Success and Failure of New Journals

The last couple weeks had me thinking about new journals. 

I "attended" a webinar from bepress, the company that supplies the software for OpenSIUC, called "Journal Make-Over: Practical Steps to Better Journals." A lot of the webinar was about helping fledgling journals develop. The gist that I got out of it was that editors for new journals need to build up a steady stream of submissions and articles to publish. Approaches that would make the journal look desperate could backfire. The stream has to be built through personal networking with potential authors and editorial board members. 

A few days later, a librarian encouraged other librarians on an email list. He encouraged people to contact Thomson Reuters to include a fairly new journal (started in the last five years) from a scholarly society publisher in Web of Science.

I also saw  "New Journals in Education and Psychology: General Trends, Discoverability, and Ubiquitous Journals of the Decade, 2000–2009" in College & Research Libraries. In it, Bernadette Lear found that new journals in education and in psychology from big for-profit publishers were more likely to receive coverage from indexing and abstracting databases and be listed in library collections than new journals from colleges and universities, small for-profits and societies.

One of Lear's other findings was that more than 83% of the new journals in her study that started in 2000-2005 were still publishing in 2010. To put that in perspective, Lear provides a footnote that over half of new magazines fail in the first five years. Heck, the high rate of new business failure is the stuff of urban legend -- though research puts it at about five ninths failing in the first four years.

To me the success rate defies economic logic. How can so many new journals appear year after year with so few failing? Why don't more of them fail? Where would libraries get the money to pay for the new journals? A few big research libraries can find a way to subscribe to new journals (maybe), but college and university libraries aren't faring that well. With the high inflation rate on existing journals, new subscriptions have to be offset by cost cutting somewhere else. Are the costs of production so low that the commercial publishers can release new ones ad infinitum and turn a profit on them from a handful of subscriptions?

What I Learned at SLA: Mathematicians Publishing and Collaboration

At the SLA conference, Kris Fowler presented results of a survey of mathematicians that she conducted. She used Web of Science to find people who had published in mathematics journals and contacted a random sample of them for an online survey.

She had a lot of findings about how people used online tools and collaborated online. One of her big findings was about open access journals coming of age. The mathematicians' reasons for choosing one journal or another were basically the same regardless of whether the journal was open access or subscription. Open access journals weren't just for open access die hards. About a third of the mathematicians indicated that they had published in an open access journal. The main reasons for choosing to submit to a particular journal had to do with reputation and audience, with open access way down on the list for importance.

The survey included a follow-up question asking people who published in open access journals to write the name(s) of the open access journal(s). About a quarter of the journals the mathematicians listed were not open access journals. If I heard correctly, this was much better than a previous survey (not necessarily of mathematicians), in which two thirds of the "open access" journals that people listed were not actually open access.


I liked her presentation a lot. She gathered information beyond just her own library or own institution and did it without having a big grant. Apparently other people also liked what she did. Aside from the article she's preparing to submit to a peer-reviewed journal, she's slated to provide a write-up in Notices of the AMS.

Open Access Week

Open Access Day expanded to Open Access Week this year. The big news in Open Access this year is the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, which unfortunately sounds like FERPA). FRPAA is still in committee in the Senate. If enacted, it would require researchers receiving grants from the major federal funding sources to supply their manuscripts that have been accepted for publiction to the funding agency and would require free, online access to the manuscripts six months after publication. Similar requirements already apply to NIH grantees, but FRPAA would expand the requirements to include NSF, DOE, DOD, HHS, and NASA grantees, among others. Chief academic officers at many universities, including SIUC have expressed their support for FRPAA.

The other local news regarding Open Access is that there will be a forum on open access in Morris Library's auditorium at 3 PM on Thursday, November 19. The working title for the event is "Tollway or freeway: Which road leads to your research?" David Shulenberger will give a keynote presentation, followed by a panel of SIUC faculty discussing their experiences with open access.