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8 - Journal finances
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 220-269
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“My other piece of advice, Copperfield”, said Mr Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
(Dickens, 1849)Introduction
No matter how well edited a journal is, how many subscribers/readers it has, or how high its impact, a journal cannot continue to exist unless the income it derives covers all of its expenses. Not only that, but a sufficient surplus of income over expenses must be generated if a journal (or a list of journals) is to survive in the long run. A surplus is needed to cover the inevitable discrepancies between financial projections and actual results, to provide seed money for future projects, and to build a reserve to weather downturns. In addition, learned society publishers need surpluses to fund their other activities, and university presses to support loss-making but nevertheless worthwhile publications; commercial publishers need to generate a sufficient return on investment to keep investors happy. In the current online environment, a surplus is even more necessary in order to cover both continuous product development and the need to convert content as new standards of online presentation and delivery develop. With a surplus of just one eighth of 1%, Mr Micawber was operating on a very thin margin.
13 - The future of scholarly communication
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 380-402
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Scholarly communication
The primary objective of a scholar’s work is to answer questions or solve problems. The nature of the questions or problems may be very different in the sciences and the humanities, but the underlying objective is the same.
This work, however, achieves nothing unless it is communicated. Scholars communicate with each other in order to test and develop their ideas, as well as to set down a personal marker for their discoveries and insights. They do this in a whole spectrum of different ways, ranging from the completely informal (e.g., face-to-face, telephone, or email “conversation”) to the completely formal (e.g., publication in a journal article or book). And formal publication is itself only a means to an end – that of getting the author’s work accepted by others, and eventually integrated into the body of the world’s knowledge.
More than a decade ago, publisher Arthur Smith (Smith, 2000) nicely described the range of ways in which scholars communicated in the past, and might do in the future – see Figures 13.1 and 13.2. He illustrated how publication in a journal is just one stage in a sequence which moves from the author’s first, preliminary private communications to the eventual adoption of his or her findings by the wider world.
Smith’s view of the potential impact of electronic media (shown in Figure 13.2) was remarkably prescient. While the stages of communication, and the degrees of completeness/formality, have remained the same, the advent of online means of achieving these ends has placed increasing control in the hands of authors and their institutions, particularly at the stage of “communication.”
4 - The production process
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 104-132
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When manuscripts were submitted on paper, mailed in envelopes with postage, and edited with color pencils, production started after a manuscript was accepted for publication, and the term “production” is still used for that stage of manuscript processing. However, with the use of electronic files, the preparation of the manuscript and related figures, datasets, etc., for publication starts long before its acceptance, so that it makes sense to combine discussion of peer-review systems and production processes. As authors are asked to prepare their manuscripts for electronic submission in ways that will make the production process more efficient, we will start our discussion of production with an overview of electronic submission and peer-review systems.
Electronic submission and peer-review systems
With the development of electronic technology for preparing manuscripts, authors went first from mailing typescripts to journal Editorial offices to mailing disks they had prepared using word-processing programs, and then to not using the mail at all when it became possible to attach article and figure files to emails or to send them using file transfer protocol (FTP).
In the late 1990s, web-based submission and peer-review systems were developed (Hames, 2007; Tananbaum and Holmes, 2008) that allowed everyone (journal Editors, reviewers, authors, assistants) involved in peer review to access, from anywhere in the world, a site on the web that allowed them to deal with a manuscript, rather than sending it to someone or waiting to receive it. This saved both time – especially time waiting for manuscripts and reviews to arrive in the mail – and money – specifically in copying, faxing, mailing, and telephone costs. In many cases, savings were realized in staff costs as well, as there was no longer a need for staff to open mail, log in paper submissions, count pages, make copies, mail manuscripts to journal Editors and reviewers, and so on.
3 - Editing
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 75-103
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Introduction
Without editors, journals would not happen.
The Oxford English dictionary (OED) defines “editor” as “a person who is in charge of and determines the final content of a newspaper, magazine, or multi-author book.”
However, in the field of scholarly journals, the terms “editing” and “editor” cover a particularly broad range of activities; to add to the confusion, the precise terminology used to describe the roles within this range varies widely among publishers, and elements of these roles may be combined in numerous different ways.
Broadly speaking, editorial roles fall into two distinct functional areas. On the one hand, there is the “content acquisition” role – generally carried out by a specialist in the journal’s subject area. The journal Editor, in this sense of the word, will fit the OED definition: he or she will be responsible for deciding what does and does not appear in the publication. There may be a more complex team fulfilling aspects of this role – this is discussed in more detail below.
On the other hand, there is the “process and management” role – the preparation of the content for publication, as well as the overall business management of the journal. This type of editorial role is exercised within the publisher’s offices (or under its control). Although it is often forgotten by those who assert that publishers are no longer a necessary part of the scholarly communication chain, Editors carry out a most valuable job, clarifying (and often correcting) the author’s text and, vitally for online journals, checking the references to ensure that they can be linked wherever possible to the publications to which they refer. For online journals, they also prepare digital files for publication and make decisions about how the content will be presented.
