Introduction & Trends

Journal Publishing in South Africa

Susan Veldsman

Agenda

• About ASSAf • ASSAf Scholarly Publishing Programme

• Quest

• Journal Publishing in SA

• SciELO SA

• Requirements for a High Quality Journal - Checklist

• Layout and Design

• Your Journal Online

2

ASSAf Mandate

• Honour distinguished scholars in all fields of scientific enquiry

• Generate evidence-based solutions to national and global challenges

3

ASSAf Goals

• Recognition and reward of excellence

• Promotion of innovation and scholarly activity

• Effective, evidence-based scientific advice

• Public interest in and awareness of science & science education

• National, regional and international linkages

4

Alignment with Government Goals

• Responsive, coordinated and efficient National System of Innovation (NSI)

• Increased knowledge generation

• Human capital development

• Using knowledge for economic development

• Knowledge utilization for inclusive development

5

Scholarly Publishing Programme (1)

Increase visibility, accessibility & searchability of SA accredited scholarly journals

• Add 10 journal titles to SciELO SA platform

• Conclude license agreements with new journals

• Prepare new journals for OA platform

• Host annual SciELO SA Users’ Group Meeting

• Monitor & evaluate OA platform

6

Strategic Objective 1

Activities

Scholarly Publishing Programme (2)

Improve quality of SA scholarly journals, books & conference proceedings

• Publish 2 discipline-grouped panel reports

• Coordinate activities of National Scholarly Book Publishers’Forum & National Scholarly Editors’Forum

• Evaluation of books, conference proceedings for DHET

• Host 4 webinars on scholarly publishing topics

7

Strategic Objective 2

Activities

Scholarly Publishing Programme (3)

• Provide DOI service to SciELO SA journals

• Assist with online hosting & managing of SciELO SA journals

• Update & expand SA journal database

• Monitor value & impact of activities of SPU

• Advise on implementation of DHET Research Outputs Policy

• Adoption of new technologies i.e. ORCiD, Portico, DOI, XML

8

Activities (cont.)

Scholarly Publishing Programme (4)

• Publish report on impact of DHET policy

• Establish impact of the SPU in South Africa

• Engage stakeholders

9

Study: Scientific Journal & Book Publishing: 2005-2015

Scholarly Publishing Programme (5)

Promote visibility & impact of SA research through publication of SAJS

• Publish 6 issues per annum

• Highlight ASSAfs 20th anniversary

• Introduce article-level metrics for improved impact measurement

• Undergo ASSAfs peer-reviewed evaluation to assess quality

• Undertake an independent bibliometric assessment to monitor impact

10

Strategic Objective 3

Scholarly Publishing Programme (6)

Promote awareness of science among youth

• Full-colour, quarterly, popular science magazine

• Print-run 25 000 per issue

• Aimed at Grades 10-12, educators, scientific community

• Improve impact through: • Targeted distribution strategy

• Increased collaboration with DBE, University Education Departments, SAASTA, Science Centres

11

Strategic Objective 4

Journal Publishing in South Africa

• 396 journal titles published in SA

• 329 scholarly journal titles accredited by the SA Dept. of Higher Education and Training

• DHET funds each article with ±R 118 000-00 once successfully published in accredited journal

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Accredited Scholarly Journal Titles

Lists acknowledged by the Dept. of Higher Education & Training (SA):

• Web of Science (Thomson Reuters)

• Scopus (Elsevier)

• DHET List

• SciELO SA Journals

• IBSS (ProQuest)

• Norwegian Registry for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers (Level 2 only)

13

SA Policy on Research Output

14

+ 75% of contributions/articles published must be from

outside a specific

organization

+ Editorial board: two thirds beyond a single institution

http://www.dhet.gov.za/Policy%20and%20Development%20Support/Research%20Outputs%20policy%20gazette%202015.pdf

Journal Publishers in South Africa • African Journals Online (AJOL)

• Sabinet

• AOSIS Publishing

• Health & Medical Publishing Group (HMPG)

• African SUNMedia

• Medpharm

• SciELO SA (65)

• Juta (10)

• Taylor & Francis (48)

• NISC (17)

• UNISA Press

• Wiley Butterworth (3)

• Elsevier (6)

• Societies, Associations, Universities, Museums, Institues, Centres 15

Accredited Scholarly Journal Titles (329) (58 in DOAJ)

16

172

157

Subscription Open Access

Indexing of Journal Titles in SA

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Data collected during:

2015 2016 Comments

DHET 271 273 2 titles added

Web of Science 66 63 3 titles removed Decline in IF: 28 titles Increase in IF: 25 titles 10 titles without IF

Scopus 131 133 2 titles added

IBSS 39 41 2 titles added

Norwegian List ----- 135 Only 0s and 1s; No 2s

SciELO SA 56 65 9 titles added

What do Authors prefer?

