The current publishing landscape

in South Africa

Susan Veldsman

Agenda

• About ASSAf• ASSAf Scholarly Publishing Programme

• SAJS & Quest

• Journal Publishing in SA

• ASSAf Initiatives/Services

• Research in scholarly Publishing

2

ASSAf Mandate (1)

• Honour distinguished scholars in all fields of scientific enquiry

3

Quarraisha Abdool Karim Jonathan Jansen Justin Nono Komguep

ASSAf Mandate (2)

• Generate evidence-based solutions to national and global challenges

4

ASSAf Goals (aligned with Government goals)

• Recognition and reward of excellence

• Promotion of innovation and scholarly activity

• Effective, evidence-based scientific advice

• Public interest in and awareness of science & science education

• National, regional and international linkages

5

Scholarly Publishing Programme (1)

Increase visibility, accessibility & searchability of SA accredited scholarly journals

• Add 8 journal titles to SciELO SA platform per annum

Improve quality of SA scholarly journals, books & conference proceedings

• Publish 2 discipline-grouped panel reports

• Coordinate activities of National Scholarly Book Publishers’Forum & National Scholarly Editors’Forum

6

Strategic Objective 1

Strategic Objective 2

Scholarly Publishing Programme (2)

• Publish report on impact of DHET policy

• Establish impact of the SPU in South Africa

• Engage stakeholders

7

Study: Scientific Journal & Book Publishing: 2005-2015

Scholarly Publishing Programme (3)

Promote visibility & impact of SA research through publication of SAJS

• Publish 6 issues per annum

• E-only

• Highlight ASSAf’s 20th anniversary

• Introduce article-level metrics for improved impact measurement

• Undergo ASSAf’s peer-reviewed evaluation to assess quality

• Citation exports

• Website upgrade and maintenance

• Undertake an independent bibliometric assessment to monitor impact

8

Strategic Objective 3

Scholarly Publishing Programme (6)

Promote awareness of science among youth

• Full-colour, quarterly, popular science magazine

• Print-run 25 000 per issue

• Aimed at Grades 10-12, educators, scientific community

• Improve impact through:

• Targeted distribution strategy

• Increased collaboration with DBE, University Education Departments, SAASTA, Science Centres

9

Strategic Objective 4

SciELO SAScientific Electronic Library Online

• Full-text searchable database of selected, high-quality South African open access scholarly journals

• Main focus: global dissemination of open access journal content

• Purpose: To increase the visibility, accessibility, indexibility and impact of South African scholarly journals

• Implementation of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)

• Creative Commons Licenses

• Digital Preservation Strategy (Portico)

• Researcher IDs (ORCID)

• Allocation of online ISSNs

• Concluding publishing agreements with editors/publishers

• XML

10

SciELO SA

To date, texts in the SciELO SA open access collection have been viewed more than 4.5 million

times in total since its inception in 2009;

± 100 000 added every month

SciELO SA training by SciELO Network

(19-23 September 2016)

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12

SA Policy on Research Output

13

+ 75% of contributions/articles published

must be from outside a specific organization

+ Editorial board: two thirds beyond a single

institution

+ Norwegian List – Level 2 only

http://www.dhet.gov.za/Policy%20and%20Development%20Support/Research%20Outputs%20policy%20gazette%202015.pdf

Journal Publishers in South Africa• AOSIS Publishing

• Health & Medical Publishing Group (HMPG)

• African SUNMedia

• Medpharm

• Juta (10)

• Taylor & Francis (48)

• NISC (17)

• UNISA Press

• Wiley Butterworth (3)

• Elsevier (6)

• Societies, Associations, Universities, Museums, Institutes, Centres

14

Journal Publishing in South Africa

• 396 journal titles published in SA

• 329 scholarly journal titles accredited by the SA Department of Higher Education and Training

15

Accredited Scholarly Journal Titles (329) (58 in DOAJ)

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172

157

Subscription Open Access

STM vs SSH Scholarly Journals

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STM

SSH

STM SSH

Indexing of Journal Titles in SA

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Data collected during:

2015 2016 Comments

DHET 271 273 2 titles added

Web of Science 66 63 3 titles removed Decline in IF: 28 titles Increase in IF: 25 titles10 titles without IF

Scopus 131 133 2 titles added

IBSS 39 41 2 titles added

Norwegian List ----- 135 Only 0s and 1s; No 2s

SciELO SA 56 65 9 titles added

Online Journal System (OJS) Pilot Project

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What have we learned? (1)• This software is relatively new to the South African

scholarly publishing landscape, and new thinking was required from the Editors

• ASSAf has limited IT expertise, and IT expertise (programming, system administrator) is not readily available. ASSAf is dependent on outside experts, when they have time to address our needs. Outstanding IT problems.

• New plugins regularly become available. It requires an openness towards new learning/lifelong learning/self-learning/learning on the go/experimenting, and also giving back in the spirit of Open Source Software. It is different from a commercial approach. South Africans still need to get used to this approach.

