The fourth edition of Scholarly Journals Publishing Practice is now available from the ALPSP website. A core value of this longitudinal series of surveys is the ability to track trends across journal publishing, even if the publishers sampled for the results are not identical for each edition.

 Open access in the EU is being carefully monitored and reported on to watch trends in access and this report on the proportion of OA papers establishes that “…the tipping point for OA (more than 50% of the papers available for free) has been reached in several countries, including Brazil, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the US, as well as in biomedical research, biology, and mathematics and statistics…”. Whether the tipping point is appropriate or meaningful remains to be seen but the data are interesting to scan.

 Two recent reports have caught my eye and are worth a good look. Firstly, Building Bricks from Thomson Reuters is an excellent overview of the continuing rise in the world knowledge marketplace of the BRICK countries based not only on the extensive data that Thomson Reuters can marshal, but it also includes valuable editorial nuance on the individual complexities of each economy and their respective research portfolios. Note in particular the long-overdue addition of South Korea to the BRICK group.

Secondly, a briefing paper Text Mining and Scholarly publishing by  Jonathan Clark sets out to answer fundamental questions such as “What is text mining? How does it relate to data mining? Why do people want to do text mining? How does it work? What do publishers need to do to support text mining?” and achieves that goal succinctly.

 Copyright Clearance Center has launched a suite of Open Access tools  through its RightsLink^® platform to help publishers with transactions surrounding many aspects of OA publishing, including author publication charges, as well as color charges, page charges and reprint orders.

 One handy reference tool for librarians and publishers is the UKSG/SWETS publishers price list for 2013. Publishers need to submit their information for it to be included here and that defines the comprehensiveness of the tool.

 An elegant application Eigenfactor in motion that tells the story of journals and publishers over time. Try selecting one of the disciplines listed and moving the time arrow along the lower end of the graph to see how this works.

 FundRef a new service, is potentially a real boon to funding agencies, publishers and authors. A pilot phase has started facilitated by Cross Ref. The overall goal is for funders especially to find the articles that their funding has supported and to enable linking from and to the funding agency web site but all those involved in publishing research stand to benefit.

 Link Rot where urls’ disappear or return a 404 or "not found" message is now estimated at 30.4% after 3-4 years within a group of online law- and policy-related materials archived by the Chesapeake project.

 PeerJ, a new OA journal launching in the Fall of 2012, is the subject of much speculation about business models, cash flow and sustainability within publishing and has set itself the goal to “..change 300 years of scholarly publishing.”

 Google Scholar has released a journal rank listing of the top 100 journals across all disciplines. The metrics on which this listing is based give more background. Parts of the list are eccentric since arXiv is listed as a ‘journal’.

 The Cost of Knowledge is an online petition to encourage scientists not to publish in or review for any Elsevier journal. So far as at April 2012 there are over 8,800 signatories of whom 1,284 are from biology, 560 from Medicine, 290 from Chemistry and 740 from Physics. Interesting disciplinary patterns are emerging already, but growth in signatures seems to be slowing.

 A useful list of around 1,000 Open Access journals that are indexed by the Web of Science.

 Is the Big Deal over? A group of 30 British research libraries has agreed not to sign up for any more large deals with two of the biggest journal publishers, Elsevier and Wiley, unless they agree to significant reductions (15% is mentioned) in what those deals cost.

 For a rapid and thought-provoking update on mobile device usage, growth and shifting trends the slides included within this post are really most helpful.

 If you have too much to read, or too much information to digest, could a machine do it for you? This is the essence of the arguments for online content mining. A recent report on journal article mining from the PRC (Publishing Research Consortium) based on 29 interviews with experts and people working on content mining also includes a survey among scholarly publishers. In sum, text and data mining is expected to increase but (as ever) standardization of content formats is a critical practical key to enabling this..

 An interesting report from the Royal Society called Knowledge, Networks and Nations (2011) is based on the SCOPUS database. The authors describe "dramatic" changes in the global scientific landscape and warn that this has implications for a nation's competitiveness. Certain countries show leadership in specific fields, such as China in nanotechnology and Brazil in bio-fuels, but the scientifically advanced nations continue to dominate. The potential for China to match US output in terms of sheer numbers in the near to medium term is clear as is shown by the chart below.

  Changes in the peer-review system are highlighted in the latest report by Harley et al entitled provocatively Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future. In their 117pp report the authors note the “..need for a more nuanced academic reward system that is less dependent on citation metrics ..marquee journals.” And point to challenges that include:

• Assessing interdisciplinary scholarship
• Hybrid disciplines
• Collaborative curation for community resource use
• Large-scale collaborations around grand challenge questions, an increase in multiple authorship
• “…a growing flood of low-quality publications”

  Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications A report commissioned by RIN in the UK identifies five different routes to Open Access (OA), these are “Green”, “Gold”, delayed OA (embargoes), license extension and transactional (PPV). While the report focuses on the scholarly publishing system in the UK – and puts prices, costs and benefits on this system, it is a generally useful report. Also of interest are comments on the RIN site about the stance of the report.

