Understanding the review process
Open access publishing
#EditorObservations 17 Open access publishing (YouTube, 1m 49s)
The publishing landscape is shifting. Historically, publishing in a journal did not cost anything and publishers earned money by charging for access to the published work, mostly via institutional subscriptions. As a result of many countries around the world taking the position that outcomes from scholarly research should be freely accessible to anyone, the model started shifting. The number of open access journals is increasing. These journals charge authors a fee to publish their paper, but do not charge a subscription fee.
The shift in the publishing business model along with research metrics driving up the number of submissions and publications has resulted in many so-called predatory publishers entering the market. For an inexperienced researcher it is not easy to determine if an open access journal is a genuine scholarly journal or a predatory journal. Here are a few tips on how to assess a journal: ask senior researchers in the field; look out for unreasonably short review times; ensure that there is no upfront publication guarantee; and have a look how many special issues the journal has published. Predatory journals publish incredibly high numbers of special issues to inflate their citation metrics. Those are not journals you want to publish in.
Another key development relevant to making journal articles accessible to everyone is the existence of pre-print servers. Pre-print servers enable authors to upload their manuscript before they submit it to a journal. Most publishers accept this practise and exclude pre-prints from their text duplication rules – along with abstracts and research theses. Importantly, the uploaded article version must not have been shaped by a journal’s review process yet. Pre-print servers have different features. My preferred pre-print server is SocArXiv operated under the umbrella of OSF. SocArXiv is run by volunteer academics who make sure the papers that are uploaded are in fact scholarly articles and issue authors with a DOI, thus securing their intellectual property even before publication in a journal. As soon as the article is published in a journal, the SocArXiv and journal DOIs get linked and all citations merged. All my articles are available on SocArXiv and accessible to anyone in the world who wants to read them for free.
#editorobservation
Today an author begged Scott McCabe and me to consider their paper for Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, not Annals of Tourism Research.
Why?
Because article will be open access WITHOUT authors paying article processing fee.
This sweet deal is on until the end of 2021!
#editorobservation
Woke up to new webpage for Annals of Tourism Research journals.
Love that authors can see manuscript processing speed!
Nothing as frustrating as a desk rejection after 3 months.
All Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights papers are open access.
Free for everyone everywhere.
#editorobservation
Fantastic to see that our Annals of Tourism Research authors are increasingly making their data publicly accessible 👏👏👏👏
Like any other research, tourism research must be replicable.
Making data available allows anyone anywhere anytime to rerun the published analysis.
#editorobservation
Your research should be freely accessible to everyone.
My preferred approach is to upload the preprint on SocArXiv because SocArXiv is run by volunteer researchers and it generates a DOI that I can later link to the DOI of the published paper.
What’s a preprint?
It’s the version of the paper that you have initially submitted to the journal. Not the version you revised in response to reviewers’ comments. Not the final, formatted version that’s on the journal webpage.
Annals of Tourism Research authors can share the preprint of their article anywhere at any time. Just do it.