• Publish in journals accredited by the SA Dept. of Higher Education and Training (DHET) (± R 118 000-00 per article)

• See 6 lists accredited by DHET

• High Impact Factor (IF) journals

• International acknowledged journals specially those in their fields

18

STM vs SSH Scholarly Journals

19

STM

SSH

STM SSH

20

Preserved via Portico

DOIs & metadata registered

Indexed via SciELO SA

Published in print/online

Managed via

OJS/other

ASSAf Scholarly Publishing Workflow Journal Specific

Peer-review of Journal Titles (1)

• Cycle of 5 years

• Peer-review process:

• Identify journals

• Editors complete questionnaire and submit to ASSAf

• Experts identified for peer-review panel

• Peer-review expert panels meet

• Cosolidate data and present consensus views

• Publish report (6)

• Number of titles reviewed up to date: 145

21

Peer-review of Journal Titles (2)

Currently under review

• Engineering and Architecture (15 journals)

• Humanities II: Visual and Performing Arts (10 journals)

• Communication and Information Science (14 journals)

Current panels being established

• Education (17 journals)

• Politics, History and Philosophy (26 journals)

• Mathematics and Science (22 journals)

Total additional titles reviewed: 104

Total: 247 of 309 titles reviewed 22

Support (1)

• Criteria for best practice in terms of journal publishing (6 lists + DOAJ criteria)

• Pilot project – ±R 5 000-00 per year (excl. staffing)

• Roadshow on journal management and publishing using OJS (WC, FS, Gauteng, KZN, EC)

• SciELO SA & WoS (65 titles) – growing collection?

• Investigation into APCs

• DOAJ Ambassador – input on international level

• DOAJ inclusion (58 journals)

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Support (2)

• Transition to online – also digitise retrospective articles

• Online help wiki

• Online newsletter & blog

• National Scholarly Editors Forum – annually

• Code of Best Practice in Editorial Discretion and Peer Review (currently being revised)

24

Online Journal System Pilot Project

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What have we learned? (1)

• This software is relatively new to the South African scholarly publishing landscape, and new thinking was required from the Editors

• ASSAf has limited IT expertise, and IT expertise (programming, system administrator) is not readily available. ASSAf is dependent on outside experts, when they have time to address our needs. Outstanding IT problems.

• New plugins regularly become available. It requires an openness towards new learning/lifelong learning/self-learning/learning on the go/experimenting, and also giving back in the spirit of Open Source Software. It is different from a commercial approach. South Africans still need to get used to this approach.

26

What have we learned? (2)

• Great care was taken to transfer journals from the previous DOI owner to the ASSAf DOI

• Work on parsing Word/PDF documents to an XML format is still in progress, and a plugin will hopefully be released later this year

• Work on article-level metrics is also still in progress, AddThis API?

27

What have we learned? (3)

• Hopefully all OJS journals will – with time – upload retrospective issues. This will increase the online presence of each journal, and the more articles available online, the better the chances of citations increasing, which can then result in an increase in journal impact.

• This is really a cost effectice and sustainable way of supporting the editor and assocaited workflow and the journals!

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What else do we need to do?

• Consistent display of all journals

• Consistent applications/functionalities/developments across journals

• Integration of social media

• Graphical design

• Hyperlinked references

• iThenticate plagiarism detection softwar

• ASSAf web page

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SciELO SA

• Full-text searchable database of selected, high-quality South African open access scholarly journals

• Main focus: global dissemination of open access journal content

• Purpose: To increase the visibility, accessibility, indexibility and impact of South African scholarly journals

30

The SciELO Citation Index (SCI) is part of the WoS Portal (Note that the SCI is not part of the WoS Core Collection)

32

SciELO SA

To date, texts in the SciELO SA open access

collection have been viewed more than four million times in total since its inception in 2009

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Scholarly Journal Initiatives – SciELO SA

• Implementation of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)

• Creative Commons Licenses

• Digital Preservation Strategy

• Researcher IDs (ORCID)

• Allocation of online ISSNs

• XML

• New platform

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Requirements for a High Quality

Journal - Checklist

• 23 editors/managing editors/ assistants

• 1 library director

• 1 interested organisation

Who are attending today?

• 23 journals are represented here (16 are DHET accredited)

• 1 published by a commercial publisher

• 3 are published by a commercial OA publisher

• 7 self-publish through Open Journal Sytems (Online Content Mangement System)

• All the journals have a website, but only 12 has a website eminating from publishing software

• 7 SciELO SA

• 3 journals have been invited to SciELO SA

• 1 DSpace implementation

• 19 OA journals

Analysis of the 23 attending journals

About the Journal

Journal Articles - technical

Journal Articles - content

Journal Financial Sustainability

Journal Visibility & Impact

Journal Guidelines

Journal Policies & Statements

Journal Roles & Responsibilities

Layout and Design

File Formats: PDF

Layout and Design

Easy to save and print

Interactive table of contents

Widely used in most scholarly

journals

File Formats: PDF

Author names, affiliations and contact information clearly visible. Space options for ORCIDs.

How to cite information, with the DOI displayed.

Licencing information

Clickable DOI in reference list, for easy citation information

EPUB In-article table of contents. With clickable links

Ability to enlarge letter size. Compatible with screen sizes.

EPUB

Links to online citations Search ability and screen size adaption

XML

Easy format for all harvester

Extensive metadata included for optimal visibility

Your Journal Online

Google Analytics

In-depth analytics on site visits, bounce rates and page views

Customisable timeline

Browser data

Overview of countries with most visits Easy reporting on

monthly/quarterly/annual or per issue details

• Developing capacity in terms of scholarly writing, editing, reviewing etc.

• Open Access Week & other advocacy opportunities

• Webinars

• Funder: National Research Foundation (NRF) made OA Statement

• ORCID Ambassador

• Collaboration with CrossRef, Portico, Creative Commons, others

Continued Support

Please Diarise!

Questions? Thank you!

Susan Veldsman Director: ASSAf Scholarly Publishing Unit

susan@assaf.org.za