Open source publishing

Open source publishing: How small, open access journals are improving

academic publishing online

Michael Holmes

8 July 2014
 Open source publishing

Abstract
Since the arrival of the World Wide Web, online journals have rapidly overtaken print as
the preferred method of dissemination, and, recently, there has been a movement towards
these publications becoming open access, giving anyone with a computer and an internet
connection the ability to read and cite scholarly work. With this increase of open access
journals, promising more available content to a greater number of people worldwide, the
issue of credibility has become a major concern. Traditional journal practises such as
impact-factor metrics and article-processing charges do not filter down well to small scale
publishers, and as such, a new kind of ‘predatory’ journal is taking advantage of the online
arena, threatening the credibility of any journal not associated with large academic
publishers or databases. However, through the use of ‘positive hoaxes’ and ‘name-and-
shame lists’, the academic community is vastly improving the quality of the online
academic journal. Now, small, open access journals can offer authors and readers more
agility than print publishers ever could, and, by tapping into the interconnected online
world, authors can easily publish their work globally.

1. Introduction
In the early 1990s, the academic publishing industry experienced a major shift when the
rise of the World Wide Web changed the way publishers, universities, and authors
engaged with each other. Online journals have rapidly overtaken print as the preferred
mode of dissemination, allowing academics ‘rapid access to a much greater variety of
scholarly journals and articles than before’ (Solomon, 2012). More recently, there is a
movement towards these publications becoming open access, giving anyone with a
computer and an internet connection the ability to read and cite scholarly work, and with
this, a rise in open source software, allowing small journals to easily publish peer reviewed
academic work. The number of open access journals has risen from a few dozen in 1993
to over 5,000 in 2009, with the total number in 2013 sitting just over 10,000 (Solomon,
2012; Van Noorden, 2013). With open access journals growing in number and credibility,
the options for authors, universities, and academic researchers are growing. While open
source software is making it easier to start an online journal, with this ease also comes the
problem of fraudulent and ‘predatory’ journals, as well as frequent clashes within the
 Open source publishing

academic community on traditional quality metrics such as impact-factor. This paper will
discuss some of the problems and solutions associated with the open access and the
open source community, as well as the future of the online journal, and, finally, how small,
open access journals are improving academic publishing online.

2. Credibility, quality, and the online community

Academic journals have always operated on a system of credibility. A successful journal
will usually have a credible editor and editorial board, be aligned with an academic
association, and will have a steady inflow of quality papers. This credibility-through-proxy
had previously been the quality assurance measure for the large journal databases—such
as JSTOR, ProQuest, etc. Dr Sean Rintel, a lecturer with the University of Queensland’s
School of Journalism and Communication commented that a major problem for new online
journals—even those with a reputable academic connection—is not being recognised by
university libraries and large professional journal databases (personal communication,
October 24, 2013). An example of this is the Journal of Computer-Mitigated
Communication (JCMC). Established in 1995, the journal was free and only available
online. As well as being published online, the entire review process was electronic—a
fitting premise for a new computer-centric journal—however, in a traditional publishing
environment, to improve the credibility of the journal, JCMC maintained traditional print
publication rules and did not incorporate any kind of electronic augmentation, even though
the medium allowed for it. In 2010, JCMC’s impact-factor was 1.958 (Journal of Computer-
Mitigated Communication, 2013), but the time taken for JCMC to join its print
contemporaries has been slow.

With open source software, it has become easier to start an open access journal, with no
marginal cost for providing e-access to the content (Solomon, 2012), and this is one of
open access’s most appealing attributes. Open Journal Systems, a free journal hosting
server provided by the Public Knowledge Project, is one common way that academic
journals can start out with virtually no overhead costs, and indeed, many open access
journals run on this system, including communication journal First Monday and, recently,
the Australian Journal of Communication. Open Journal Systems offers its users a
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complete online publishing package, including website hosting and a fully electronic
submission and review management system (Public Knowledge Project, 2013). However,
this ability to easily create an academic journal also raises concerns over regulated quality
assurance with the online academic community. However, as journals move online so, too,
does a new kind of quality assurance. Traditional print metrics like journal impact-factor
can now be supplemented by electronic guides that help authors decide which journals are
legitimate. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian from The University of Colorado Denver, maintains an
online list, Jeffrey Beall’s List, of what he calls ‘potential, possible, or probable predatory
scholarly open-access publishers’, and has become renowned for shaming predatory open
access journals, that is, journals that are ‘corrupt and exist only to make money off the
author processing charges’ (Beall, 2013). John Bohannon, a biologist and instigator of a
famous 2013 article hoax, found that his own results showed that ‘Beall is good at spotting
publishers with poor quality control: for the publishers on his list that completed the review
process, 82% accepted [Bohannon’s hoax] paper’ (2013). The hoax has also become an
interesting open access quality measure, with academics such as Bohannon publishing
their hoax results online. Interestingly, as the risk of fraudulent and predatory journals
increases, so does the amount of free support offered by an online academic community
who are working together to maintain quality.

