The Future of Scholarly Publishing

Open Access and the Economics of Digitisation

Peter Weingart, Niels Taubert, Peter Weingart, Niels Taubert

• Publisher: African Minds
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781928331551
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The formal scientific communication system is currently undergoing significant change. This is due to four developments: the digitisation of formal science communication; the economisation of academic publishing as profit drives many academic publishers and other providers of information; an increase in the self-observation of science by means of publication, citation and utility-based indicators; and the medialisation of science as its observation by the mass media intensifies. Previously, these developments have only been dealt with individually in the literature and by science-policy actors. The Future of Scholarly Publishing documents the materials and results of an interdisciplinary working group commissioned by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) to analyse the future of scholarly publishing and to make recommendations on how to respond to the challenges posed by these developments. As per the working groups intention, the focus was mainly on the sciences and humanities in Germany. However, in the course of the work it became clear that the issues discussed by the group are equally relevant for academic publishing in other countries. As such, this book will contribute to the transfer of ideas and perspectives, and allow for mutual learning about the current and future state of scientific publishing in different settings.

PART 1

The changing scholarly publishing system

CHAPTER TWO

Different from Discipline to Discipline

Diversity in the Scholarly Publication System

Konstanze Rosenbaum

In academia, publishing is of the utmost importance, and this in at least three ways. First, the publication is vital for the communication of new knowledge. Research results have to be published in order to be considered scientific (or scholarly) knowledge (Weingart 2003: 32). Second, the formal publication is a central part of the reward system of science, and serves as the foundation for attributing reputation. Third, mechanisms of external assessment of performance are also largely based on publications insofar as the measurement of performance is conducted via counting publications and citations. In the way science functions, publishing is an essential ingredient – in all disciplines. At the same time, however, there are significant differences within the various disciplines with regard to their cultures of publishing.

In the formal scientific communication system, homogeneity exists only in an abstract manner and refers to the functions of registration, certification, dissemination and archiving of new research.1 The present case study reconstructed the central differences of the publication system in seven disciplines on the basis of expert interviews.

The analysis is structured along four comparative dimensions. The first section compares the relationship of printed and digital publications in the individual disciplines, and shows influential factors for the respective states of digitisation in the scholarly publication system (section 2). In the course of digitisation, not only do the media of publication that are used change, but also the accessibility. The realisation of free accessibility and the extensive usability of publications are the most important developments within the system. The analysis of the differences is discussed in detail with respect to a certain model – free access to the original place of publication (gold open access) (section 3). Differences are found at the economic level and with regard to reputation. Subsequently, processes of self-monitoring of quality and of quantitative measurement of scientific performance were analysed. In section 4, the peer-review processes of the different disciplines will be compared and analysed with regard to their function of selecting contributions before publication. After that, the focus will be on the significance and perception of bibliometric measurement of performance (section 5). In a first step, the influence of bibliometric measures on the publication behaviour of researchers will be presented by using the example of the journal impact factor. Here, complementary to the mechanisms of the peer-review process, the selective function of impact factors in the context of publication activity, on the one hand, and the distributive decisions, on the other hand, will be worked out. The analysis is preceded by a brief description of the empirical material and methods of evaluation.

1 Materials and method

The main focus of this contribution is on the perspectives of scientists towards the communication system in their respective disciplines. In the framework of eight interviews, the members of the ‘Future of the Scholarly Publication System’ interdisciplinary working group and an invited contributor have gathered information on the characteristics and practices of the communication system in each discipline. The natural and engineering sciences are represented by experts from mathematics, physics and medical engineering. In the humanities and social sciences, two historians of science, one sociologist and one legal scholar were interviewed.

The interviews were conducted on the basis of a loosely structured guideline with which structural aspects of the formal communication system, on the one hand, and of the publication system as well as its responsible organisations, on the other hand, were revealed. Moreover, procedures of professional evaluation, performance measurement and accessibility to scientific information were taken into account. The transparent design of the interviews was chosen to provide experts with the opportunity to set different priorities and to explain the different facets of the scholarly communication system by means of the respective practical experiences (cf. Bogner et al. 2014: 12–15). Correspondingly, the evaluation was aimed at reconstructing the internal perspectives of different disciplines on the communication system and to elaborate the specific disciplinary differences by means of comparative dimensions. It is not claimed that the results are complete or that they can be generalised, however.

All interviews were transcribed, and all excerpts presented here were translated into English. The resulting amount of text formed the data material of the analysis. The computer-based qualitative content analysis was chosen as method of evaluation. The development of the system of categories was deductive as well as inductive. Analytical dimensions and main categories were derived from the interview guidelines. In comparison with the empirical material, further main categories could be added and sub-categories could be differentiated. Methodologically, techniques of thematic as well as summarising coding could be applied (cf. Kuckartz 2007: 83–96; Schreier 2012: 58–106).

