A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals

Abstract

Open Access (OA) is nowadays increasingly being used as a business model for the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals, both by specialized OA publishing companies and major, predominantly subscription-based publishers. However, in the early days of the web OA journals were mainly founded by independent academics, who were dissatisfied with the predominant print and subscription paradigm and wanted to test the opportunities offered by the new medium. There is still an on-going debate about how OA journals should be operated, and the volunteer model used by many such ‘indie’ journals has been proposed as a viable alternative to the model adopted by big professional publishers where publishing activities are funded by authors paying expensive article processing charges (APCs). Our longitudinal quantitative study of 250 ‘indie’ OA journals founded prior to 2002, showed that 51% of these journals were still in operation in 2014 and that the median number of articles published per year had risen from 11 to 18 among the survivors. Of these surviving journals, only 8% had started collecting APCs. A more detailed qualitative case study of five such journals provided insights into how such journals have tried to ensure the continuity and longevity of operations.

Sepsis and Hemocyte Loss in Honey Bees (Apis mellifera) Infected with Serratia marcescens Strain Sicaria

“…Genome comparisons were then made with both the nucleotide sequence and the deduced amino acid sequences [21,22]. ANI and AAI scores were calculated using custom scripts based on those provided online [64]. The data were transformed to a distance matrix with the formula (100-%ID)/100 and analyzed with the Fitch program in the Phylip suite of tools version 3.7a (http://evolution.gs.washington.edu/phylip/doc/main.html).…”

The Two-Way Street of Open Access Journal Publishing: Flip It and Reverse It

“…We turn to these studies when considering the time frame within which reverse flips occurred, with particular attention to newly founded OA journals. In both Crawford [48] and Björk et al [47], most journals remained active during the first two to five years, whereas the mortality rate rose during the critical six to nine-year period. After that, the number of ceased journals decreased sharply and journals still actively publishing at that point had reached higher stability.…”

“…While the last two studies affirm the relevance of our paper by addressing reverse flips as secondary research results, we draw on the following two for interpreting our findings. Björk et al [47] examined the OA status and publishing activity of 250 independent born-OA journals founded prior to 2002 (independent defined as not being published by a professional publisher). In 2014, 115 journals were still active and fully OA, 100 journals had ceased publication, 23 had disappeared from the Web completely, and the remaining 12 journals had reverse-flipped to subscription access.…”

“…After that, the number of ceased journals decreased sharply and journals still actively publishing at that point had reached higher stability. In addition to briefly reporting observations on reverse flips, Björk et al [47] highlight that maintaining momentum in publishing activity is a common trait among surviving journals, whereas it is rare for journals to recover after a period of inactivity.…”

“…For the purposes of this study, we created and curated a dataset-available on Zenodo [56]-that includes the following core data: ISSN, year the journal was founded, year of the reverse flip, country of journal affiliation, journal affiliation, journal title, publisher, access mode, academic discipline, OA history (born-OA/flipped-to-OA), and embargo period. Since no single data source exists that tracks the OA status of journals over time, we consulted several different data sources-Scopus title lists [57], journal title lists provided by publishers, title lists by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) [58], the OAD list of reverse-flip journals [22], previous studies [37,[45][46][47], and Ulrichsweb [59]-in order to create a dataset that is as comprehensible as possible. With the exception of Ulrichsweb and journals encountered during earlier research projects by the authors, we only used sources that are publicly available on the Internet, although sometimes difficult to find.…”