Information Systems Science
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(2023-02-17)This study investigates the relationship between scholarly journal publishing and public funding, specifically concerning the context of small- and mid-sized journal publishers in European countries. As part of the movement towards open science, an increasing number of journals globally are free to both read and publish in, which increases the need for journals to seek other resources instead of subscription-income. The study includes two separate components, collecting data separately for each European country (including transcontinental states): 1) the volume and key bibliometric characteristics of small- and mid-sized journal publishers, and 2) information about country-level public funding mechanisms for scholarly journals. The study found that there are 16387 journals from small-and mid-sized publishers being published in European countries of which 36% are already publishing open access. There is large diversity in how countries reserve and distribute funds to journals, ranging from continuous inclusive subsidies to competitive grant funding or nothing at all.
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(2022-10-17)Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being published on open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process. In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 34 overlay journals. While the results show that new overlay journals have been actively established within recent years, the current presence of overlay journals remains diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. Most overlay journals publish articles in natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences, and are commonly published by groups of academics rather than formal organisations. They may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. None of the investigated journals required fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effective aspects of the overlay publishing model. Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories and researchers’ willingness to publish in overlay journals will determine the model’s wider impact on scholarly publishing.
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(2022-11)This paper reports on some of the initial observations from an ongoing study focused on determining the preservation status of academic open access books. The central challenges discussed revolve around lack of common definitions, metadata, and established practices for openly recording preservation status for books.
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(2022-03-25)
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(2022-06-18)Open access (OA) to research publications is of global relevance, both in terms of provision and consumption of scholarly content. However, much of the research, practice, and models surrounding OA have been centered around the Global North. In this study we investigate how and to what degree higher education institutions (HEIs) in Angola interact with the concept of OA to journal publications through their policies and practices, a country where the end of the civil war in 2002 marked a new start for growth in teaching and research. This study is based on an online survey conducted in 2020 among research management units of Angolan HEIs. 23 valid institutional responses were received of 44 invitations sent (52% response rate). The results suggest that Angolan HEIs have moderate awareness of OA but practical incorporation into academic processes has remained slow, however, this can be seen to be connected to the overall slow progress in ramping up research intensity in the country. Seven of the responding institutions reported to be involved in publishing scholarly journals, all of them OA. Overall Angolan HEIs have few institutional repositories, and have so far placed little value on OA in the context of academic career advancement.
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(2021-12-21)
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(2021-04-13)For more than thirty years the spiralling costs of scholarly journal subscriptions (“the serials crises”) has been a hotly debated topic. Academics and librarians have pointed out the high profit levels of the major commercial publishers, despite the fact that the content is provided by unpaid authors and reviewers, which the publishers then resell to the universities of these same authors and reviewers. Publishers have attempted to justify their prices by cost increases, their IT-investments and the value they add. A useful framework for understanding the prevailing situation is Michael Porter’s five forces framework for explaining the competitive situation in any given industry. Despite claims to the contrary the degree of market concentration in scholarly publishing is not higher than in many other industries, and not the main cause of the problem. But the fact that the big deals of different publishers are complements rather than substitutes, means that essentially the leading companies don’t compete for customers, in contrast to other industries like mobile phones or automobiles. The high barriers to new entrants, partly due to journal ranking lists and impact factors, as well as the low bargaining power of suppliers and customers, explain why this industry has been so well protected from the disruptive forces of the Internet. The protected competitive position and high profitability is also the major reason why the big subscription publishers have been rather slow in adopting the open access business model.
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(2021-03)
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(2021-07-12)With the growth of open access (OA), the financial flows in scholarly journal publishing have become increasingly complex, but comprehensive data on and transparency of these flows are still lacking. The opacity is especially concerning for hybrid OA, where subscription-based journals publish individual articles as OA if an optional fee is paid. This study addresses the lack of transparency by leveraging Elsevier article metadata and provides the first publisher-level study of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing. Our results show that Elsevier's hybrid OA uptake has grown steadily but slowly from 2015 to 2019, doubling the number of hybrid OA articles published per year and increasing the share of OA articles in Elsevier's hybrid journals from 2.6 to 3.7% of all articles. Further, we find that most hybrid OA articles were invoiced directly to authors, followed by articles invoiced through agreements with research funders, institutions, or consortia, with only a few funding bodies driving hybrid OA uptake. As such, our findings point to the role of publishing agreements and OA policies in hybrid OA publishing. Our results further demonstrate the value of publisher-provided metadata to improve the transparency in scholarly publishing.
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(2021-02-04)The preservation of the scholarly record has been a point of concern since the beginning of knowledge production. With print publications, the responsibility rested primarily with librarians, but the shift towards digital publishing and, in particular, the introduction of open access (OA) have caused ambiguity and complexity. Consequently, the long-term accessibility of journals is not always guaranteed, and they can even disappear from the web completely. The focus of this exploratory study is on the phenomenon of vanished journals, something that has not been done before. For the analysis, we consulted several major bibliographic indexes, such as Scopus, Ulrichsweb, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and traced the journals through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. We found 174 OA journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the web between 2000–2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world. Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge. We encourage those interested in the phenomenon of vanished journals to use the public dataset for their own research.
