Doctoral thesis: Sustainable solutions needed for open access journals outside the mainstream publishing model

In her doctoral thesis titled “A study of Three Alternative Open Access Publishing Models”, Cenyu Shen studied three distinct types of OA journals which make their articles immediately open access upon publication: indie OA journals, ‘predatory’ OA journals and Chinese-language OA journals. ‘Predatory’ journals are OA journals that maximise their revenues by accepting virtually all submitted papers, even if they are of questionable academic quality.

Shen has selected Chinese-language OA journals as a case study, aiming to shed some light on the status of OA journals published in other languages than English. The situation of China might to some degree be similar to other countries where journals rely to a large extent on external subsidy funding, for instance, countries in Latin America.

-Nearly half of indie journals founded prior to 2002 remain operating beyond their initial 6 to 9 years of publication, but on average they publish a relatively small number of articles per year. Most of them have found other alternatives than to rely on article processing fees to finance their OA journal publishing, says Shen.

The findings indicate that the operations of indie OA journals are challenged by the difficulties to scale up to bigger publishing volumes, possibly due to limited financial and human resources.

-Although the number of ‘predatory’ journals and total published article volumes was rapidly growing between 2010 and 2014, the ‘predatory’ publishers and authors who published in them are highly concentrated to Asia and African countries, among which India is the most prominent contributor.

– My findings suggest that ‘predatory’ OA publishing appears not to be a global problem as it is mainly limited to a few developing countries, where ‘international publication’ is a prerequisite for academic appointment, more funding, or promotion, Shen states.

China in recent years has been an emerging market in producing the world’s second largest research outputs and its open access movement has gained some progresses with all kinds of support from Chinese government, funders, libraries, and scientific communities. The majority of China’s OA journals are published in Chinese, and most of them are published by universities and scholarly societies.

-The lack of a sufficient number of high-quality submissions is the biggest barrier to the successful publishing of Chinese-language OA journals. Their operational situation is further threatened by the financial instability which hinders their possibility to internationalise the journals.

According to Shen, there is an urgent need to increase the visibility of Chinese-language OA journals and more importantly to develop sustainable means to finance their long term development. A nonprofit governmental OA publishing platform, similar to the popular Latin American SciELO portal, could be built to support the electronic publishing of Chinese-language OA journals and to promote them to the wider global audience.

The complete doctoral thesis can be found here.

More information:

Cenyu Shen
Email: cenyu.shen@hanken.fi
Tel: +358443657666

Cenyu Shen defends her doctoral thesis in Information Systems Science: "A study of three alternative open access publishing models” on Tuesday 9 June at 4:15 p.m.

Opponent: Professor Carol Tenopir, University of Tennessee
Custos: Associate Professor Mikael Laakso, Hanken School of Economics

The doctoral defence will be held virtually on the Teams-platform. You can join here. The link opens on 9 June at 4 pm.