The Future of Academic Publishing: A View From the Top

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the transition that publishers have had to make in the process of converting print journals and reference books to an online format. It was originally thought that making content available online would save publishing costs, but the changes made to production cycles and the needs of making content widely available, updated, and housed on online platforms are sometimes more expensive than the print process alone. Publishers have responded with new pricing models, and they are working more closely with libraries to deliver content to a wider audience while competing with search engines and other online content providers. Additionally, publishers have a new responsibility to manage the quality and accuracy of content given that so much information is now available to readers.

This article originally published in Journal of Library Administration, Vol. 49, Issue 4, pages 439–458, 2009. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01930820902832579.     

Evaluation and analysis of term scoring methods for term extraction

We evaluate five term scoring methods for automatic term extraction on four different types of text collections: personal document collections, news articles, scientific articles and medical discharge summaries. Each collection has its own use case: author profiling, boolean query term suggestion, personalized query suggestion and patient query expansion. The methods for term scoring that have been proposed in the literature were designed with a specific goal in mind. However, it is as yet unclear how these methods perform on collections with characteristics different than what they were designed for, and which method is the most suitable for a given (new) collection. In a series of experiments, we evaluate, compare and analyse the output of six term scoring methods for the collections at hand. We found that the most important factors in the success of a term scoring method are the size of the collection and the importance of multi-word terms in the domain. Larger collections lead to better terms; all methods are hindered by small collection sizes (below 1000 words). The most flexible method for the extraction of single-word and multi-word terms is pointwise Kullback–Leibler divergence for informativeness and phraseness. Overall, we have shown that extracting relevant terms using unsupervised term scoring methods is possible in diverse use cases, and that the methods are applicable in more contexts than their original design purpose.     

Unnecessary Requests: Examining Patrons’ Reliance on Interlibrary Loan for Electronically Owned Items at an Academic Library

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Library analyzed 4,567 interlibrary loan borrowing requests for articles and other non-returnables. From 2017–2018, nearly 44% of requests were for items that the library owned electronically. Patrons could have accessed the full-text immediately but submitted interlibrary loan requests instead. This prevalence raises questions about user behavior and deficiencies in discovery tools.     

Pragmatic citing and linking in electronic scholarly publishing

The transition from traditional, paper‐based publishing to electronic publishing presents many challenges for publishers and their constituents. Among the most significant are those that concern linking to articles that are available online and citing of articles that are now published online prior to (or even in lieu of) the final pagination and binding of paper issues. The solutions to these problems will have a great impact on the usability of the scholarly electronic corpus for the research community. In particular, the solutions must be easy to use, persistent, and scalable. Here we examine some pragmatic solutions (in use now) that satisfy these criteria and contrast them with other proposed solutions. The examples are drawn mainly from the experiences of the American Physical Society, but the lessons gleaned will have wide applicability.     

Reading behaviour and electronic journals

Studies from 1977 through 2001 demonstrate that scientists continue to read widely from scholarly journals. Reading of scholarly articles has increased to approximately 120–130 articles per person per year, with engineers reading fewer journal articles on the average and medical faculty reading more. A growing proportion of these readings come from e-prints and other separate copies. Most scientists in a discipline now use electronic journals at least part of the time, with considerable variations among disciplines. Evidence suggests that scientists are reading from a broader range of journals than in the past, influenced by timely electronic publishing and by growth in bibliographic searching and interpersonal communication as means of identifying and locating articles. Although the scholarly journals system has changed dramatically in the past few decades, it is evident that the value scientists place on the information found in scholarly journal articles, whether electronic or print, remains high.     

Speaking into Silences: Autoethnography,Communication, and Applied Research

Editor's Note: Given the rare use of autoethnography in the field of communication, I invited Dr. Tillmann to discuss autoethnography as a valuable tool in applied communication research. This discussion serves as a prelude to her essay “Body and Bulimia Revisited: Reflections on ‘A Secret Life.’”

In 2004, two articles in the Journal of Applied Communication Research (Ashcraft & Tretheway, 2004; Goodall, 2004) celebrated the merits of auto- and narrative ethnography, methods of research grounded in lived experience and evocative modes of representation that seek to engage readers emotionally, aesthetically, ethically, and politically. Despite these and other persuasive calls for auto- and narrative ethnographic works, few have been published in communication journals. More than four years ago, JACR offered readers arguments for this kind of scholarship, yet no full-length autoethnography appeared in its pages—until now. This essay, a prelude to its companion, “Body and Bulimia Revisited,” speaks into that silence.     

The Future of Academic Publishing: A View From the Top

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the transition that publishers have had to make in the process of converting print journals and reference books to an online format. It was originally thought that making content available online would save publishing costs, but the changes made to production cycles and the needs of making content widely available, updated, and housed on online platforms are sometimes more expensive than the print process alone. Publishers have responded with new pricing models, and they are working more closely with libraries to deliver content to a wider audience while competing with search engines and other online content providers. Additionally, publishers have a new responsibility to manage the quality and accuracy of content given that so much information is now available to readers.     

