THE FUTURE OF ACADEMIC JOURNALS

Amelia Acker | Information Ecology | 5.17.10

What makes an Academic Journal? Peer review Discipline specificity Specialized vs. Broad Research reviews, book reviews New research Critiques of existing research Indexed rankings

PEER REVIEW

Indexed Rankings

Science Citation Index Social Science Citation Index Not a long indexing tradition in the

humanities & arts, but there are 1,100 journals indexed in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index

Indexing is done by Thomson’s Scientific’s

Institute for Scientific Information

Journal Impact Factor

A journal’s impact factor (IF) is calculated in Journal Citation Reports (also published by ISI)

IF is the average number of citations of articles that were published in the past 2 years:

X = number of times articles published in ‘08-09 were cited by indexed journals in ’10Y = total number of citations published in ‘08-092010 Impact factor = X/Y

Publishing

Print vs. Electronic Formats

•Hard copies on the shelf

•Electronic Copies online

•Remote storage like SRLF

http://unitproj.library.ucla.edu/mainlib/serials/index.cfm

Open Access Journals

Factors pushing scholarly communications online: low costs of reproduction and distribution, increasing networked connectivity, current publishing price structures are crippling libraries

Factors keeping journals off-line: licensing and copyright, current academic reward structure…[read = print or perish]

Q: Which type of publication are you likely to submit to in LIS?

Costs of Hard Copies

First copy costs of an academic article on paper is $2K-$4K (Tenopir and King 1996)

Fixed cost of a journal, with 4 issues per year at $12, with 600 subscribers is $120,000

Archiving a journal for a SINGLE issue is estimated $25-$45 for a library (Cooper 1989)

Cost-per-article-read: estimated between $50-$200 (Consider cost per cited, which is quite low)

Benefits of Electronic Copies Saving shelf space creates possibilities for

increasing real estate for cultural heritage materials, other formats, and improved environments like study spaces

Monitoring metrics: easier to measure use, distribution, users (faculty, grad students, public use)

Supporting materials: data sets, images, modules

Search: improves findability but decreases traditional avenues of serendipity

Q: Let’s speculate the costs of electronic formats

Shifting Conventions

Publishing conventions are shifting in our current budget climate. Factors such as the academic reward system, library resources, open access, and networked communication are changing we see the once ‘stable’ format of the scholarly journal article.

As information scholars, professionals and scientists, what roles should we take on as we begin to publish, promote, write and research? What traditions should we begin to slough off?

References

Cooper, Michael. (1989.) A cost comparison of alternative book storage strategies. Library Quarterly 59(3): xx—xx.

Marcum, J. W. (2003). Visions. D-Lib Magazine, 9(5). doi:10.1045/may2003-marcum

Mullins, J. L., Allen, F. R., & Hufford, J. R. (n.d.). ACRL | Top ten assumptions for the future of academic libraries and librarians. Retrieved May 18, 2010, from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crlnews/2007/apr/tenassumptions.cfm

Tenopir, Carol, and King, Donald W. (1996.) Trends in scientific scholarly journal publishing. Technical report, School of Information Sciences, University of Tennesee, Knoxville.

Varian, H. R. (1997). Reprint: The Future of Electronic Journals. Retrieved May 11, 2010, from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0004.105