Our @tibosl colleague @Maryna_Nazarovets and her coauthors @mikaellaakso and @zehrataskin
published a nice comprehesive overview of their research on niversity journal publishers – in the LSE Impact blog.
The original article:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05535-4
University journals in the global academic publishing landscape: Mapping over 19,000 diverse titles based on Ulrichsweb data
@tibosl @Maryna_Nazarovets @mikaellaakso @zehrataskin
There are recommendations in the blog posting that should really be taken seriously.
"First, treat journals as infrastructure. Many university journals operate on minimal resources and fragile continuity. A small amount of stable institutional support (platform hosting, DOI workflows, archiving and training) can have outsized impact."
This has loads of implications, such as thoughts on how to secure sustainability of the journal software.
@tibosl @Maryna_Nazarovets @mikaellaakso @zehrataskin
"Second, invest in metadata as a public good. Good metadata is not cosmetic. It is how journals are discoverable, preservable and analysable. The absence of reliable affiliation data, language data and open access status makes whole parts of scholarly communication hard to study and easy to overlook."
This problem needs to be tackled on different levels. Awareness needs to be raised, sure. But the technology needs to be improved, too, ...
@tibosl @Maryna_Nazarovets @mikaellaakso @zehrataskin
.. allow for easier metadata curation and dissemination on different levels (author, journal, data aggregator). We tried to support this with our now finished @komet project (https://projects.tib.eu/komet/en/). Two outcomes are #ROR integration in OJS and structured citations (see a webinar with @gaziyucel on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX4y2k-eP_w )
@tibosl @Maryna_Nazarovets @mikaellaakso @zehrataskin @komet @gaziyucel
"Third, recognise diversity as a feature, not a failure. University journals do not all aim to become global flagship titles. Many exist to support disciplines, languages and publics that universities are meant to serve. A healthy institutional publishing ecosystem will include both internationally-oriented journals and locally-rooted ones."
This has oh so many dimensions! This needs much more research. Diversity requires
@tibosl @Maryna_Nazarovets @mikaellaakso @zehrataskin @komet @gaziyucel
... inclusion, requires thinking of people and what they need. In a paper with Zeynep Aydin, Paul Müller and @KaliuzhnaN we tried to organise some potential barriers to diversity: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.250257.
To cite our concluding sentence: "Tangible progress requires bold reforms, from rethinking financial models to challenging the cultural perceptions that sustain these barriers."
Hurdles to open access publishing faced by authors: a scoping literature review from 2004 to 2023
@hauschke Thank you for such thorough feedback! What we saw in this study, while it is intuitively understood from experience, but lacks factual evidence, is that approaches to publishing UJs vary greatly, and these differences are highly dependent on national contexts. And misunderstanding these contexts is key, which, in my opinion, has marginalized UJs publishing in recent years. This leads to a lack of funding, which causes other problems, such as a lack of technology and staff, etc.