Document–document similarity approaches and science mapping: Experimental comparison of five approaches

This paper treats document–document similarity approaches in the context of science mapping. Five approaches, involving nine methods, are compared experimentally. We compare text-based approaches, the citation-based bibliographic coupling approach, and approaches that combine text-based approaches and bibliographic coupling. Forty-three articles, published in the journal Information Retrieval, are used as test documents. We investigate how well the approaches agree with a ground truth subject classification of the test documents, when the complete linkage method is used, and under two types of similarities, first-order and second-order. The results show that it is possible to achieve a very good approximation of the classification by means of automatic grouping of articles. One text-only method and one combination method, under second-order similarities in both cases, give rise to cluster solutions that to a large extent agree with the classification.     

SCI-E收录中国期刊现状分析

中国作者对发表SCI论文有巨大的需求,但目前SCIE收录的中国期刊数量较少,且总体水平未达到世界平均水平。将SCI-E收录的中国期刊根据语种和论文作者的国籍进行分类后发现:甲类期刊(以中文刊载的论文大于50%)和乙类期刊(发表论文的作者至少50%来自中国,且至少50%的论文以英文形式发表)学术水平未达到国际平均水平,2001—2011年期间变化不大;但乙类期刊是SCI-E收录的中国期刊中的绝大多数。丙类期刊(其刊载的论文至少50%是以英文发表的,且至少50%的论文第一作者为非中国作者)引用指数(JCS)逐年上升,上升幅度明显,2011年超过国际平均水平。说明通过改变语种不能提高期刊的国际影响力。在这3类期刊中,丙类年刊均载文量最低,为117.27篇/刊,2007后呈逐年下降趋势,2011年甚至降至91.07篇/刊。中国被SCI-E收录的期刊数量少,与国内发表SCI论文的巨大需求,以及中国期刊走上国际舞台,发挥更大的学术影响力的需求差距甚远,的确有必要创办更多的英文科技期刊;但是在此过程中,有必要慎重评价SCI-E收录期刊的学术影响力和作用。     

Seeking Cultural Relevance

This study identifies the prevalence of culturally oriented writing techniques found in international news coverage of major American newspapers, through a concept explication and content analysis. These techniques, which I call “culture peg” and “culture link,” are content and thematic choices in international coverage that journalists make to enhance the material's appeal to their home audience. They are, in essence, cultural meaning-making processes that render foreign stories relevant to the home audience which might not otherwise be interested in international news. A content analysis revealed that these cultural strategies, deployed in both text and photographs, were employed in 72 percent of international news articles in the New York Times. Excessive use of such methods might skew the understanding of foreign cultures/societies for the readership. Theoretical and methodological implications of the study are discussed.     

Methods of Selection and Acquisition of European French Monographs in an Academic Law Library

This article examines methods of selection and acquisition for European (as opposed to Canadian) French-language print monographs for a research-level law library collection in North America based on the study of the practices and techniques locally developed in the Nahum Gelber Law Library, McGill University. These techniques represent a combination of non–approval plan–based methods: blanket order, standing orders, online slip service in WorldCat, use of other libraries’ acquisition lists, and firm orders. The methods described in this article are not exclusive to the selection in the subject area of law and could be applied in other academic disciplines.     

关联数据及DBpedia实例分析*

基于关联数据的基本原则和发布方法,分析介绍DBpedia的实现技术：通过对WikiText格式数据进行语法解析和流程控制,实现对自由文本进行的结构化数据抽取和RDF表达,并基于URI参引、SPARQL查询和RDF文件转存等多种方法,实现多样化的Web数据获取;采用基于属性和基于模式的自动关联算法,与众多数据集之间实现关联。     

National vs. international journals: views of medical professionals in Croatia

Scholarly journals, especially in non‐English‐speaking countries, may perform very different functions depending on whether they are published for national or international audiences. Four hundred and sixty‐six academic physicians and non‐academic general practitioners in Croatia were surveyed on their knowledge about two Croatian medical journals: Lije?ni?ki vjesnik (published in Croatian) and Croatian Medical Journal (published in English). The physicians were also surveyed about the importance of all national and international journals published in Croatia, and the types of articles they thought should be published in these journals. More respondents rated national (n = 329, 72.6%) than international journals (n = 275, 63.5%, P < 0.001, Wilcoxon test) as very important for the medical profession. On the other hand, publishing in international journals was more often rated as important than publishing in national journals (n = 184, 42.5% vs. n = 125, 27.8%; P < 0.001, Wilcoxon test). Guidelines for clinical practice were rated as the most important publication item in national journals, and original scientific articles in international journals.     

