Chapter Three: Literature review
3.4 Trends
3.4.7 Trend seven : changing role of the journal in the scholarly communication
Many e-journals are produced by academics bypassing commercial publishers and are available free on the Internet. However, very few of these are science journals which tend to be more expensive than journals in other fields. No subscription fee or publication fee is levied and the journals include no advertisements. Presumably these journals are based on voluntary contributions from academics and the use of institutional resources. Furthermore, academics are probably less efficient at producing journals than professional publishing staff who have the required business, design and technical skills. It is also questionable whether academics receiving no funding for the purpose could guarantee preservation and long-term access to their journals.
Experts still allocate journals a key position in scholarly communication. Experts recognize that distribution and communication of research findings can be achieved more quickly and effectively by other services. The advantages of journals remain, mainly in the areas of quality control, reward and recognition and enabling citation.
The Minister of Education‟s National Plan for Higher Education of February 2001 (Walker 2003 : 11) states that Universities will be evaluated on certain research outputs, that is the number of academic publications per annum, the research productivity of individual
researchers in the higher education system and the number of postgraduate registrations.
The primary South African Post Secondary Education (SAPSE) measure is academic publications, particularly articles published in international and national peer-reviewed journals. The acceptance of articles in journals appearing in the indices of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has been recognized as a relevant output measure by the Department of Education.
The University of Natal Senate at its meeting of 20 November 2002 approved the allocation of Research Productivity Awards within the framework of an incentive driven research policy.
An article in a journal is fifteen productivity units, sixty units if it is in a SAPSE journal and fifteen for a chapter in a book. The most productive faculties during 1996 – 2002 have been Science and Agriculture with over 100 SAPSE units per annum. The University has
maintained a position in the middle rank of comparative national research output statistics, with an upward trend relative to other universities in the mid-1990s and a downward trend relative to leading universities in the late 1990s and in 2000. (University of Natal 2003d : 4)
During the massive restructuring of the University in the 1990s student numbers increased and teaching loads became substantially heavier, impacting critically on academics‟ ability to undertake research. Rewards to staff were allocated in recognition of excellence in teaching while research output may not have been equivalently rewarded. There have been
insufficient incentives to motivate individuals to apply for competitive research funding in the international arena or to undertake cutting edge high risk research projects. (University of Natal 2003d : 2)
A new trend with scholarly communication is the open access initiative. Open access is an alternative to the traditional subscription-based publishing model made possible by new digital technologies and networked communications. Open access refers to works that are created with no expectation of direct monetary return and made available at no cost to the reader on the Internet for purposes of education and research. Open access operates within the current legal framework of copyright law and is intended to be free for readers, not free for producers. Open access focuses on academic research and is concerned with scientific and research texts that scholars give to the community without expectation of direct monetary return, including peer-reviewed journal articles, preprints, preliminary findings, and data sets.
(Association of Research Libraries 2005 : 2)
There are many open access initiatives in place, namely the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which has been signed by a growing number of researchers, universities, laboratories, libraries, fourndations, journals, publishers, learned societies and scholars from around the world. A second such initiative is SPARC which is actively promoting both open access journals and the development of institutional repositories. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a grassroots initiative signed by over 30 000 scientists to encourage publishers to deposit their journals in central archives, like PubMed Central, within six months of
publication. (Association of Research Libraries 2005 : 5) 3.5 Summary of the chapter
Various aspects of the subject of the study have been surveyed in this literature review. The purpose of the review was to establish the theoretical framework of the research and to indicate where the present study fits into these broader debates, thereby justifying the significance of the study. The aim of this literature review is not to give a detailed picture of the developments with e-journals. It rather tries to assess points of view, evaluate trends, study short and long-term implications and describe possible scenarios for the future.
However a comprehensive review of the literature would give some indication of future developments.
As to the electronic journal itself, many developments as reported in the literature are currently taking place that give an insight into how things will evolve. Where relevant,
significant points identified in the literature review will be drawn on in the interpretation of the results of this study. The important issues that were identified were the existence of different pricing models, document delivery or interlibrary loans as a solution, access – simultaneous and off-campus access and finally archiving and digital preservation. Various solutions to the pricing dilemma were attempted, for example access instead of ownership, that is using document delivery to provide articles instead of subscribing to a journal. Another solution was putting together a consortia of libraries to negotiate better prices and provide access to sets of e-journals. A third solution is the creation and maintenance of electronic archives without reference to commercial publishers.