Today, Scholastica announces the launch of our second “State of Journal Production and Access” survey of independent scholarly society and university publishers. We’re running this survey to develop an openly available report (no email required for download) on the areas of journal production and access that independent society and university publishers are prioritizing now and where they see challenges and opportunities in the future. The report will build off of our first survey on journal production and access run in 2020.

If you work with a scholarly society, university press, university library, or research institution that independently publishes one or more journals, please take this survey to help develop collective insights on the state of production and access. The information you submit for the survey will be published in an aggregated and anonymized form, and no personally identifying fields are required.

We will be accepting responses now through the 9th of September 2022. Click here to take the survey.

Optional Raffle: In appreciation of taking the time to complete the survey, respondents will also have the opportunity to enter a raffle for two chances to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

Survey overview: What’s covered

The “State of Journal Production and Access” survey explores how society and university publishers are approaching core aspects of journal production and access in terms of current publishing strategies and practices as well as future goals. Questions span:

  • Article production processes and formats
  • Metadata tagging standards and priorities
  • OA journal development approaches and funding models
  • Subscription and hybrid content access plans

Scholastica’s aim for this survey is to provide society and university publishers with valuable community insights they can use to benchmark where they stand against peers in the current landscape and gauge where the industry is moving. This is a global survey, and we welcome feedback from publishing programs of all sizes and across academic disciplines.

Why the state of production and access?

For independent scholarly society and university journal publishers, the digital landscape presents new opportunities to expand the reach and influence of research and new challenges — often at the intersection of article production and access models. Publishers must navigate fast-evolving content formatting and metadata standards as well as open access (OA) mandates, which increasingly go hand in hand.

For example, Plan S calls for journals to not only provide full and immediate open access to research but also machine-readable metadata for articles in interoperable formats. Metadata fields required by Plan S include complete funding information, OA status, and copyright license. Similarly, UKRI’s latest OA policy includes a series of metadata and technical criteria.

As a result of such recent publishing initiatives, questions surrounding the most sustainable ways to meet new journal production and access requirements and recommendations are becoming more pressing across disciplines. We believe looking at production and access together will provide generative insights for the scholarly community around how publishers are weighing the many discrete but related factors at play in these key areas.

Take the survey

“The State of Journal Production and Access Survey” will be open now through the 9th of September 2022, at which point we will gather the results and compile an openly available report to share with the community.

The survey takes around 10 minutes to complete. Respondents will have the opportunity to request to have the survey report emailed to them when it’s available as well as to enter a raffle for two chances to win a $50 (local currency) Amazon gift card. Contact information is optional and will not be shared with outside parties or used for purposes other than those explicitly stated in the survey (to enter the raffle and/or receive a copy of the final survey report).

We invite you to take the survey here.

If you have any questions about the survey, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

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