3. Fees and charges, impact-factor, and citation

When open access journals first appeared, they were mostly funded by individual scholars
who did not charge authors article-processing charges. ‘This model worked for small
journals publishing a few articles per year but didn’t scale well to bigger journals’
(Solomon, 2012, p. 99). By 2000, the academic community was already seeing
professional publishers whose main source of income was article-processing charges (p.
99). It was these professional publishers who had traditionally moved from print to online,
or who were publishing through both mediums and have ties to the large online databases,
and these databases—such as JSTOR—act as ‘gatekeepers who decide what is worthy of
being in there’ (S. Rintel, personal communication, October 24, 2013). So the small, open
access journal that might be considered too ‘regional’, or ‘niche’, is effectively blocked by
the publishing industry. However, the advance of online technology has made it possible
 Open source publishing

for small, open access journals to offer authors some benefits that larger publishers
cannot.

The open access journal is seen as a ‘service provider to authors who wish to get maximal
dissemination for their research results’ (Solomon, 2012, p. 98), but the variation in cost of
author processing fees between large publishers and small journals is dramatic. With open
access boasting an impressive citation tracking ability, by making individual articles
searchable through freely accessible software such as Google Scholar, Aaron Dobbs of
the American Library Association comments, ‘there is a definite mind shift going on in
academic writing, it’s no longer ‘“just get published”: it’s “get published, but also get seen
everywhere”’ (Marcus, 2013).

When print publishers first began to create PDF versions of academic papers for digital
distribution, they established two classes of open access to offer authors: green standard,
where authors can distribute the preprint draft version of their papers freely, and are
usually offered fifty downloads of the final PDF version; and gold standard, which is free
for anyone, forever. The cost of green and gold open access varies from publisher to
publisher, with gold being the most expensive, and so when authors are choosing a journal
to submit a manuscript to, they are ‘making choices in the same way that consumers
choose any other commodity, that is, they evaluate the costs and benefits for a particular
journal compared with other options’ (Solomon, 2012, p. 99). So while the fees are high to
have a paper published in gold standard open access through a large publisher, as more
credible open access journals are becoming available, the author has the choice to publish
their work in gold standard for little or no cost, with the same benefits offered by large
publishers. This shift, while potentially threatening the publishing industry, has the ability to
greatly improve the outcome for the individual author and their readership. However, an
increase in open access journals has also led to the rise of fraudulent and poor quality
publishers.

In 2013, a record number of online journals were banned from being included in Thompson
Reuters’ impact-factor list due to ‘excessive self-citation or because of “citation stacking”
(in which journals cite each other to excessive amounts)’ (Van Noorden, 2013). Although
 Open source publishing

these journals represent only 0.5% of the total number of registered online journals, it has
only added to the problem of open access citation and quality metrics. While impact-factor
is clearly being abused by some online journals, there is also a movement to alter this
long-disputed grading scale. This movement, the San Francisco Declaration on Research
Assessment (DORA), is a statement backed by 150 scientists and 75 science
organisations who believe that the impact-factor metric is a problematic system. Journal
impact-factor was introduced in 1963 as a means of offering academic decision-making
bodies ‘a cost effective way of comparing applicants for posts, research grant applicants,
as well as the output of research groups and whole universities’ Solomon, 2012, p. 99),
and is ‘derived from the number of citations amassed by a particular journal over a set time
span divided by the number of items published during that period’ (Grozanick, 2010). As
DORA argues, this is problematic because an impact-factor rating is for an entire journal,
not a specific article; this leads to academics being rewarded for ‘getting into high-impact
publications rather than for doing good science’ (Van Noorden, 2013); of course, this issue
applies to all fields of research. One answer is to move away from journal-level metrics to
article-level metrics, which would allow academics to ‘be able to consider which journal
suits the community they want to reach’, rather than which journal will help them
professionally (Van Noorden, 2013). For the professional open access publishers, their
‘journals need to be able to offer additional advantages such as accessibility, rapid
publication, better topical fit, and/or the likelihood of more citations to offset and exceed the
negative cost of the [article-processing charges]’ (Solomon, p99), but as Rintel argues,
‘you might have a high impact-factor journal like Science or Nature, but your paper might
never be cited. Citation factors are difficult to find, and therefore difficult to gauge’
(personal communication, October 24, 2013). Instead, with Internet search engines such
as Google Scholar being able to rate and count citations on individual articles and authors,
open access improves the accuracy of quality per article, and allows for a more
transparent impact-factor.