10 - Contract publishing
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 297-317
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Introduction
It has been said that as soon as the number of scholars in a given subject area reaches 500, two events generally occur: a society is formed and a new journal is launched. Although many societies publish their own journals, the majority of society journals are published under contract. Many new and smaller societies (and indeed some large ones) prefer to partner with a publisher to launch a new journal. The partner could be a commercial publisher, a non-profit University Press, or a related larger society with its own publishing program. (See discussion of societies’ role in journal publishing in Chapter 1, Introduction to journals.)
While this chapter addresses contract publishing for societies, a journal may equally be owned by other bodies such as an academic department at a university or an independent institute. In addition, the “publisher” may also be a society that publishes its own journal and offers publishing services to other societies. The same procedures generally apply.
Partnering with a publisher to launch a new journal offers a society a number of advantages:
It allows the society to concentrate on its mission to serve its members and advance the field.
It allows the society to retain ownership of the journal without the financial risk of self-publishing.
It provides a reduced-rate publication to members, again without the financial risk of self-publishing.
It provides access to a depth of publishing and marketing expertise which would be difficult to match for a single title.
…
6 - Marketing and sales
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 156-198
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Introduction
One might think that “everybody knows the important journals in their field,” but marketing is an absolutely crucial function in journal publishing – not only for the publisher but for the author, reader, and buyer (the librarian) as well. “Marketing” entails a wide range of activities well beyond what the “marketing department” does, and requires support from editorial, fulfillment, production, technology, and accounting departments.
When a product manager emails authors about a new feature in an online journal; when an editor conducts a workshop for young scholars on how to get published in a journal; when a customer-service representative helps restore access to an IP range that had been shut off; when the IT group sends metadata to a library search engine; when an indexer lists keywords for the article abstract; when a programmer optimizes a web page for better search engine results – they are all helping to market the journal. This chapter discusses marketing in this broadest sense: an interrelated set of activities that promotes the brand (of the journal and the publisher) while maximizing the discoverability of each individual article.
“Brand” refers to the “identity” of a product, service, or company in the eyes of its customers – or the identity that the company would like the customer to perceive. In the journal world, the publisher’s brand matters to the Editors-in-Chief who are recruited to manage a journal, but the brand known to authors is almost always that of the journal rather than the publishing company. The reputations of the Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board are an integral part of that brand for most authors.
Contents
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp v-x
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9 - Subsidiary income
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 270-296
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Summary
Introduction
We noted in the marketing chapter that journal publishers who rely primarily on institutional subscriptions and license fees need to develop other sources of revenue. This chapter will briefly survey some of these other revenue channels. Since consortia licensing arrangements draw on the same institutional serials budgets that pay for subscriptions, we will not dwell on them here. (Consortia licensing is covered in Chapter 6, Marketing and sales.) Some of these items do depend on the institutional market, but not, generally, on the library’s serials budget.
We make no attempt to rank these revenue channels by size or return on investment. Different publishers will have different results, depending on subject matter, the national or international character of the journal, real-world events, and the effectiveness of the publisher’s own marketing and publicity efforts. Suffice it to say that, for most journals, subscription and license revenue and/or OA publication fees will still probably constitute the major part of the publisher’s income.
Alternative modes of access
Subscriptions and license fees are not the only way to gain access to a publisher’s content, especially for those institutions or individuals who only need an occasional article, or who want to tap into a publisher’s content for a brief period of time (as a student doing a thesis might).
Appendix 1 - Glossary
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 403-427
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abstract A short summary (usually by the author, often within a set word limit) of the content of an article, usually published at the head of the article and generally freely available even when the article itself is not. Also third-party summaries included in some abstracting and indexing services (q.v.). A structured abstract is an abstract with distinct, labeled sections, often mimicking the IMRAD heading sequence (q.v.).
abstracting and indexing (A&I) service A database and/or publication of bibliographic information, with or without summaries, about the scholarly literature in a given field (e.g., Mathematical Reviews) or a related set of fields (e.g., Inspec); a few cover extremely large sets of journals (e.g., Scopus, Web of Science). A&I services now find themselves competing with general search engines such as Google and Bing.
acceptance rate The percentage of submitted papers that are accepted for publication. A high-profile, high-impact journal may have an acceptance rate of less than 10 due to a high volume of submissions far in excess of the available page budget. Many specialty journals have an acceptance rate of between 40 and 60 .
acid-free paper (sometimes known as permanent paper) Paper made for archival purposes. The specifications for manufacture are laid out in American Standard ANSI Z39 1984 and cover neutral pH, alkaline reserve, chemical finish, tear resistance, and fold endurance.