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What have we learned? (2)

• Great care was taken to transfer journals from the previous DOI owner to the ASSAf DOI

• Work on parsing Word/PDF documents to an XML format is still in progress, and a plugin will hopefully be released later this year

• Work on article-level metrics is also still in progress

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What have we learned? (3)

• Hopefully all OJS journals will – with time – upload retrospective issues (keeping DOI costs in mind). This will increase the online presence of each journal, and the more articles available online, the better the chances of citations increasing, which can then result in an increase in journal impact.

• This is really a cost effectice and sustainable way of supporting the editor and assocaited workflow and the journals!

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What else do we need to do?

• Consistent display of all journals

• Consistent applications/functionalities/developments across journals

• Integration of social media

• Graphical design

• Hyperlinked references

• iThenticate plagiarism detection software

• ASSAf web page

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Peer-review of Journals (1)

• In 2007 ASSAf, with the support of the NSEF, was mandated by the Department of Education and the Department of Science and Technology to carry out peer reviews of all SA research journals.

• In response to the need for a system of quality assurance for scholarly journals that are accredited by the DHET.

• Subject grouped titles sharing a particular broad disciplinary focus.

• The report makes recommendations to DHET in terms of DHET accreditation and SciELO SA inclusion. The report also includes the findings of the Peer Review Panel in terms of the journal’s quality and operations.

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Peer-review of Journals (2)• Only DHET accredited journals are reviewed

• Peer-review process:• Identify journals in disciplinary groups• Editors complete questionnaire; submit to ASSAf;

provide access to journals• Experts identified for peer-review panel• Peer-review panel meets• Reviewers selected (3 per journal)• Data collected; panel present consensus views• Report published (6 reports to date)

• Titles reviewed to date: 145

Agriculture, Social Sciences, Religion, Health, Law and Humanities: Language and Linguistics

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Peer-review of Journals (3)• Titles to be reviewed (current): 162

Currently under review

• Engineering and Architecture (15)

• Humanities II: Visual and Performing Arts (10)

• Communication and Information Science (14)

Panels being established

• Education (17)

• Politics, History and Philosophy (26)

• Mathematics and Science (22)

Panels to be established

• Economics and Business Management (27)

• Other disciplines (31)

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Support (1)

• Criteria for best practice in terms of journal publishing (6 lists + DOAJ criteria)

• Pilot project – ±R 5 000-00 per year (excl. staffing)

• Roadshow on journal management and publishing using OJS (WC, FS, GN, KZN, EC)

• Investigation into APCs

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Support (2)

• Transition to online (OJS) – also digitise retrospective articles

• Online help wikihttps://academyofsciencesa.wikispaces.com/

• Online newsletter & blog

• National Scholarly Editors Forum – annually

• National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum--annually

• Code of Best Practice in Editorial Discretion and Peer Review (currently being revised)

• Webinar: ScholarOne; Similarity checks; DOAJ, ORCID and soon.....alternative metrics

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Collaborative research

Problem statement:

The participation of individual researchers in national and international collaborations has become an increasingly common phenomenon of the research landscape. Notwithstanding, the input of these researchers to the team effort, such a contribution is generally poorly recognised. This problem is acute in large collaborations.

The objective of this study is to understand the context and scale of collaborative authorship, and make recommendations which enable evaluation and recognition without unintended deleterious consequences.

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Africa Open Data Platform• Collaboration between the South African Department of Science and

Technology, ASSAf, NRF and CODATA-ICSU.

• Its multi-state, regional rationale arises from the experience of increasing collaboration between African states and their institutions and the need to address common problems and priorities.

The African Platform will be a basis for:

• shared roadmaps, priorities and investment in infrastructure;

• collaboration in harvesting innovative concepts;

• shared development of appropriate data policies;

• spreading and supporting good practice;

• developing the capacities of individuals and institutions;

• promoting key applications of relevance to African economies and societies;

• acting as a conduit for links with the international open data and open science programmes and standards.

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• Developing capacity in terms of scholarly writing, editing, reviewing etc.

• Open Access Week & other advocacy opportunities

• Webinars

• Funder: National Research Foundation (NRF) made OA Statement

• ORCID Ambassador

• Collaboration with CrossRef, Portico, Creative Commons, others

Continued Support

Trusted List of OA Journal Titles

• Journal management & publishing system, web site – all in one

• Licensed as Open Source Software

• Developed by Public Knowledge Project (PKP) & Simon Fraser University

• Community of developers

• Download and install on local server https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/

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DOAJ Ambassador

DOAJ inclusion (61 journals to date)Pending (5)

In progress(24)

ORCID AMBASSADOR

ORCID (2)

• 9 research institutions have joined

• CPUT

• DUT

• Gordon Institute of Business, UP

• NRF

• NWU

• SU

• TUT

• UCT

• UNISA

• NRF first entry point for applying for funding

• Journal editors to request authors to add their ORCID

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• Services available• deposit DOIs including detailed metadata Free)

• Similarity Checking, (Costs involved)

• Cited-by-linking, (Free)

• CrossMark, (Costs involved)

• Fundref, (Free)

• Text and data mining etc

• Benefits• ORCID update

• It is also a persistent identifier and will never change.

• Usage Stats are also generated via DOIs

All SciELO SA

jnls are

allocating DOIs

Questions? Thank you!

Susan VeldsmanDirector: ASSAf Scholarly Publishing Unit

susan@assaf.org.za