MedKnow publications

A number of journals from India are published by the learned societies or their editors without the involvement of commercial publishers. MedKnow publications is a for-profit open access journal publisher providing services to more than 35 journals. Sahoo (2006) provide the features of MedKnow publications which maintains an independent website for each of its journals which provide full text of articles without any access restriction. The full text is available in HTML and PDF. The web site use open URL standard, making linking easier and Dublin Core Metadata. Websites provide interactive features such as ability to add comments on published articles, usage statistics and translation into eight foreign languages. Links are given to Pubmed and databases such as DSMZ and Species 2000. MedKnow has put in place an online manuscript submission and peer review system through which over 10,000 manuscripts have been processed by 2006. After becoming online the visibility and reach of the journals has increased greatly. The projected impact factor of JPGM has increased from 0.25 in the year 2000 to 0.99 in 2005 and a continuous growth has been seen in manuscript submission an article download also.   

Sahu, DK (2006). Journal publishing in the developing world: MedKnow publications as a model. INASP Newsletter, Spring, pp 7-8.

Open access to scientific publications

Bjork (2004) share the experience of last ten years in open access scholarly communication. Despite widespread agreement among academies that OA would be the optimal distribution mode for publicly financed research results; such channels still constitute only a marginal phenomenon in global scholarly communication system. There are many barriers which hindering a rapid proliferation of open access. The discussion is structured according to the main OA channels; peer reviewed journals for primary publishing, subject-specific and institutional repositories for secondary parallel publishing. It also discusses the types of barriers, which can be classified as consisting of the legal framework, the information technology infrastructure, business models, indexing services and standards, the academic reward system, marketing and critical mass.

Bjork, BC (2004). Open access to scientific publications- an analysis of the barriers to change?. Information Research, 9 (2). Retrieved on April 4, 2010 from http://inforamationr.net/ir/9-2/paper170.html.

Interactive open access publishing

Poschl (2010) argued that the advantages of open access, public peer review and interactive discussion can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional publishing and peer review. Since 2001 the benefits and viability of this approach are clearly demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and a growing number of sister journals launched by the publisher Copernicus and the European Geosciences Union. These journals are practicing a two-stage process of publication and peer review combined with interactive public discussion, which effectively resolves the dilemma between rapid scientific exchange and through quality assurance. The same or similar concepts have recently also been adopted in other disciplines, including the life sciences and economics. The principles, key aspects and achievements of interactive open access publishing (top quality and impact, efficient self-regulation and low rejection rates, little waste and low cost) are outlined and discussed.

Poschl, U (2010). Interactive open access publishing and public peer review: The effectiveness of transparency and self-regulation in scientific quality assurance. INternation federation of Library Associations and Institutions 36 (1) pp 40-46. Retrieved on November 29, 2010 from http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/publications/ ifla-journals/fila-journals-36-1_2010.PDF. DOI: 10.1177/0340035209359573.

An often-cited reason authors make their articles openly accessible is to maximize the impact of their research. OA article is more likely to be used and cited than one published commercially. Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the greatest possible research impact (citation impact). In May 2005, 16 major Dutch universities cooperatively launched DAREnet, the digital Academic Repositories, making over 47,000 research papers available online. By the 2009, the repository holds in excess of 69,000 articles. In April 2006 European Commission recommended that research funding agencies should establish a European policy mandating published article arising from EC funded research to be available after a given time period in OA archives. Libraries and librarians are also among the most vocal and active OA advocates. Many library associations have either signed major OA declarations or created their own (Irivwieri, 2009).

Irivwieri, JW (2009). Research into open access science publishing. Library Hi-Tech News 3 (4), pp 16-18.

ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin.

In Germany, university libraries have the duty to collect the dissertations from their own students and the German National Library is obliged by law to collect all paper based German dissertations. In addition to this there was a project entitled ‘Dissertation Online’ which finished in 2001 and attempted to make available the dissertations online. By 2003, there were 10,173 electronic dissertations in Germany. A student in Germany can publish in most universities electronically. In average, 16% of the students publish electronically and in some particular universities it is upto 25%. Electronic publishing gives a chance of higher quality and quantity of retrieval. One of the biggest problems of electronic publishing is long term archiving of documents. Other problems faced by Humboldt University were i) storage media: there were no experience about the long term, and what is the right media, tape or CD-ROM or any other? ii) the file format: the recommended format were XML or SGML but there were not enough tools to convert to XML from other formats like MS-Word, Word Perfect, LateX or StarOffice. 