2 The relationship between printed and digital publications

An initial and important comparative dimension is the relationship between printed and digital publication. As a result of the development and utilisation of digital information and communication technology, the scholarly communication system is subject to large dynamics of change. Mailing lists, email traffic and scientific Internet forums structure the social organisation of the exchange of information between scientists, and are used in the scientific communities to different degrees (cf. DFG 2005; Fry & Talja 2007). Along with the spreading of digital infrastructures, the format of the digital publication has been established, albeit to a very different degree. As a comparatively young form of publishing, the establishment and utilisation of digital formats in the scholarly publication system are inconsistent. The heterogeneity of digitisation within the communication system becomes clear in the interviews. Digital publication has a high status in disciplines that are characterised by a strong international orientation or by high technological standards of graphical description. In the natural and engineering sciences as well as history of art, scientists make use of technological opportunities of digitisation more strongly in order to design or disseminate their publications. In the humanities and social sciences, digital publications play a less important role. Indications for the reasons why digital publications are of varying importance in the different disciplines come to the fore in the interviews.

The indication of an interdependency between the importance of electronic publications and the type of medium of publication originates in the history of science. There, printed monographs and anthologies are of central importance. These ‘books of the normal scholarly production’ (H.-J. Rheinberger) are still primarily received in paper format, and e-books are uncommon. Review journals such as sehepunkte and the Berlin mailing list H-Soz-Kult are, however, published in digital form. These are important places of publication within the discipline, which are freely accessible in purely electronic form.2 In the journal sector, an electronic version appears in addition to the printed one. These publications are disseminated electronically by the publishers as a print version and via publication servers.

The state of digitisation in the publication system is, aside from the media of publication, also dependent on the performance abilities of the responsible organisations, in particular the publishing companies. In German-speaking sociology, the publisher Springer VS is a powerhouse. As a large publishing company with a central location in an otherwise fragmented landscape of publishers, Springer Verlag was easily able to take over platforms from science, technology, and medicine (STM) in order to provide digital products also within sociology. Smaller publishers frequently lack the resources to fulfil even minimum standards of their readership in terms of digital publications. Such developments have benefitted the creation of oligopolistic structures within the landscape of publishing companies.

Aside from publishing companies’ technological ability for innovation, the attitude of the respective discipline towards digital publication also plays a role. In the field of law, the landscape of publishers is characterised by decentralisation. Here Beck Verlag is the leader in the market. In contrast to mid-sized publishers, like Mohr Siebeck and De Gruyter, Beck’s status allows the company distribution of all digital products for money. E-books, however, have only been added to the portfolio of Beck-Online in recent years (cf. also Roxin 2009: 64). This hesitation in adding e-books correlates with the negative attitude of the scientific community towards digitisation as such.

In the history of art, there is a complementary relationship between printed and digital forms of publication. In this discipline, digitisation programmes and purely electronic publications were already developed and conceptualised at the beginning of the 1980s.3 At the same time, the form of the printed book remains indispensable for monographs or exhibition catalogues. The latter is a form of publication that not only addresses a broad public but also serves the exchange of research results within the discipline.4 Art history is a pictorial discipline (cf. also Boehm 2009: 62), whose publications are characterised by a special bonding between image and text. In most scientific disciplines, images additionally serve to illustrate connections between arguments that stem from theoretical or empirical work (for example, texts or in the laboratory). The history of art reverses this conventional relationship between image and text: ‘images come first, the texts need to try to illustrate them’ (H. Bredekamp). Aside from the quality of the image, factors such as choice of paper, density and complexity of the digital samples influence the outcome of a publication. In the printing process, authors are therefore strongly dependent on the printing and layout quality of the publisher and the competency of its designers. ‘It’s about providing the images with text without the reader having to turn the page [...]. If you have to turn back pages in a description, the description is gradually lost’ (H. Bredekamp). Epistemic reasons and resulting high technological standards regarding presentation thus explain a ‘unique standard in the art of book printing, which nowadays can be achieved through high-performance digital processes, but which cannot be well shown in digital form. Analogue high-performance books are produced by digital means’ (H. Bredekamp).

Digital publications can supplement or even replace printed formats. The latter is the case in the natural and engineering sciences. Here, the electronic journal article as a typical medium of publication is predominant and has almost entirely replaced the printed journals (cf. DFG 2005: 22–25). From the perspective of the researchers interviewed, digital publications are of significant advantage regarding reception, dissemination and archiving of research regardless of spatial boundaries.

The interviewee from medical engineering, for example, emphasised the efficiency of access to digital publications. Here, digital journals play an essential role. The university libraries acquire their licences in the form of bundle deals and provide researchers access via the internal university network:

It’s paradise and we sit at our desk... and we read a publication and there...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword to the English Edition
• Introduction
• Part One: The Changing Scholarly Publishing System
• Part Two: Framing Conditions
• Part Three: Visions