 At last a publisher is experimenting with versioning of content! Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) will be experimenting with a ‘dual’ format for the journal, to explore a shorter magazine-like print version and a more extensive online version.

 A news focus in Science that reviews the current position on “Free Journals” and growth in the volume of research content available at no cost to readers. Mary was interviewed for this article.

 Two articles about my report on the recent Mellon funded pilot study of eight flagship journals in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) have now been published. The Journal of Scholarly Publishing has published the full report and a briefer review of the report is now published in Learned Publishing.

 Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines for the results of a study by the Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley. This report brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions to closely examine scholarly needs and values in seven selected academic fields: archaeology (25 interviews), astrophysics (25 interviews), biology (25 interviews), economics (14 interviews), history (24 interviews), music/performance (22 interviews), and political science (16 interviews).

 The US Office of Science and Technology Policy has invited comment and discussion on  key aspects of access to research information through two blog areas. If you have the time, the responses are diverse and well worth reading as they provide some interesting cornerstones for framing policy. Of course there are large doses of fulmination and partisan comment, but those are obvious and can be skipped over.

• Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation
• Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Features and Technology.

 An article in the Times Higher Education supplement questions the role of journals in advancing science.The reader comments posted below this article are also most interesting.

 An article entitled "The Hidden Digital Revolution in Scholarly Publishing: POD, SRDP, the 'Long Tail', and Open Access," on the impact of print on demand (POD) and short run digital printing (SRDP) on scholarly publishing especially e-books is now available online. Quote “Digital printing has, indeed, spawned a whole new way of thinking about publishing, which breaks down the “life cycle” of a book into discrete segments.”

 The Chronicle of Higher Education story on a report I completed for the National Humanities Alliance earlier in 2009, which looked into journal finances and business issues over three consecutive years and describes these for eight flagship journals in Humanities and Social Sciences. The final report "The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations" is here.

 Obituaries are not a feature of this site, but John Maddox, Editor of Nature when I first worked as Editorial Director at Macmillan Magazines in London, died in April. A brief editorial written by Phil Campbell, the current Editor, recalls the JM we knew who reinvented science journalism.

 I was interviewed for an article about the current state of the medical publishing industry especially advertising revenues. The article is a helpful overview of challenges and responses by publishers during the current economic downturn.

 The Annual Periodical Pricing Survey from the Library Journal is always an interesting read and this year is especially pertinent for the forces for change that it identifies within the scholarly publishing system globally.

 Bollen et al have published an article using data from observed article usage as “click streams” clarifying the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences. On the map the inner “hub” is a tight cluster of social sciences and humanities journals; the “outer rim” consists of clusters of journals in the natural sciences and the “spokes” connect the hub to the rim. Location of the social sciences and humanities in the center of the map is a surprising finding (click on map below to enlarge image).

Map of science derived from clickstream data - This map is produced in Bollen at al the article. The circles represent individual journals and labels have been assigned to local clusters of journals that correspond to particular scientific disciplines.

 Why do authors have such a poor understanding of publishers agreements? For some answers to this question there is a report from the Publishers Research Consortium “Journal Authors' Rights: perception and reality”.

 A report in Science entitled “Open Access and Global participation in Science” by Evans and Reimer suggests that research articles published Open Access are not necessarily read or cited more than those accessed through the traditional paid subscription route. As is clear from the chart above “In three areas, OA confers no additional attention, including physics, where preprint and publication databases already provide nearly complete access, and the social sciences, where personal preprint archiving and lengthy review times are common” (The third area is chemistry).  The authors concluded that “Across subfields, the impact of commercial online availability was positive, statistically significant, and on average 40% larger than the OA effect, suggesting that most researchers rely on institutional subscriptions.” The authors did show that online OA had the greatest effect in the developing Southern Hemisphere. The sample of articles studied was of more than 26 million published articles.

A: Percentage increase in citations for sub fields after free online availability, 1998–2005. Online availability is measured in the previous year. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals (source: Science Vol 323 page 1025 Feb 20th 2009).

 Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication is an excellent report conducted by Ithaka on behalf of the Association of Research Libraries in the US. The study set out to look squarely at new forms of scholarship and scholarly works and consider them in their own right, engaging with librarians and faculty to understand ways in which new models are already being relied upon. Highlights from the study's findings include:

• While some disciplines seem to lend themselves to certain formats of digital resource more than others, examples of innovative resources can be found across the humanities, social sciences, and scientific/ technical/medical subject areas.
• Of all the resources suggested by faculty, almost every one that contained an original scholarly work operates under some form of peer review or editorial oversight.
• Some of the resources with greatest impact are those that have been around a long while.
• While some resources serve very large audiences, many digital publications--capable of running on relatively small budgets--are tailored to small, niche audiences.
• Innovations relating to multimedia content and Web 2.0 functionality appear in some cases to blur the lines between resource types.
• Projects of all sizes--especially open-access sites and publications--employ a range of support strategies in the search for financial sustainability.

 The Google Book Settlement is producing much discussion within the publishing community. OCLC’s Ricky Erway has written a thoughtful and brief summary of the Impact of the Google Book Settlement on Libraries.