Schirmbacher, P (2003). Electronic theses and dissertations and the necessity of a new culture of electronic publishing: ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin. Retrieved July 21, 2010 from http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/conferences/etd2003/schirmbacher-peter/PDF/index.pdf.

open access journal initiatives in India

Sawant’s study in 2009 revealed that there were 178 open access journals available online in India. Almost 50 percent of the online journals from India are open access. Out of 178 journals there were 17 social science and 161 science and technology journals. Most of the journals were published or funded by government agencies such as ICAR, ICMR, academies such as IASc, INSA, learned societies, associations, commercial publishers and even editors. About 64 percent journals are published or hosted by MedKnow and Medlars Centre. All journals are peer reviewed, indexed and abstracted in premier indexing and abstracting services such as Index Medicus, Chemical Abstract Service, SCIRUS, SCOPUS, EMBASE etc. Most of them are also linked from DOAJ, PubMed and OJ Gate. Online full text availability of the journals varies and their archives were mostly available from 1998 onwards. All the journals are available online and 163 journals published as hybrid journals. There were only three journals which ask authors to pay for publishing.

Sawant, S (2009). The current scenario of open access journal initiatives in India. Collection Building, 28 (4), pp 159-163. DOI: 10.1108/01604950910999819.

Case study of Sankya: an open journal

The Indian statistical Institute publishes Sankya- the Indian Journal of Statistics, one of the oldest statistical journals of the world, started producing the electronic version and provided link to old volumes from 1999 onwards. The archives provide full text of articles from 1999 onwards. The Sankya will be published electronically and in print by Springer from 2010. The journal will include Cross Reference Linking, alert services, and OnlineFirst, a feature by which articles are published online before they appear in print. Springer will also implement the online author submission system, editorial manager, the system will be in use by authors and it allows the peer-review process to be handled faster. Manuscripts will be processed through it resulting in the speedy publication of the article. The archives of the Sankya are accessible free through the internet. Presently archives of Sankya for the year 1999 to 2007 (full text) is available online. For the period 1933-1998 only abstract/summary are available online free of cost and linked to Mathematical Reviews for viewing full text.

Khatri, NK (2009). E-Journal publishing in India: A case study of Indian Statistical institute publication: Sankya- the Indian journals of statistics. Proceedings of International Conference on Academic Libraries,  New Delhi, pp 386-398.

OA Publishing: Authors attitude

Two main ways in which authors can provide open access to their work are i) by publishing in open access journals and ii) by depositing their articles in e-print archives (self-archiving). A survey among 154 OA authors and 160 Non-OA authors ware conducted in UK by Swan and Brown in 2004 to learn more about authors’ attitude towards OA publishing. Over 90% OA authors publish in this way because of the principle of free access. They also associate other values with publishing in OA journals such as: to be faster than traditional journals, to have a larger readership and consequently to be cited more frequently and to have high prestige and quality than traditional journals. The main reason for not publishing NOA authors worked in OA journals is that they are unfamiliar with any suitable open access journals in their field. While over 40% of OA authors think that publishing their work in open access journals may limits its impact, a far greater proportion, 74% of NOA authors share this view. The majority (66% of OA authors and 71% of NOA authors) think that when ‘a fee must be paid it should come from their research grant. Over all 71% of OA authors said they would be more likely to choose to publish in an open access journal again after their experience.

Read in detail from:

Swan, A., Brown, S. (2004). Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing, 17, pp 219-224.

Librarians and libraries supporting Open Access publishing

This article examines the role of libraries and librarians in developing and supporting open access publishing initiatives and services in higher education. It reflect the experiences of three librarians involved in the open access movement at their libraries, within Canadian Library Association, and as creators, managers, and editors in two open access journals in the field of library and information studies; Evidence-based library and information practice published form University of Alberta; and Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research hosted by the university of Guelph. Open access publishing is the best option to tackle the price hike of journals in the libraries. There was a dramatic growth by 180% in serial unit cost and 321% in serial expenditure in the past 20 years. Many universities in Canada support their scientist and researchers by allocating Open Access Authors Fund to publish their research output. University of Calgary uses its library budget for this purpose. Similar funds are in place in research libraries in US and Europe. There are 11 academic library publishing services in Canada and it was expected that over 50 journal should either be created or migrated to online with the assistance of university libraries using OJS or Erudit, journal management software.  

For more detail read:

Richard, J., Koufogiannakis, D., & Ryan, P (2009). Librarians and libraries supporting Open Access publishing. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 39 (3) pp 33-48.

