THE FUTURE OF ACADEMIC JOURNALS Amelia Acker | Information Ecology |

What makes an Academic Journal?  Peer review  Discipline specificity  Specialized vs. Broad  Research reviews, book reviews  New research  Critiques of existing research  Indexed rankings

PEER REVIEW

Indexed Rankings  Science Citation Index  Social Science Citation Index  Not a long indexing tradition in the humanities & arts, but there are 1,100 journals indexed in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index  Indexing is done by Thomson’s Scientific’s Institute for Scientific Information

Journal Impact Factor  A journal’s impact factor (IF) is calculated in Journal Citation Reports (also published by ISI)  IF is the average number of citations of articles that were published in the past 2 years: X = number of times articles published in ‘08-09 were cited by indexed journals in ’10 Y = total number of citations published in ‘ Impact factor = X/Y

Publishing

Print vs. Electronic Formats Hard copies on the shelf Electronic Copies online Remote storage like SRLF

Open Access Journals  Factors pushing scholarly communications online: low costs of reproduction and distribution, increasing networked connectivity, current publishing price structures are crippling libraries  Factors keeping journals off-line: licensing and copyright, current academic reward structure… [read = print or perish]  Q: Which type of publication are you likely to submit to in LIS?

Costs of Hard Copies  First copy costs of an academic article on paper is $2K-$4K (Tenopir and King 1996)  Fixed cost of a journal, with 4 issues per year at $12, with 600 subscribers is $120,000  Archiving a journal for a SINGLE issue is estimated $25-$45 for a library (Cooper 1989)  Cost-per-article-read: estimated between $50- $200 (Consider cost per cited, which is quite low)

Benefits of Electronic Copies  Saving shelf space creates possibilities for increasing real estate for cultural heritage materials, other formats, and improved environments like study spaces  Monitoring metrics: easier to measure use, distribution, users (faculty, grad students, public use)  Supporting materials: data sets, images, modules  Search: improves findability but decreases traditional avenues of serendipity  Q: Let’s speculate the costs of electronic formats

Shifting Conventions Publishing conventions are shifting in our current budget climate. Factors such as the academic reward system, library resources, open access, and networked communication are changing we see the once ‘stable’ format of the scholarly journal article. As information scholars, professionals and scientists, what roles should we take on as we begin to publish, promote, write and research? What traditions should we begin to slough off?

References Cooper, Michael. (1989.) A cost comparison of alternative book storage strategies. Library Quarterly 59(3): xx—xx. Marcum, J. W. (2003). Visions. D-Lib Magazine, 9(5). doi: /may2003-marcum Mullins, J. L., Allen, F. R., & Hufford, J. R. (n.d.). ACRL | Top ten assumptions for the future of academic libraries and librarians. Retrieved May 18, 2010, from ions.cfm ions.cfm Tenopir, Carol, and King, Donald W. (1996.) Trends in scientific scholarly journal publishing. Technical report, School of Information Sciences, University of Tennesee, Knoxville. Varian, H. R. (1997). Reprint: The Future of Electronic Journals. Retrieved May 11, 2010, from idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=