fee. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is " double dipping ", where both authors and subscribers are charged. For these reasons, hybrid open access journals have been called a " Mephistophelian invention", and publishing in hybrid OA journals often do not qualify for funding under open access mandates , as libraries already pay for subscriptions thus have no financial incentive to fund open access articles in such journals. Bronze open access articles are free to read only on
7910-628: The average APC (ensuring open access) was between $ 1,418 and US$ 2,727. The online distribution of individual articles and academic journals then takes place without charge to readers and libraries. Most open access journals remove 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
8023-439: The commercial publishers raised the subscription prices significantly, they lost little of the market, due to the inelastic demand for these journals. Although there are over 2,000 publishers, five for-profit companies ( Reed Elsevier , Springer Science+Business Media , Wiley-Blackwell , Taylor & Francis , and SAGE ) accounted for 50% of articles published in 2013. (Since 2013, Springer Science+Business Media has undergone
8136-488: The cost of electronic publishing , which has been the main form of distribution of journal articles since ca. 2000, is incommensurably smaller, than the cost of on-paper publishing and distribution, which is still preferred by many fiction literature readers. Whereas non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open-access journals are characterised by funding models which do not require
8249-401: The current APC-based OA publishing perpetuates this inequality through the 'Matthew effect' (the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer). The switch from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish has left essentially the same people behind, with some academics not having enough purchasing power (individually or through their institutions) for either option. Some gold OA publishers will waive all or part of
8362-485: 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
8475-448: The differences between traditional peer-review based publishing models and deposition of an article on a preprint server, "scooping" is less likely for manuscripts first submitted as preprints. In a traditional publishing scenario, the time from manuscript submission to acceptance and to final publication can range from a few weeks to years, and go through several rounds of revision and resubmission before final publication. During this time,
8588-468: The dramatic increase in opportunities to publish results online has led to a decline in the use of peer-reviewed articles. An academic paper typically belongs to some particular category such as: 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
8701-500: The editor of Philosophical Transaction's 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner 's report of the first vaccination against smallpox . "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. There are various types of peer review feedback that may be given prior to publication, including but not limited to: The possibility of rejections of papers
8814-402: The fee for authors from less developed economies . Steps are normally taken to ensure that peer reviewers do not know whether authors have requested, or been granted, fee waivers, or to ensure that every paper is approved by an independent editor with no financial stake in the journal. The main argument against requiring authors to pay a fee, is the risk to the peer review system, diminishing
8927-517: The financial pressure on journals. 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
9040-498: The following changes: An obvious advantage of open access journals is the free access to scientific papers regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library and improved access for the general public; this is especially true in developing countries. Lower costs for research in academia and industry have been claimed in the Budapest Open Access Initiative , although others have argued that OA may raise
9153-517: The greatest possible research impact. As a means of achieving this, research funders are beginning to expect open access to the research they support. Many of them (including all UK Research Councils) have already adopted open-access mandates , and others are on the way to do so (see ROARMAP ). A growing number of universities are providing institutional repositories in which their researchers can deposit their published articles. Some open access advocates believe that institutional repositories will play
9266-418: 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. Because the work of academic copy editors can overlap with that of authors' editors , editors employed by journal publishers often refer to themselves as "manuscript editors". During this process, copyright
9379-548: The kinds of open access defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative , the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities . The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses ; all of which require as a minimum attribution of authorship to the original authors. In 2012,
9492-525: 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. 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. By 2004, it was noted that the output of scientific papers originating from
9605-516: The latter can monetise the process via dissemination and reproduction of the work. With OA publishing, typically authors retain copyright to their work, and license its reproduction to the publisher. Retention of copyright by authors can support academic freedoms by enabling greater control of the work (e.g. for image re-use) or licensing agreements (e.g. to allow dissemination by others). The most common licenses used in open access publishing are Creative Commons . The widely used CC BY license
9718-507: The latter half of the 19th century, and 33% by the first half of the 20th century. The decline in contested claims for priority in research discoveries can be credited to the increasing acceptance of the publication of papers in modern academic journals, with estimates suggesting that around 50 million journal articles have been published since the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions . The Royal Society
9831-489: The number of serials purchased increased an average of only 1.9% per year. Unlike most industries, in academic publishing the two most important inputs are provided "virtually free of charge". These are the articles and the peer review process. Publishers argue that they add value to the publishing process through support to the peer review group, including stipends, as well as through typesetting, printing, and web publishing. Investment analysts, however, have been skeptical of
9944-507: The number of works under libre open access was considered to have been rapidly increasing for a few years, though most open-access mandates did not enforce any copyright license and it was difficult to publish libre gold OA in legacy journals. However, there are no costs nor restrictions for green libre OA as preprints can be freely self-deposited with a free license, and most open-access repositories use Creative Commons licenses to allow reuse. The biggest drawback of many Open Access licenses
10057-1011: The overall quality of scientific journal publishing. No-fee open access journals, also known as "platinum" or "diamond" do not charge either readers or authors. These journals use a variety of business models including subsidies, advertising, membership dues, endowments, or volunteer labour. Subsidising sources range from universities, libraries and museums to foundations, societies or government agencies. Some publishers may cross-subsidise from other publications or auxiliary services and products. For example, most APC-free journals in Latin America are funded by higher education institutions and are not conditional on institutional affiliation for publication. Conversely, Knowledge Unlatched crowdsources funding in order to make monographs available open access. Estimates of prevalence vary, but approximately 10,000 journals without APC are listed in DOAJ and