4. Looking forward: HTML and digital augmentation

Much of the potential for open access has not yet been realised, because ‘the business
model of scientific publishing has continued to be based on selling content to subscribers,
 Open source publishing

which increasingly tend to be libraries’ (Solomon, p98), and many other organisations rely
on library subscriptions to fund ‘regional’, or ‘niche’ journals that are not affiliated with any
particular academic association (Lumb p535). Professional publishers have been unwilling
to explore the possibilities of digital technology, such as augmentation, and still maintain
the traditional PDF download as the electronic standard. While this restricts professional
publishers, it opens the door for small, open access journals, who are beginning to change
the world of academic publishing. For example, the Australian Journal of Communication,
which in 2013 is releasing three issues in gold standard open access—40(1), 40(2), and
40(3)—with the possibility of digitising its entire back catalogue. At the time of writing,
40(1) is available in both PDF and HTML, and in 40(2) the HTML will have the same
content as the PDF, but with some advanced augmentation such as embedded video with
subtitles and line numbers to accompany transcripts. Now readers can decide for
themselves if the researchers have accurately described the content of the recording,
rather than trusting their transcript or description alone. This adds a new level of
transparency that would not be possible in print or PDF. Furthermore, HTML allows for the
free production of images, videos, interactive charts, and translation into other languages
through software such as Google Translate. Because open access allows digital searching
of individual articles, and particularly small journals who use the Creative Commons
license, academics can now share their peer-reviewed papers across the world, via an
increasing number of social-network-style websites such as academia.edu and
researchgate.net, and can embed their work in other websites. With digital augmentation
and file sharing websites, small, open access journals can now offer a new level of
interactivity and transparency that is otherwise unavailable through professional
publishers.

5. Conclusion

With the arrival of the World Wide Web, the academic publishing industry began what
would be a dramatic transformation online. This change brought with it many opportunities
for small, open access journals, but it also brought problems with fraudulent and predatory
journals who lack proper peer-reviewing and do not meet quality standards. The World
Wide Web has also allowed for a large online community of academics who are sharing
 Open source publishing

information and, through the use of hoaxes and name-and-shame lists, vastly improving
the quality of the online academic world. Now, small, open access journals can offer
authors and readers more than print publishers ever could, and by tapping into the
interconnected online world, authors can easily publish their work globally.
 Open source publishing

References

Beall, J. (2013) Beall’s list: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-
access publishers. Retrieved from http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

Beall, J. (2013) Criteria for determining predatory open-access publishers (2nd edition).
Retrieved from http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/30/criteria-for-determining-predatory-
open-access-publishers-2nd-edition/

Bohannon, J. (2013) Who’s afraid of peer review? Retrieved from

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

Grozanick, S. E. (2010). The impact factor: Implications of open access on quality, Public
Services Quarterly 6(4) p. 389-399

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Retrieved from

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1083-
6101/homepage/Society.html

Lumb, P.D. (2012). Open access publishing. Journal of Critical Care, 27 p535-536.

Marcus, J. (2013, January 24). Unexpected martyr for the open-access movement. The
Times Higher Education Supplement, p. 18.

Public Knowledge Project: Open Journal Systems. (2013). Retrieved from

http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/

Solomon, D.J., & Björk, B. (2012). Publication fees in open access publishing: Sources of
funding and factors influencing choice of journal. Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, 63(1) p. 98-107.

Van Noorden, R. (2013). New record: 66 journals banned for boosting impact factor with
self-citations. Retrieved from http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/06/new-record-66-
journals-banned-for-boosting-impact-factor-with-self-citations.html
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Van Noorden, R. (2013). Scientists join journal editors to fight impact-factor abuse.
Retrieved from http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/05/scientists-join-journal-editors-
to-fight-impact-factor-abuse.html

Further reading

Australian Journal of Communication. (2013). http://austjourcomm.org/index.php/ajc

First Monday. (2013). http://firstmonday.org/index

Google Scholar Citations. (2013). http://scholar.google.com.au/intl/en/scholar/citations.html

Google Scholar: Top publications. (2013).

http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en

Petelin, R. (2004). Academic journal publishing: Desiderata for the digital age. Australian
Journal of Communication 31(3) p. 117-23.

Thompson Reuters. (2013). Thomson Reuters research analytics unveils 2013 release of
its journal citation reports. http://thomsonreuters.com/press-releases/062013/2013-
journal-citation-reports