*If you haven’t had a chance to take “The State of Journal Production and Access” survey, there’s still time — we’ve extended the deadline to the 5th of June 2020. You can take the survey here. Read on for the full details.*
Since the 12th of March 2020, Scholastica has been running a survey on “The State of Journal Production and Access” among scholarly societies, university presses, and university libraries that publish one or more journals independently (i.e., not outsourced to a separate publisher). The survey spans core aspects of journal production, including article formatting, layout, and metadata tagging processes and priorities, as well as different open access publishing and funding models. Scholastica is running this survey to develop an openly available report for the independent society and university journal publishing community on current production and access practices and future priorities.
If you work with a scholarly society or university publishing program, we invite you to take the survey, open now through the 5th of June, to help develop collective insights. The survey takes only around 5-10 minutes to complete. The information you submit for this survey will be published in an aggregated and anonymized form, and no personally identifying fields are required.
Survey details
“The State of Journal Production and Access” is a global survey that spans all scholarly publishing disciplines and welcomes feedback from publishing programs of all sizes. So far, the survey representation has been wide-reaching with responses from members of scholarly publishing organizations in 26 countries in various roles, ranging from senior leaders to journal editors to technical staff. Our goal for this survey is to help society and university journal publishers and stakeholders gauge the current state of production and access among independent publishing organizations and what they are prioritizing in the future. We’ve decided to extend the deadline for survey responses one more week (extended from May 29th to June 5th) since there has been increasing interest in this survey.
Why does this survey look at both production and access together? While production and access are two separate aspects of journal publishing, with the rise of digital publishing in recent years, they’ve increasingly started to converge. Many new scholarly publishing initiatives, such as Plan S, not only require journals to make their articles fully and immediately open access but to also meet specific digital production criteria to expand their reach and usage potential. We believe that looking at production and access together — as discrete but related aspects of publishing — will provide generative insights to help publishers and stakeholders determine where the digital publishing landscape is moving.
We’ve kept all survey questions on the topics of production and access separate, to avoid conflating questions/responses within the different topic areas. The final survey report will also have separate sections for the topics of production and access.
Take the survey
This survey will run now through the 5th of June 2020, after which point Scholastica will gather the feedback into an openly available community report (no email required for download). All survey feedback will be published in an aggregated and anonymized form. If you have any questions about the survey, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We would also love to hear your thoughts in the comments section! We invite you to take the survey here.