Hybrid Journals: Ensuring Systematic and Standard Discoverability of the Latest Open Access Articles

An important current challenge for research information providers is ensuring the automated discovery of Open Access (OA) content in hybrid journals. We found no evidence of discovery services that are able to systematically identify the crucially important free full-text availability of OA articles regardless of where and how such articles have been published (i.e., in fully OA journals or in hybrid journals). A solution is important because hybrid journals are proliferating and consequently the chances of missing OA articles is real and is happening. Nearly all of the major publishers now provide such journals in order to take advantage of recent changes in research funder requirements, and to be competitive in the new OA business model. By working with a group of scholarly publisher partners and by using standard metadata elements that publishers are already familiar with, we show a systematic and standardized manner to identify OA at the article level. Our proposal is to embed OA-related elements in the metadata freely exposed by publishers for aggregators and discovery services. For example, in the Table of Content (TOC) Really Simple Syndication feeds the publishers use to announce new journal issues and content. Based on the initial results obtained, we discuss the capabilities of our solution, and evaluate the impact produced by our application in the systematic discoverability of OA content from the participating hybrid journals, using an implementation done with the freely available journal current awareness service—JournalTOCs.     

高校学报本校科研人员发文情况探究--基于104个高校人文社会科学学报发文情况的量化分析

对104个高校人文社会科学学报的数据采集,探索现阶段高校学报的本校科研人员发文情况,并分析其对高校学报影响力的影响。研究表明：高校学报的本校科研人员发文比率在20%—60%之间;985或211高校、具有社科博士点高校学报更倾向于刊发本校作者的论文;从区域上来看,华东、华北、东北的高校学报更倾向于刊发本校作者的论文;CSSCI 和非 CSSCI 高校学报在本校科研人员发文占比上差异不显著;高校学报的本校科研人员发文占比并未显著影响学报的影响力。     

E‐journals,researchers — and the new librarians

This paper provides the results of a two‐year investigation into the use of e‐journals by the UK research community. Log analysis, questionnaires, interviews, and observation were used to collect the information. The results are presented in a FAQ format to make the key findings accessible. The main findings are that journals have become central to most disciplines, and that the e‐form has become the prime means of access. The results for history suggest that the old scholarly communication mantras (scientists primarily communicate through articles, historians through monographs) are rapidly breaking down. Indeed, all researchers seem addicted to journal content. Research without this resource now seems unthinkable; journals are a researcher's lifeblood. Gateway services, hugely popular in science, are re‐intermediating the broken chain between publisher and reader; they are the new librarians.     

天津市高校图书馆馆际互借自动化管理的实现

天津高校图书馆用天津高校统一使用的自动化管理系统来实现馆际互借的自动化管理,实现方法包括馆际互借的原则、自动化管理系统参数的设置以及馆际互借的服务流程。影响天津地区高校图书馆馆际互借的因素包括服务理念;宣传力度;馆藏文献质量、数量和种类;地理位置及院校之间专业设置的相近度。为了更好地提供馆际互借服务,天津高校图书馆联盟应该加强4个方面的工作。     

A longitudinal investigation into the changing citing behavior of geomatics postgraduate students at Wuhan University,China, 1988–2004: Implications for collection development

Aim:The purpose of this study is to identify and describe the citing behavior of geomatics postgraduate students at the Wuhan University in China. These students constitute one of the main user groups of Wuhan University Library and the analysis of their use of literature (through the means of citation analysis) can yield valuable insights against which to benchmark and inform collection development policy and other services at the Information Technology Library (ITL) at Wuhan University.Design/methodology/approach:In this project, 9317 citations in 21 PhD and 180 MSc theses submitted at the Wuhan University in the years of 1988, 1996, and 2004 were analyzed. All cited materials were divided by output format (monographs, proceedings, journal articles) and the more in-depth analysis was conducted for all cited journals. The following characteristics of the cited journal literature were analyzed: subject, age, language, and dispersion of journal titles.Findings:An increased use of journal literature in bibliographies of geomatics theses was observed over time. A trend to increase citations to international conference proceedings was also noted as well as a trend to cite more journals in disciplines other than surveying and mapping. It was also noted that, over time, citations to documents in languages other than Chinese and English have significantly decreased (in some cases, disappeared). Large dispersion among the most frequently cited journals in different time periods (only 25% of titles were repeated in 1988, 1996, and 2004 top ranking journal lists) was also noted. It was also noted that the core of geomatics literature is expanding (it now takes 42% of journal titles to cover 80% of all citations).Practical implications:By analyzing citation patterns of the graduate students of geomatics in China, we can track the developments and changes within that discipline in China and can compare these trends internationally (e.g. increased role of a journal, the importance of conference proceedings, domination of the English-language sources, dispersion of journal literature, and increasing multidisciplinarity of the discipline). The techniques and methods used in this study can be replicated to study other disciplines. Also, it is hoped that the findings of this research will inform collection development planning, development of reference services, and information literacy training.     

Are the authors of highly cited articles also the most productive ones?

Ever more frequently, governments have decided to implement policy measures intended to foster and reward excellence in scientific research. This is in fact the intended purpose of national research assessment exercises. These are typically based on the analysis of the quality of the best research products; however, a different approach to analysis and intervention is based on the measure of productivity of the individual scientists, meaning the overall impact of their entire scientific production over the period under observation. This work analyzes the convergence of the two approaches, asking if and to what measure the most productive scientists achieve highly cited articles; or vice versa, what share of highly cited articles is achieved by scientists that are “non-top” for productivity. To do this we use bibliometric indicators, applied to the 2004–2008 publications authored by academics of Italian universities and indexed in the Web of Science.