Call for Papers: Current Issues in Scholarly Publishing

June 9, 2024

Madelaine Hare
Digital Transformation and Innovation PhD program, University of Ottawa

Leigh-Ann Butler
University of Ottawa Libraries, University of Ottawa Libraries

Stafanie Haustein
School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science invites submissions to a special issue on current issues in scholarly publishing in Canada and globally.

The academic publishing landscape is rapidly evolving in response to both continued and emerging challenges. Effortsto transition away from subscription publishing models have posed a series of new challenges: as open access models diversify, so too does the complexity of navigating licensing (Baldwin & Pinfield, 2018), embargoes (Koley & Lala, 2022), predatory publishing (Grudniewicz et al., 2019), and supporting authors with the rising costs of Article Processing Charges (Butler et al., 2023) through transformative agreements (Fontúrbel & Vizentin-Bugoni, 2020; Farley et al., 2021). In tandem, the Open Science movement has catalyzed advancements in publishing infrastructures and tools, such as preprint servers (Ni & Waltman, 2024). Open peer review initiatives such as Peer Community In (PCI) and MetaROR have emerged, aiming to facilitate the open communicationand evaluation of research. These developments further exacerbate and emphasize the necessity of working towards a more inclusive and equitable scientific system (Demeter & Istratii, 2020).

Objectives of the special issue

Rapid developments in policy, practice, and research about scholarly publishing make this a critical time to survey howsuch issues are being addressed. While scholarly publishing takes place on a global scale, we invite authors to consider the effect of these issues in a Canadian context and globally. This special issue hopes to promote information exchange, collaboration, and productive discussion to advance how we think about and tackle current issues in scholarly publishing in a national context.

We welcome contributions on a broad range of topics using a diverse range of methods and theories. Submissions from students and practitioners are encouraged. CJILS accepts a diverse range of formats including research articles, research notes, reviews, commentaries, and book reviews. See the journal’s authorship guidelines for more details on accepted submission formats.

Important dates

Please submit your manuscript in either official language (English or French) through the OJS by December 31st, 2024. Please indicate in your cover letter that you are submitting to the special issue. Submissions will be reviewed as they are received and published upon acceptance. The issue will be officially launched in spring 2025.

Contact

Please contact Maddie Hare (maddie.hare@uottawa.ca) if you have any questions.

References

Baldwin, J., & Pinfield, S. (2018). The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access. Publications, 6(3), 31. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications6030031

Butler, L.-A., Matthias, L., Simard, M.-A., Mongeon, P., & Haustein, S. (2023). The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges. Quantitative Science Studies, 4(4),778–799. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272

Demeter, M., & Istratii, R. (2020). Scrutinising what Open Access Journals Mean for Global Inequalities. Publishing Research Quarterly, 36(4), 505–522. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-020-09771-9

Farley, A., Langham-Putrow, A., Shook, E., Sterman, L. B., & Wacha, M. (2021). Transformative agreements: Six myths, busted | Farley | College & Research Libraries News. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.82.7.298

Fontúrbel, F. E., & Vizentin-Bugoni, J. (2021). A Paywall Coming Down, Another Being Erected: Open Access Article Processing Charges (APC) may Prevent Some Researchers from Publishing in Leading Journals. The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 102(1), e01791. https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.1791

Grudniewicz, A., Moher, D., Cobey, K. D., Bryson, G. L.,Cukier, S., Allen, K., Ardern, C., Balcom, L., Barros,T., Berger, M., Ciro, J. B., Cugusi, L., Donaldson, M.R., Egger, M., Graham, I. D., Hodgkinson, M., Khan, K. M., Mabizela, M., Manca, A., … Lalu, M. M.(2019). Predatory journals: No definition, no defence. Nature, 576(7786), 210–212. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03759-y

Koley, M., & Lala, K. (2022). Are journal archiving and embargo policies impeding the success of India’s open access policy? Learned Publishing,35(2), 175–186. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1441

Ni, R., & Waltman, L. (2024). To preprint or not to preprint: A global researcher survey. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 75(6), 749–766. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24880

(Via Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science)