10170-403: 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
10283-505: The published papers the next year, is smaller although also increasing. Developing countries continue to find ways to improve their share, given research budget constraints and limited resources. 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
10396-581: The publisher page, but lack a clearly identifiable license. Such articles are typically not available for reuse. Journals that publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as the sale of advertisements , academic institutions , learned societies , philanthropists or government grants . There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over
10509-462: The publisher. Since open access publication does not charge readers, there are many financial models used to cover costs by other means. Open access can be provided by commercial publishers, who may publish open access as well as subscription-based journals, or dedicated open-access publishers such as Public Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed Central . Another source of funding for open access can be institutional subscribers. One example of this
10622-550: The reader to pay to read the journal's contents, relying instead on author fees or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers , theses , book chapters, monographs , research reports and images. There are different models of open access publishing and publishers may use one or more of these models. Different open access types are currently commonly described using
10735-519: The region's higher education. 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
10848-501: The resulting publications back to academia at inflated profits. Such frustrations sometimes spill over into hyperbole, of which "publishers add no value" is one of the most common examples. However, scholarly publishing is not a simple process, and publishers do add value to scholarly communication as it is currently designed. 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
10961-486: The same work will have been extensively discussed with external collaborators, presented at conferences, and been read by editors and reviewers in related areas of research. Yet, there is no official open record of that process (e.g., peer reviewers are normally anonymous, reports remain largely unpublished), and if an identical or very similar paper were to be published while the original was still under review, it would be impossible to establish provenance. Preprints provide
11074-475: The scholarly record. Open access Open access ( OA ) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright, which regulates post-publication uses of
11187-477: 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. Each scholarly journal uses a specific format for citations (also known as references). Among the most common formats used in research papers are
11300-468: 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
11413-693: The term 'open access' and make the concept easier to discuss. Initially proposed in March 2016, it has subsequently been endorsed by organisations such as the European Commission and the G20 . The emergence of open science or open research has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Scholarly publishing invokes various positions and passions. For example, authors may spend hours struggling with diverse article submission systems, often converting document formatting between
11526-421: The terms 'gratis' and 'libre' were used in the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition to distinguish between free to read versus free to reuse. Gratis open access ( [REDACTED] ) refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, without re-use rights. Libre open access ( [REDACTED] ) also refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, plus some additional re-use rights, covering
11639-482: The total cost of publication, and further increase economic incentives for exploitation in academic publishing. The open access movement is motivated by the problems of social inequality caused by restricting access to academic research, which favor large and wealthy institutions with the financial means to purchase access to many journals, as well as the economic challenges and perceived unsustainability of academic publishing. The intended audience of research articles
11752-553: 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
11865-415: The value added by for-profit publishers, as exemplified by a 2005 Deutsche Bank analysis which stated that "we believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process... We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." A crisis in academic publishing is "widely perceived";
11978-468: The value of publishers. 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
12091-476: The western monopoly of science-publishing, "by August 2021, at least 210,000 new papers on covid-19 had been published, according to a Royal Society study. Of the 720,000-odd authors of these papers, nearly 270,000 were from the US, the UK, Italy or Spain." In the 1960s and 1970s, commercial publishers began to selectively acquire "top-quality" journals that were previously published by nonprofit academic societies. When
12204-781: The work openly available at the time of publication. The money might come from the author but more often comes from the author's research grant or employer. While the payments are typically incurred per article published (e.g. BMC or PLOS journals), some journals apply them per manuscript submitted (e.g. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics until recently) or per author (e.g. PeerJ ). Charges typically range from $ 1,000–$ 3,000 ($ 5,380 for Nature Communications ) but can be under $ 10, close to $ 5,000 or well over $ 10,000. APCs vary greatly depending on subject and region and are most common in scientific and medical journals (43% and 47% respectively), and lowest in arts and humanities journals (0% and 4% respectively). APCs can also depend on
12317-446: The work, or to an independent central open repository, where people can download the work without paying. Green OA is free of charge for the author. Some publishers (less than 5% and decreasing as of 2014) may charge a fee for an additional service such as a free license on the publisher-authored copyrightable portions of the printed version of an article. If the author posts the near-final version of their work after peer review by
12430-439: The work. The main focus of the open access movement has been on " peer reviewed research literature", and more specifically on academic journals . This is because: 1) such publications have been a subject of serials crisis , unlike newspapers , magazines and fiction writing . The main difference between these two groups is in demand elasticity : whereas an English literature curriculum can substitute Harry Potter and
12543-545: Was not until the middle of the 20th century that peer review became the standard. The COVID-19 pandemic hijacked the entire world of basic and clinical science, with unprecedented shifts in funding priorities worldwide and a boom in medical publishing, accompanied by an unprecedented increase in the number of publications. Preprints servers become much popular during the pandemic, the Covid situation has an impact also on traditional peer-review . The pandemic has also deepened
12656-473: Was sold to LSC Communications in 2018. Notable authors published by HUP include Eudora Welty , Walter Benjamin , E. O. Wilson , John Rawls , Emily Dickinson , Stephen Jay Gould , Helen Vendler , Carol Gilligan , Amartya Sen , David Blight , Martha Nussbaum , and Thomas Piketty . The Display Room in Harvard Square, dedicated to selling HUP publications, closed on June 17, 2009. HUP owns
12769-462: Was steadfast in its not-yet-popular belief that science could only move forward through a transparent and open exchange of ideas backed by experimental evidence. Early scientific journals embraced several models: some were run by a single individual who exerted editorial control over the contents, often simply publishing extracts from colleagues' letters, while others employed a group decision-making process, more closely aligned to modern peer review. It
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