State of academic publishing online?

April 28, 2010 12:41 PM

What are good resources on the state of online publishing?

I am affiliated with a small academic journal (200 subscribers), and I am trying to figure out the state of academic publishing online. I am interested in learning what the biggest hosts of such data are (JSTOR and EBSCO seem big), how to learn where our journal ranks compared to others, how to go about converting a journal to open access, and so on. Any tips would be most appreciated, and especially articles written by librarians or publishers on the state of academic publishing today. My goal is for us to better plan our future as a journal. Thanks in advance.

posted by tnygard to education (7 answers total)

Searching for The State of Academic Publishing turns up several pages worth of online articles, papers, and books worth looking through.

Digital-Scholarship.org looks like a roundup of several of the kind of resources you're looking for.

Open Access Week has a very active community that could probably help you explore both open access, and the broader context of academic publishing you're looking for information on.
posted by ElfWord at 4:25 PM on April 28, 2010

I know zip about academic publishing, but I posted your question to a FriendFeed group that I follow that has some knowledgeable folks. Some interesting things may turn up there.
posted by epersonae at 5:43 PM on April 28, 2010

Coming here via Friendfeed, I have a little bit to offer in terms of where your journal ranks relative to others. Mendeley has statistics on readership that you can use to gauge your relative attention share. I don't want to launch into commercial mode (I work for them) so if you want to know more, send me a message.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 6:04 PM on April 28, 2010

The Scholarly Kitchen.
posted by Toekneesan at 6:32 PM on April 28, 2010

If you do migrate online, bravo/brava! you'll likely have more readers, and those who don't want to read it online almost certainly know where the "print" button is on their computer. Don't think about JSTOR and EBSCO so much as "who are we? who is our potential audience? what do we want to accomplish?" and go forth. EBSCO is entirely based on the traditions of print publication, which is fine if that's where you want to be, but it's horribly expensive and unsustainable and there's really no reason to publish as if the Internet is only a highway where you can set up your tollgates. THAT'S BROKEN!

Take a look at DOAJ and, for a really fine born-digital journal, take a look at First Monday. There are all kinds of ways to do this better.
posted by bfister at 9:28 AM on April 29, 2010

You might be interested in Stanford's Arcade, which bills itself as a kind of online salon, and includes journals among its other offerings. It's more of an example of how being open access can work than a primer on how to do it, but it's a pretty great example, and perhaps worth investigating further.
posted by dizziest at 1:35 PM on April 29, 2010

The blog mentioned by Toekneesan is interesting to keep an eye on, but as a branch of the SSP, be aware that they definitely have an agenda to support traditional publishing and constantly churn out anti-open access propaganda. For example, a recent post basically said PLoS was a vanity press because one of the PLoS journals, PLoS ONE, allows you to pay to have your article become open access immediately. No mention was made of the fact that traditional journals also charge page charges and color charges which add up to about as much as the PLoS ONE fees, and you don't even get OA rights out of the deal.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 2:30 PM on April 29, 2010