  The Transfer Code of Practice provides guidance in the case of transfer of journal ownership from one publisher to another.

  A departmental working party from UC Santa Barbara sets out to analyze the reasons for changes in Impact factor over time (since 1994). Findings are that the average Impact Factor (IF) across all disciplines has been increasing (up 2.6% per year). Most powerfully there are large differences between fields, with (for example) Economics journals having an average IF of 0.8, whereas the average in molecular and cell biology is 4.8. The report notes that an increasing number of citations in the reference lists of published papers is the greatest contributor to impact factor inflation over time.

  A new imprint is Bloomsbury Academic with a radical new open access model for humanities and social sciences books. All titles will be made available free of charge online, “with free downloads, for noncommercial purposes immediately upon publication, using Creative Commons licenses.” The works will also be sold as printed books, using an array of short-run print-on-demand (POD) services.

  For all of us interested in the changes to University Press publishing an article in the Mellon Foundation Annual Report is essential reading. The article confirms that US University Presses account for 5% of books published and 1.3% of book sales based on the latest available data. “University presses thus are creatures that are both distinguished and limited by the particular niche they occupy.” The Mellon Foundation intends “to encourage experimentation in response to clearly identified needs in the (university press) system.”€�

 Following the vote passed at Harvard for university ownership and distribution of research papers (February 2008) three publishing organizations - STM, PSP and ALPSP have joined forces to issue a statement about publishing agreements which is essential reading.

 An initiative to reduce the repetition of peer-review of the same manuscript within a community is being pursued by BioMed Central. The Neuroscience peer review consortium journals “…accept manuscript reviews from other Consortium journals. By reducing the number of times that a manuscript is reviewed, the Consortium will increase the speed of publication of research results, and lessen the burden on both authors and reviewers alike.”

 SERU: A Shared electronic Resource Understanding should help smaller publishers (and libraries) with limited resources sell electronic resources into US academic libraries.

 A CIBER research behavior study commissioned by the British Library sets out to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time. Interesting reading throughout - and see the chart below from this study which provides one benchmark of researcher behavior by age in 2007 and the findings  “..suggest that the shift away from the physical to the virtual library will accelerate very rapidly and that tools like Google Scholar will be increasingly a real and present threat to the library as an institution.”

 The American Institute of Physics is slicing and dicing its publications in an interesting way now offering the option of subscribing to specific sections of two of its journals. Applied Physics Reviews comprises the review articles from Journal of Applied Physics. JCP: Biochemical Physics is made up of the articles published in The Journal of Chemical Physics  that directly deal with, or have important implications for, biologically related systems; content is published online daily. Presumably the option of subscribing to a particular subset of the content of these journals will be attractive to institutional libraries that may not want to subscribe to the complete journals.

 An editorial in Nature Genetics in 2007 written by the first Editor Kevin Davies describes the exciting events surrounding hatching of this first Nature spin-off journal in 1992 which went on to be so highly successful, and the first of many.

 David Prosser’s recent article Public policy and the politics of Open Access  provides a helpful overview of the public policy drivers that are affecting scholarly communications and describes the major policy initiatives that are supporting a move to open access.

 An article describing a concept that has been around for over 5 years Publishing cooperatives: an alternative for non-profit publishers describes how publishing cooperatives can provide a scalable publishing model that provides a practical financial framework capable of building and sustaining society publishing programs. However, the practical issue here is who and how will such cooperatives form?

 The OECD has published Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding. The principles set out to increase return on public investments in research through effective access to research. Core principles which are central and important are Openness, Flexibility, Transparency, Legal conformity, Protection of intellectual property, Formal responsibility, Professionalism, Interoperability, Quality, Security, Efficiency, Accountability and Sustainability

 The OECD Council has come out with a lengthy and specific set of recommendations on access to research data from public funding which clearly articulates a policy position and makes clear the differences between publicly and privately funded research data. It goes on to include a set of guidelines and principles which are well worth reading.

 Following feedback from the Customer Service Briefing Session at the 2006 Conference, the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) collected publishers' pricing announcements to simplify the renewals process for serials librarians worldwide by providing a central look-up point. The list to date is available at: http://www.uksg.org/pricelists.asp and there is a link for all publishers not currently included to add their details.

 Who reads your online text? Jakob Nielsen's recent Alertbox presents the results of some Eye-tracking Behavior studies which show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. No great surprises it is but worth noting that users will not read text thoroughly so when writing for the Web:

• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information
• The start of sub-headings, paragraphs and bullet points are most effective if they use information carrying words

Conversely, for scholarly publishers it may not be eyes at all that read the text you publish. In a Chapter from a book to be published soon (and to which I also contributed a Chapter) Cliff Lynch asks some key questions about how information is being read: "As the scholarly literature moves to digital form, what is actually needed to move beyond a system that just replicates all of our assumptions that this literature is only read, and read only by human beings, one article at a time?  What is needed to permit the creation of digital libraries hosting these materials that moves beyond the "incunabular" view of the literature, to use Greg Crane's very provocative recent characterization?  What is needed to allow the application of computational technologies to extract new knowledge, correlations and hypotheses from collections of scholarly literature?"

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