Scholarly Communication & Publishing in the Digital Era

1. Scholarly Communication & Publishing
in the Digital Era
Changes, Challenges, Questions
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
13 January 2015
Session Website
Nicholas W. Jankowski
Former affiliations
Co-editor, New Media & Society
Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities & Social Sciences (VKS)
e-Humanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences
Radboud University Nijmegen, NL
nickjan@xs4all.nl

2. Preface
• caveat: ‘work-in-progress’
• ongoing conversations
– across: disciplines, contexts, time periods
– Individual exchanges
• editor-editor
• editor-publisher
• author-author
– Public events
• conference keynote ALPSP
• Publishing seminar, Brill
• IR11 Roundtable

3. Objectives & Procedures
1. Panorama of innovations
2. Preliminary clustering
3. Proposal for research question & study
• Procedures
– Informal: exploratory
– Selection: personal, non-random
• orientation: new media, Internet
• mainly: social sciences, humanities; few STM publications
• mainly: journals, some book publishers, some special publishing projects
– Illustrations: large variety
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4. Summary Statement re Innovations
What’s Happening in Scholarly Publishing?
• Web-based
– Linked: within & between
• Visualization-rich
– Multimedia
• Access: publications, data
• Proliferation
– titles, publishers & authors
– publishing models
• Interweaving: formal & informal communication
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5. Panorama of innovations
illustrations to show
• Collage
• Plus:
– Visualizing Asia
– digitalculturebooks
– Intern’l J. of Internet Science (IJIS)
– Intern’l J. of Learning & Media (IJLM)
– Vectors
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6. Collage of Contrasts
in Scholarly Publishing

7. Enhancing Scholarship:Visualizing Cultures
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8. Enhancing Books: Univ. Of Mich. Press
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10. International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM)
(last issue: 2012)
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11. Clustering innovations
Scholarly Communication & Publishing
in the Digital Era
Changes, Challenges, Questions
Part II of Screencast
Ljubljana seminar: Scholarly Publishing 12

12. Clustering innovations
1. Accessibility & searchability
2. Assessment
– Peer review
– Metrics: Impact factor, H-index, altmetrics
3. Functionalities (online added values)
– Hyperlinks
– Visualizations (color, dynamic)
– Length
– Multimedia
– Real-time reference updating
– Distribution forms (e.g., web: html, pdf, pdf plus; mobile, print)
– Supplementary materials (e.g., data sets, analyses)
4. Communicating (social media & Web 2.0)
– signalling, sharing, commenting, discussing
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13. Accessibility 1: Repositories (SSRN)
Ljubljana seminar: Scholarly Publishing
Open-access
repositories worldwide,
2005–2012; Pinfield et
al., 2014
14

14. SSRN: illustration of functions
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15. SSRN: citation info
16

16. Accessibility: Open Access
Basic definition: digital, online, free of charge, free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions (Peter Suber)
Main versions of OA (research articles)
– Gold road: research articles in OA
journals…usually with publication fee (APC: Article
Processing Charges, ranging from ca. 200-3000 USD)
– Green road: put articles in OA archives or
repositories…after embargo period
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17. Peter Suber: Open Access
18

18. Varieties of open access
Open Access: overview (Waltham, 2009: 39)
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19. PLOS ONE
• Other mega-journals:
BMJ Open, SprinterPlus, PeerJ, Scientific Reports
• SAGE Open: Launch 2011
• Fees: $700/article
• Review: ‘sound methodology’
– not cascading peer review
– “Sage Open will accept articles solely on the basis of the quality of the research, evaluating the scientific and research methods of
each article for validity”
• (see the scholarly kitchen on SAGE Open)
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20. Assessment 1: ‘conventional’ peer review;
statements from journals
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iCS: Published articles in iCS have all been subjected to rigorous peer review comprising initial editorial screening and anonymous
refereeing by at least two referees.
TIS: Your article will be previewed in the editorial office for its quality and suitability for publication in The Information
Society (TIS). If your article appears to be a work that our readers would be eager to read, it will be sent to an Associate
Editor who belongs to TIS' editorial board to manage the review.
NM&S: operates a strictly anonymous peer review process.
All articles in Digital Journalism have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymised refereeing by
two anonymous referees.
POQ: All manuscripts are reviewed anonymously. The review process is ordinarily completed within 3 months.
SAGE Open: Each article undergoes a rigorous double-blind peer review process, in which the reviewer and author’s names and
information is withheld from the other. The approach of SAGE Open's peer review process, however, differs from that of traditional
journals. Rather than assessing the relative 'importance' of a given article to its respective field, peer review will instead focus
solely on determining the quality of research methodology,… determining whether the research was conducted properly, the
discussion accurately summarizes the research, and the conclusion follows logically from the research.
JCMC: Please remove all author names and institutional information from manuscripts, so as to enable blinded peer
review.

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McFarland, M. (2014). Why Clay Christensen is abandoning the traditional approach to
academic research -. The Washington Post.