E-Publishing Initiatives in India

Abraham, T and Minj, S (2007) provide a report about the Scientific Journal Publishing in India (SJPI) project which promotes electronic publishing of scholarly journals. It covers briefly the objectives, implementation and outcomes of the project. The SJPI project was based at National Centre for Science Information at IISc, in Bangalore, India, carried out during Oct. 2004 – March 2007. The project was wet up in two phases – in the first phase, set up a prototype journal indexing and management systems for a sample of Indian journals. In the second phase the project aimed to help Indian journals to go online and to develop a Hindi language interface for Open Journal System (OJI) open source software for online management and publishing of journals with OAI-PMH compliance, developed by Public Knowledge Project (PKP). The outcomes of the project was installing and configuring OJS for 11 journals from Indian Academy of Science, and one each from SRELS and IISc, Bangalore and developed a Hindi language interface for OJS. The project installed PKP Harvester under the title ‘SJPI Cross Journals Search Service’ to harvest data from all of the thirteen prototype journals.

Read More at:

Abraham, T., & Minj, S. (2007). Scientific Journal Publishing in India: Promoting electronic publishing of scholarly Journals in India. The First Monday, 12 (10). Doi: http://firstmonday.org/thbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1954/1831.

Open Access Publishing

Water (2008) put into notice the financial constraints face by the universities in promoting the open access publishing. In many fields funding at both the university and foundations or government agency level is much more fragmentary and partial; the idea that foundations and universities can or should mandate open access publishing there for run up de minimis  limitations. It may be in the public interest to mandate open access, but it may equally be a failure of public trust if such a mandate is not balanced  by  consideration of a requirement for sustainability so that the content and the publishers endures if the academy is unwilling or unable to think carefully about possible downstream. Consequences of open access publishing and ways to steer clean of undesirable consequences than the mantra about journal publishing - that the academy gives away its products only to  buy them back at exorbitant prices will surely return to haunt the academy in an even scarier garb than before, and prove to be even more financially debilitating.

Read more at: 

Water, D. (2008 Winter). Open Access Publishing and the Emerging Infrastructure for 21^st centrurey scholarship. The journal of Electronic Publishing. II (1).

Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0011.106

Electronic Publishing at Humboldt University, Berlin

Article Review

5. Muller et al (2006) reports the electronic publishing activities at Humboldt University, Berlin. The E-Publishing system originally established to merely publish electronic theses and dissertations as well as postdoctoral theses. The university library and the computer and media service have installed a joint electronic publishing group, which concentrates on offering the service to potential authors and editors. Besides enhancing the visibility of the university’s research results, to increase the availability of Humboldt University’s scientific output especially those that were hardly available and accessible like dissertations or research papers, it is the primary goal to establish a ‘new culture for e-publishing’ within and outside the university by encouraging scientists to use new publishing models and change publication habits. The edoc server at Humboldt University, Berlin has become the service platform for scholarly publications of all types. It is an integral part of the university’s information infrastructure which also contains a teaching management system (Moodle), a virtual library portal (Metalib) and a media portal (Mneme). The edoc server itself has become a DINI certified server in 2004. ProPrint, a print-on-demand service jointly developed by Humboldt University and the State university library, Gottingen deliver the tailor-made publications as paper back copies by using a PDF merge function. To support peer review processes the university offer two different systems; a conference system and GAPworks. The authors conclude that the interest of the university primarily was to enhance the visibility of its scientific output and excellence and not to reach the maximum monetary return of investment in this case. But it was obvious that edoc and the electronic publishing service do not convince large parts of the university to change from traditional publication habits. There are still necessary technological and organizational enhancements to be done.

           

     Uwe Muller, Manuael Klatt, Susanne Dobratz, Sven Bahnik (2006, June). Electronic Publishing at Humboldt University, Berlin: Concept, Tools and Services.- Proceedings ELPUB 2006 conference on Electronic Publishing- Bansko, Bulgaria.

Back to Academia?

Article Review

4. Okerson (1991) discusses the contribution of academicians towards scientific publishing in American universities. The author reveals that America’s 3500 academic libraries spend more than $1.25 billion a year on acquisitions out of which 58% spent on serials. Contrary to this, they found, about 70% of scientific journal articles are from universities. But universities are increasingly unable to ‘buy back’ their own work. It is not surprising that a vision of university based publishing captures the imagination of parts of academe. A marketing survey in 1990 determined that universities publish at most 15% of their scholar’s output.  It is a stretchy 15% including not only work of university presses, but also publications of individual academic departments, working papers and periodicals. About 90% is produced by scholarly and scientific societies as opposed to the commercial sector but soft evidence suggests that since World War II, half or more of what used to be not for profit output is now commercially published. Universities could compete and influence price by retrieving control of a proportion of the academic literature and strengthen the arm of university publishing without through lack of interest, support, glamour or profitability. In the US in 1991, university based publishing is receiving significant attention as well as tremendous re-vitalization from the university linked networks. The confluence of a number of factors suggests that the time is perfect for academe to re-affirm its commitment to wide distribution of scholarly information. The mechanisms are almost in place; the community is energetic and eager; the need is urgent.