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(2021-04-12)The Internet has enabled efficient electronic publishing of scholarly journals and Open Access business models. Recent studies have shown that adoption of Open Access journals has been uneven across scholarly disciplines, where the business and economics disciplines in particular seem to lag behind all other fields of research. Through bibliometric analysis of journals indexed in Scopus, we find the share of articles in Open Access journals in business, management, and accounting to be only 6%. We further studied the Open Access availability of articles published during 2014–2019 in journals included in the Financial Times 50 journal list (19,969 articles in total). None of the journals are full Open Access, but 8% of the articles are individually open and for a further 35% earlier manuscript versions are available openly on the web. The results suggest that the low adoption rate of Open Access journals in the business fields is a side-effect of evaluation practices emphasizing publishing in journals included, in particular, ranking lists, creating disincentives for business model innovation, and barriers for new entrants among journals. Currently, most business school research has to be made Open Access through other ways than through full Open Access journals, and libraries play an important role in facilitating this in a sustainable way.
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(2017-01-13)Metrics on open access (OA) availability of content published in scholarly journals (i.e. content licences, copyright ownership, and publisher-stipulated self-archiving permissions) are still scarce. This study implements the four core variables of the recently published Open Access Spectrum (OAS) (reader rights, reuse rights, copyright, and author posting rights) to measure the level of openness in all 1,728 Spanish scholarly journals listed in the Spanish national DULCINEA database at the end of 2015. Data exported from the database and used as variables for the analysis were: journal research area, type of publisher, type of access, self-archiving and reuse policy, and type of Creative Commons (CC) licence used. Out of the total number of journals (1,728), 1,285 (74.5%) published their articles OA immediately after initial publication and thus received the maximum OAS score for reader rights; 37.5% of all journals used CC licences, and 79.5% allowed self-archiving in some form. In 72% of journals, authors retained or publishers granted broad rights, which included author reuse and authorization rights (for others to reuse), whilst 13.5% did not specify any terms for copyright transfer. Similar studies could be carried out on other countries as this would enable comparisons of the general adoption and form of openness in different parts of the world.
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(2017-08-03)The motivations for an author to choose a journal to submit to are complex and include factors relating to impact and prestige, service quality, and publication costs and policies. Authors require information about multiple characteristics of journals that may be difficult to obtain. This article compares and contrasts the new author-oriented journal comparison tools and services that have emerged to assist researchers in this important step of the scholarly publishing process. Many of these tools combine factors to provide full web-based manuscript submission decision tools, however all have limitations that reduce their usefulness.
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(2017-10-28)Context Since its inception around 2010, gamification has become one of the top technology and software trends. However, gamification has also been regarded as one of the most challenging areas of software engineering. Beyond traditional software design requirements, designing gamification requires the command of disciplines such as (motivational/behavioral) psychology, game design, and narratology, making the development of gamified software a challenge for traditional software developers. Gamification software inhabits a finely tuned niche of software engineering that seeks for both high functionality and engagement; beyond technical flawlessness, gamification has to motivate and affect users. Consequently, it has also been projected that most gamified software is doomed to fail. Objective This paper seeks to advance the understanding of designing gamification and to provide a comprehensive method for developing gamified software. Method We approach the research problem via a design science research approach; firstly, by synthesizing the current body of literature on gamification design methods and by interviewing 25 gamification experts, producing a comprehensive list of design principles for developing gamified software. Secondly, and more importantly, we develop a detailed method for engineering of gamified software based on the gathered knowledge and design principles. Finally, we conduct an evaluation of the artifacts via interviews of ten gamification experts and implementation of the engineering method in a gamification project. Results As results of the study, we present the method and key design principles for engineering gamified software. Based on the empirical and expert evaluation, the developed method was deemed as comprehensive, implementable, complete, and useful. We deliver a comprehensive overview of gamification guidelines and shed novel insights into the nature of gamification development and design discourse. Conclusion This paper takes first steps towards a comprehensive method for gamified software engineering.
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(2019-06-01)With the increasing provenance of hedonic and social information systems, systems are observed to employ other forms of feedback and design than purely informational in order to increase user engagement and motivation. Three principle classes of motivational design pursuing user engagement have become increasingly established; gamification, quantified-self and social networking. This study investigates how the perceived prominence of these three design classes in users’ use of information system facilitate experiences of affective, informational and social feedback as well as user’s perceived benefits from a system and their continued use intentions. We employ survey data (N = 167) gathered from users of HeiaHeia; an exercise encouragement system that employs features belonging to the three design classes. The results indicate that gamification is positively associated with experiences of affective feedback, quantified-self with experiences of both affective and informational feedback and social networking with experiences of social feedback. Experiences of affective feedback are further strongly associated with user perceived benefits and continued use intentions, whereas experiences of informational feedback are only associated with continued use intentions. Experiences of social feedback had no significant relationship with neither. The findings provide practical insights into how systems can be designed to facilitate different types of feedback that increases users’ engagement, benefits and intentions to continue the use of a system.
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(2021-02-05)The Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon), was founded in 1996, using the new innovative open access business model enabled by the World wide web. A quarter century later Open Access (OA) journals have established themselves in all fields of science, in particular in biomedicine, so that around a fifth of all high quality peer reviewed articles are currently published in OA journals. In building and construction there are half a dozen active full OA journals, although ITcon remains the only one dedicated specifically to construction IT research. The development of OA has been slower than anticipated in the early years. An analysis using Michael Porter’s five forces model of the competitive environment of scholarly publishing helps to highlight the reasons for this. Particularly important as a barrier to change is the strong emphasis in academic evaluations on impact factors, which favors old established journals. Despite such hurdles OA continuously grows in importance and pioneering journals like ITcon have helped to pave the way.