22. Assessment 2: open peer review
23

23. Assessment (cont.) & functionality
Scholarly Communication & Publishing
in the Digital Era
Changes, Challenges, Questions
Part III of Screencast
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24. Assessment 3: MediaCommons & SQ
Reference: Fitzpatrick & Rowe (2010)

25. Assessment 4: F1000: post peer review

26. Assessment 5:
Solicited post-publication comments

27. Assessment 6:
AEJMC-Peter Lang Scholarsourcing Series
• Scholarsourcing is a joint publishing initiative between the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and Peter Lang
publishing.
• The series re-imagines the way that scholarly books are proposed, peer-
reviewed, and approved for contract during this time of relentless change
in both the journalism and publishing industries.
• Proposals are uploaded to an online public platform that allows as many
AEJMC members as possible to browse, review, and then vote on and
pledge support.
• The authors of the top proposals are invited to submit complete book
proposals. Once those reviews have been evaluated by the editorial
committee and the publisher, a decision on which proposals receive
contracts is made.
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28. Functionality
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29. IJLM 1 (most cited)
30

30. IJLM 2 (related articles)
31

31. IJLM 3 (pop up images)
32

32. Functionality: online, multi-media
(IJOC)

33. IJOC: multimedia
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34. Seminar.net 3
35

35. Functionality: Article of the Future
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37. Article of the Future: 2
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38. Article of the Future: 3
Initial Reactions to Elsevier Prototypes (Sept. 2009)
• Nothing really new
• Underestimation of editorial investment
• Underestimation of author willingness
• Misguided estimation of reader interest
Illustrations of comments in blogsphere
– Online Journalism Blog
– the scholarly kitchen
– ReadWriteWeb
– Ptsefton
– nature network
• Now (2014): standard practice among Elsevier (Cell Press) journals
• But: which functionalities have been taken up by other journals, particularly in
SSH?
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39. Functionality: informal & formal
ASA: Society Pages, Contexts
40

40. Contexts 1
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41. Contexts 2
42

42. Contexts 3
43

43. Contexts 4
44

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45. Contexts
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46. Theory Culture & Society
“Theory, Culture & Society is a highly ranked, high impact factor, rigorously peer reviewed journal
that publishes original research and review articles in the social and cultural sciences.”
47

47. Theory Culture & Society
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48. Communicating
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49. Communicating (SAGE Publications)
communicationspace: terminated
Methodspace: operational
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50. Communicationspace 2
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51. Communicationspace 3
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52. Coming to a Close...
• Areas of change
– Information presentation
• Web-based
• visual
– Access
• Open access emerging
• Access to publications & data
– Information providers: proliferating
– Communicative functions : blending formal & informal
• Change agents
– commercial, publisher-driven (e.g., Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Open Choice)
– Open access advocates
• Attention required: perspective of user / reader / audience
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53. Possible Research Question
• Which of the functionalities made available in online versions of scholarly journal articles are used
by students and scholars in which disciplines?
• Functionalities (not complete)
– Abstract, keywords
– Internal & external links in articles
– Visualizations (e.g. pop-up tables, images suitable for reuse)
– Article metrics (e.g., most read, cited, downloads,
– Import to reference mgm software (e.g., Mendeley, Zotero, EndNote)
– Videos, podcasts
– Availability of supplementary mat’ls (e.g., datasets, instruments, additonal analyses)
– Links in references
– Lists of similar articles
• Journals
– different (commercial) publishers (e.g., SAGE, Routledge, Wiley, Elsevier)
• Users
– Scholarly level (e.g., undergrad., grad., post-doc, early-career academic, senior scholar)
• Disciplines
– 2 - 3 disciplines (e.g., soc. sci., hum., natural sci.)
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54. Research design considerations
• Mixed / multiple methods
– Survey, interview, observation, log data
• Longitudinal
– Trend, panel
• Multiple institutional sites
– Location, type inst., e.g., research / teaching / professional
training
• Multiple disciplines
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55. Possible forms of data collection
• Online survey of sample of users
• (e.g., single inst., but multiple disciplines, range of
scholarly levels)
• Observation sessions with users
• (e.g., ‘think aloud’)
• Log data from publishers
• (frequencies of functionality use for journals, together
with identifying info on users, e.g., inst., location)
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56. Other considerations
• Theoretical perspective
• Exploratory or hypothesis testing
• Relation to publishers in study (e.g., gaining
access, periodic reporting)
• Practice / policy components
• IRB approval
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57. Thank You!
Scholarly Communication & Publishing in the Digital Era
Changes, Challenges, Questions
Nicholas W. Jankowski
nickjan@xs4all.nl
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58. URLs
for journals / documents mentioned in presentation
• International Journal of Internet Science
• International Journal of Learning & Media, MIT Press
• International Journal of Learning & Media
• Vectors Journal
• Visualizing Cultures
• digitalculturebooks
• Digital Scholar
• Thd Battle for Open
• The Journal of Media Innovations
• Cell Reports
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
• Open Access (Peter Stuber)
• The future of scholarly journals publishing among social science and humanities associations (Waltham, 2009)
• Open-access repositories worldwide, 2005–2012: Past growth, current characteristics, and future possibilities, Pinfield et al., 2014
• SAGE Open
• the scholarly kitchen
• Shakespeare Quarterly
• Mediacommonspress, Shakespeare Quarterly
• Fitzpatrick, K., & Rowe, K. (2010). Keywords for Open Peer Review. Logos, 21(3), 133–141. Available here.
• Christensen, C. M., & Bever, D. van. (2014). The Capitalist’s Dilemma. Harvard Business Review. Available here.
• McFarland, M. (2014). Why Clay Christensen is abandoning the traditional approach to academic research -. The Washington Post.. Available here.
• F1000Research
• Sociologica
• AEJMC-Peter Lang Scholarsourcing Series
• International Journal of Communication
• Seminar.net
• Article of the Future
• The SocietyPages
• Contexts
• Contexts at SAGE
• Theory Culture & Society
• Methodspace
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