           

 Ann Okerson (1991).  Back to Academia?: The case for American Universities to publish their own research.-LOGOS 2/2,  pp 106-112

Role of university libraries in scholarly communication system

Article Review

3. Rao (2009) discusses the role of academic libraries in disseminating scholarly information and explores the possibility of librarians acting as partners in electronic publishing and self archiving of the university’s research output. At present the academic and research community is faced with a new challenge of communicating their research to others directly over the World Wide Web. Although electronic journals have been in existence since 1976, full fledged e-journals came into limelight only in the 1990s. One study identified 30 scholarly e-journals in 1991, which by 1997 have increased to 2500.  the cost of journal is increasing day by day. The average increase in journals cost is estimated to be around 8% per year. At the same time, rarely do academics and scientists receive any remuneration for scientific articles published in journals. The commercial publishers are not willing to share their profits with the ‘creators’ of information. So far so good, with the learned societies, who are prepared to pass on the benefits of electronic information to the creators. It is also noticed that various publishers are coming together and interlinking their databases through third party ‘aggregators’ so that the user can access all these databases by subscribing to any one vendor.                                             

Some libraries like, Highwire Press, a division of Stanford University Libraries, which publish life-science journals, provide free access to most back issues of its publications and some current journals. University librarians have already accepted the role of publishers by maintaining copies of open access journals under the banner of institutional repositories, which might lead to a transformation of the scholarly communication system itself. Further the availability of free online journal publishing software enabled everyone to publish journals online. The internet revolution has partly given the ‘power’ back to scientists, universities and leaned societies. Publishing in e-journals is gaining recognition and momentum with the inclusion of the reference or peer review system by major publishers.               

Koteswara Rao, M (2009). Academic Publishing: Role of university libraries in scholarly communication system. Proceedings of International Conference on Academic Libraries, India, University of Delhi,

Authors’ perceptions of electronic publishing

Article Review

2. Schroter (2004) and others contributed a study on authors’ perceptions of electronic publishing of the unedited version of article on bmj.com once papers have been accepted for publication. Conducting two cross sectional surveys among 253 authors from corresponding authors of a consecutive sample of published BMJ research articles that had undergone the ELPS (Electronic Long, Paper Short) process and corresponding authors of consecutive research articles submitted by BMJ authors, but there is some concern that electronic information is not permanent and uncertainty about how versions are referenced. While authors who had experienced ELPS reported some problems with editors shortening papers, most were able to rectify these. Overall 70% thought that the BMJ should continue to use ELPS; 49% thought that publishing just the abstract in the printed journal with the full version only on bmj.com was unacceptable; and 23% thought it unacceptable to post unedited versions on bmj.com once a paper had been accepted for publication. The study revealed that it is acceptable to authors to publish short versions of research article in the printed version of a general medical journal with longer version on the websites i.e., the authors are in favour of electronic publishing of their articles.       

Sara Schroter, Helen Barratt and Jane Smith. Authors’ perceptions of electronic publishing: Two cross sectional surveys. BMJ vol. 328,  5 June 2004. bmj.com.

The library as a mediator for e-publishing

Article Review

1. Denmark is a small country but with a large and diverse scholarly publishing environment. There are many small journals, mostly in English. A majority of these see the potential in online publishing but do not gave resources and capabilities to do so. Furthermore they have a conservative business model (i.e, Finance) that doesn’t encourage an open access publishing strategy. The study reveals that the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) library provides low risk environment for small journals related to the business sholl to make a gradual transition to e-publishing / e-archiving. The authors found out that the major hurdles to migrate to online in Denmark are lack of fund and lack of sufficient techno-savvy personals. The study also discuss about the Open Journal Systems (OJS) in Denmark. Copenhagen Business School has started e-publishing of scientific articles from their ‘own journals’ in a logical step. The largest university in Denmark, the University of Copenhagen was planning to start an e-publishing project in autumn of 2007. Its university library supports an active blog on open access. This paper includes a case study of “Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies”, and “Foucault Studies” published from Denmark and moved from print to online publishing.

Mikel K Elber and Lars Nondal (2007). The library as a mediator for e-publishing: A case on how a library can become a significant factor in facilitating digital scholarly communication and open access publishing for less web-savvy journals. First Monday 12 (10). 

About this Blog

This blog carries open access materials on electronic publishing around the world. The emerging trends in scholarly electronic publishing, various models,systems, organisations, standareds, conference and workshops and related meterials are collected here for use of those who interested in this field.