7 - Fulfillment
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 199-219
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Summary
Introduction
The fulfillment function (also referred to as circulation, distribution, and/or subscription management) is the backbone of the publishing operation, connecting customers to content. The fulfillment operation is responsible for invoicing customers, generating renewals, receiving and tracking payments, and delivering the goods purchased. This includes physical distribution involving printers, warehousing, and postal regulations as well as electronic delivery with its own issues of technical support, user authentication, and access rights.
Regardless of whether the “deliverable” is print or electronic, the fulfillment team needs to work closely with subscription agents, online hosting services, printers, the marketing and editorial departments, and the company’s own accounting systems. As with the discussion of marketing in the previous chapter, we will discuss “fulfillment” in the broadest sense, regardless of which department is responsible for the various activities that constitute it.
Online publishing has turned fulfillment into a 24/7 operation, very different from what was necessary to distribute print journals. With print, institutional “subscribers” were essentially shipping addresses, often with multiple mail drops within a single institution – but seldom related to each other in the publisher’s database at an institutional or “customer” level. Indeed, many of the publisher’s institutional customers were completely unknown to the publisher, buried in bulk-copy orders from subscription agents, who then redelivered the copy to the final recipient. Publishers and agents sometimes argued over who “owned” such customers, and agents were not always willing to identify them to the publisher.
2 - Managing journals
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 28-74
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Summary
Introduction – what is management?
Management is the process of gathering a team of people to work together in order to accomplish a desired goal both effectively and efficiently with available resources. The effective manager does not need to know every detail of the process involved in attaining the goal; rather, he or she must know what needs to be done, who knows how to do it, what resources are needed, and how to get everyone to work together to get the job done.
It has been said that we learn to manage by the way we have been managed. While we all may consciously emulate aspects of the style of managers we admire and avoid the style of those we do not, it is important to recognize that we may have unconsciously absorbed other aspects of their management approach, of which we are unaware. Anyone aspiring to management should consider taking a basic management course, or at least read a basic management text (see “Further reading” at the end of this chapter), in order to gain an overview of what is entailed in managing a project and to be exposed to a variety of management methods.
While much has been written about the science of management, there is a large component of art involved as well. Some aspects can be taught, but others are best learned by observation and practice. One of these is the ability to recognize the strengths (and weaknesses) of the individuals in the team; another consists of learning how best to get each person to “buy in” to the goal and work together with the rest of the team. Two additional interpersonal skills are essential: (1) knowing when to leave someone alone to do a job and when to intervene to get the job done and (2) knowing how to be an effective buffer between your staff and your own manager, allowing each to concentrate on the task at hand and not to interfere unduly with each other.
11 - Copyright and other legal aspects
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 318-357
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While copyright provides the legal underpinning for much of what journal publishing does, it is far from being the only area of law which is relevant. Contract law governs the whole range of agreements, from full-blown contracts (e.g., between a publisher and a journal’s owner, or between the publisher/owner and the Editor) to agreements with individual authors; licenses (whether for a whole country, or for an individual user), and subsidiary agreements with third parties, are contracts too. The issue of libel may arise (for example, in book reviews). Another area of law which is increasingly important, as personal records of authors, reviewers, and others are generally maintained on computer, is that of data protection.
All of these areas of the law are governed by national laws, which vary somewhat (although within the European Community they operate under the overall umbrella of European law); in this chapter we aim to bring out the main differences between US and UK/European law. Further detail of the national differences can be found at http://portal.unesco.org/culture.
Copyright
What is copyright?
Copyright is what it says – the right to copy. It provides the copyright owner with the exclusive right to make copies, and to permit (or not to permit) others to make copies (in whatever medium) and to “communicate them to the public” – i.e., to distribute or publish them. It also covers the right of rental or lending; performing, showing, or playing the work in public; including in a collection (e.g., an anthology); and making an adaptation (e.g., a translation).
The Handbook of Journal Publishing
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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The Handbook of Journal Publishing is a comprehensive reference work written by experienced professionals, covering all aspects of journal publishing, both online and in print. Journals are crucial to scholarly communication, but changes in recent years in the way journals are produced, financed, and used make this an especially turbulent and challenging time for journal publishers - and for authors, readers, and librarians. The Handbook offers a thorough guide to the journal publishing process, from editing and production through marketing, sales, and fulfilment, with chapters on management, finances, metrics, copyright, and ethical issues. It provides a wealth of practical tools, including checklists, sample documents, worked examples, alternative scenarios, and extensive lists of resources, which readers can use in their day-to-day work. Between them, the authors have been involved in every aspect of journal publishing over several decades and bring to the text their experience working for a wide range of publishers in both the not-for-profit and commercial sectors.
