The handbook of journal publishing

Throughout the book, the authors repeatedly raise concerns about providing long term access to journal content published online. This is presented as an economic and organizational issue, but also a technological one.

They are right, of course, to point out this shift in responsibility from libraries to publishers, and to recognize that preservation of digital content requires planning and resources.

However, ensuring that content will be readable in the future need not be as much of an unsolved mystery as the authors suggest. Since the most detailed discussion of preservation occurs in the chapter on production, it would have been nice to see the authors draw this connection between production choices and preservation.

When discussing terminology and definitions, the authors are careful to be precise and judicious. However, as they move into discussions of practices, some of this is lost. That is, Open Access means that journals are freely accessible to readers, and this is frequently—but not always—accomplished through author charges. While this may indeed be true of OA journals relying on an author pays model, many OA journals do not charge such fees at all. Another example occurs in the chapter on metrics.

In discussing the Thomson Reuters Journal Impact Factor JIF , the authors identify ten known problems with relying solely on citation-based metrics as indicators of journal quality. It surprised me that the authors would identify this practice as a known issue undermining the significance of the JIF, and at the same time recommend it as an obvious course of action to improve the performance of an ailing journal.

They are open about this apparent contradiction, though, and state matter-of-factly, that despite all of the known problems with the JIF, journals wishing to succeed must be willing and able to participate in this process. Finally, the book itself is indeed well organized to function as a reference work. Although chapters refer to one another, they stand well on their own. Additionally, the glossary and appendices of resources and vendors are valuable for quickly checking an acronym or as a starting point for researching service providers.

However, the lack of navigational markers made it difficult for me to actually move around this book with ease.

While chapters are numbered, heading and subheadings are not. And while the running heads do include the chapter and section names, they do not include a chapter number. Numbering chapter sections and subsections, displaying subsections in the table of contents, and displaying chapter and section numbers in the running heads would all go a long way to aid quick look up and cross-referencing. Although some recommendations and practices may not be applicable to readers outside of traditional publishing companies, The Handbook of Journal Publishing is a thorough, easy-to-read guide that will help readers quickly get up to speed both on important events and hot button issues in the history of journal publishing, and equip them to jump into running existing titles, or launching new projects.

Rebecca Welzenbach is the coordinator of Michigan Publishing's journals program, which is home to 25 actively publishing scholarly journals most fully open access , as well as a number of archived publications. Her responsibilities include supporting editors and potential partners, improving Michigan Publishing's services and resources for journals, and acquiring new titles. The production process 5. Journal metrics 6. Marketing and sales 7. Fulfilment 8.

Journal finances 9. Subsidiary income Contract publishing Copyright and other legal aspects Ethical issues The future of scholarly communication Appendix 1: glossary Appendix 2: resources Appendix 3: vendors. View via Publisher. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Topics from this paper. Glossary Handbook. Scholarly communication Journal Citation Reports.

Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Careers in Science Publishing. Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology. Sustaining the growth of library scholarly publishing in a New University Press. View 2 excerpts, cites background. How to write a paper for successful publication in an international peer-reviewed journal.

Highly Influenced. View 1 excerpt, cites background. Developing a sustainable publishing model for a university press : a case study of the University of Huddersfield, The University of Huddersfield Press, re-launched in , is an open access publisher of peer reviewed journals, monographs and sound recordings.

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