Preface and acknowledgments
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp xi-xii
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Summary
We, the authors, have all spent many years involved with scholarly and professional journals in the course of our respective publishing careers. And we have all found journals to be one of the most fascinating areas of publishing. Maybe it is because journals are so important to authors; particularly in the sciences, being published promptly in the best available journal is key to a researcher’s future career. Maybe it is because journals represent the cutting edge, where new findings and new ideas are first reported. Maybe it is because journals are not static, but more like a living entity; the publisher can make adjustments to every aspect of a journal, as frequently as necessary, and observe what difference they make (whereas a book publisher has only one chance to make changes – the publication of a new edition – if any!). Maybe it is because journals have been for decades – and still are – in the vanguard of all kinds of exciting developments enabled by the web: developments not just in how journals are produced, delivered, and used, but also in how they are financed. Maybe it is because journals have been at the forefront of significant cultural changes affecting academia, scientific research, publishing, and scholarly communication in general. Probably it is a combination of all these reasons, and more besides.
Whether you, the reader, have come to journals publishing after a spell with books, or are completely new to publishing – or, indeed, if you have some journals experience and want to refresh your knowledge and ideas – we hope that you will find this book a useful resource. You may or may not want to read it from cover to cover; more likely, you will refer to particular sections as you need them. However you use our book, we hope that it will help you to enjoy your experience of journals publishing as much as we have done. Good luck!
12 - Ethical issues
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 358-379
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The discussion of ethics in scholarly publishing has become more common in recent years. One could argue that this is due to an increasing amount of unethical behavior by authors, who are under ever more pressure to publish often and in high-profile journals, and who may stretch or breach the boundaries of what is ethical in order to do so. One could also argue that the use of technology to create a manuscript makes it easier to copy and paste published texts, or to tweak the information shown in a figure. But at the same time, this technology makes instances of unethical conduct easier to find, because, for example, it is easy to compare two documents electronically, to open an electronic figure file to see how it was changed, or to search for text online to see if it has been copied from another source. So one could equally argue that authors are not more dishonest than they used to be, but that ethical issues are more easily, and therefore more frequently, found. More than likely, the apparent increase in cases of ethical misconduct is a combination of all of the above.
There is a spectrum of ethical issues, and some can be considered more serious than others, as will be clear throughout this chapter. They range from unintentional sloppiness, through intentional pushing of the boundaries and “researchers behaving badly,” to the kind of behavior that negates published research, destroys careers, and tarnishes the research enterprise.
Frontmatter
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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5 - Journal metrics
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 133-155
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Why measure journals?
The measurement and ranking of journals has been an obsession of the scholarly communication community since at least the mid-1970s when Eugene Garfield, scientist and founder (in 1955) of the Institute for Scientific Information, first published the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which ranked journals by the journal impact factor (JIF) (Thomson Reuters, n.d.; Adler et al., 2008). A variety of journal metrics have evolved since the release of the first JCR, purporting to measure a variety of journal aspects such as quality, usefulness, popularity, and influence.
But why the interest in measuring journals? Librarians want information that can inform their decisions on which journals to purchase or renew; authors want to know which are the most prestigious places to publish; and publishers want to know about the relative standing of the journals they publish and those they may try to acquire. Additionally, funding bodies and promotion committees have controversially used journal metrics as an indicator of the quality of individual authors’ papers published in those journals. This in turn increases the pressure on authors to publish their work in the highest-ranked journals, and on publishers to get their journals ranked as highly as possible in order to attract the best authors.
1 - Introduction to journals
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 1-27
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Journals have been, for more than 350 years, a key part of the fabric of scholarly communication. They enable scholars to communicate their ideas and discoveries across time as well as space; thus the sum of human knowledge and understanding is gradually increased, as others are able to integrate, question, and build on the work of their predecessors (as in Newton’s famous remark “if I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of giants” [Newton, 1676]).
In November 2012, there were 28,714 active peer-reviewed, scholarly journals listed in the Ulrichsweb database (Ulrichsweb, 2012) and there are certainly many more, particularly in languages other than English; this number has been increasing steadily by around 3 per annum, and will no doubt continue to do so. Jinha estimated that by 2009, some 50 million individual articles had been published since the first journals appeared in 1665 (Jinha, 2010); for about every 100 additional articles written, a new journal is created (Mabe, 2003).
No accurate estimates are available for the global value of the scholarly journals market; in 2011, the global market for all scholarly, peer-reviewed journals was variously estimated at $9.4bn (Outsell, 2012) to $10.3bn for science, technology, and medicine (STM) alone (Simba Information, 2012). This is not large in the overall scheme of things – in 2010, the market for chocolate and confectionery in the UK alone was estimated at approximately $7.72bn (KeyNote, 2011)!
Appendix 2 - Resources
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 428-443
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Index
- Sally Morris, Ed Barnas, Douglas LaFrenier, Margaret Reich
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- 21 February 2013, pp 451-467
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