Scholars have transitioned to using the internet as their primary vehicle for conducting academic research and the preferred method for disseminating their own published works. Considering the ongoing digital evolution of the research landscape, it’s a near certainty that all journals will have to eventually convert to digital-centric publishing models and mediums. Yet, many journals are still holding onto their print issues for reasons of tradition and uncertainty about how to go about making the switch to publishing online only.
Why should journals transition to online-only publishing models and what are the key considerations for a smooth transition? To answer this question we caught up with Trish Groves, director of academic outreach at BMJ and editor-in-chief of BMJ Open. Groves gave a presentation titled “Transition from Print to Online Publishing“ at the 2016 Annual Council of Science Editors (CSE) meeting along with Helen Atkins, director of publishing services at PLoS, and David Gillikin, chief of the bibliographic services division at the National Library of Medicine. In the interview below, Groves shares some highlights from the presentation and her experience working with the BMJ team to transition journals to online only, as well as to launch “born-digital” publications.
Q&A with Trish Groves
Why is having an online journal edition so important, and do you think online publishing is eliminating the need for print?
TG: Online publishing is surely a no brainer these days, as people have less time and tolerance for reading print. When online journal publishing first took off, readers at the cutting edge were getting their laptops out to catch up with the latest scholarly information. You only have to look around in any public space to know that most people now read (very) often on smartphones and tablets, and often find content via social media rather than through electronic tables of contents. Any journal that hasn’t yet transitioned should think as much about mobile as online.
In March 2015 the STM Report (Ware and McCabe, 2015) noted that “All STM journals are now available online, with just a few exceptions…Print’s advantage over digital in terms of portability and readability seem likely to be eroded by the latest tablets, and these mobile formats also appear to be offering some compelling benefits to advertisers…print editions will, however, finally start to disappear from publisher’s lists in significant numbers over the next couple of years.”
Is it better for journals to gradually move to online only, or should journals make an immediate switch from print to online publishing? What are the pros and cons of either approach?
TG: I see online and open access publishing as being closely intertwined. Indeed, the decision to launch or switch to a purely online journal these days will often be driven largely by the market’s demand for - and its ability to support - OA publishing. For original research papers, that market will mostly comprise of study funders and research institutions willing to pay article processing charges (APCs).
Coupled with the continuing decline in display advertising and the downward pressure on institutional subscriptions, ‘flipping’ journals from either print or paywalled online publishing to OA makes economic sense for many journal publishers and owners. But it isn’t easy, it requires careful planning, and can take about a year to achieve successfully, according to a literature review from Harvard Library (Solomon, Laakso, Björk August 2016). The authors reviewed 15 journal-flipping scenarios, 10 of which depend on APCs, and reported a wide range of pros and cons.
Some journals fear that if they go online-only some authors or readers will be disappointed. Do you think that’s the case?
TG: Anecdotally, academics still like to say ‘look, my paper’s filled 5 pages in this week’s issue.’ PDFs seem to have largely replaced print pages in the researcher’s heart, though. A journal that switches from print to online without making its PDFs beautiful does so at its peril, and should be prepared for dismayed complaints from authors as well as readers.
In your CSE presentation, you mention that journals moving online must make their online publications the archived and indexed version and let go of using page numbers as part of the article ID. Can you explain the importance of taking these steps when transitioning from print to online publishing?
TG: This is how the BMJ became a fully online-first journal with all content published continuously online and with the online versions being canonical. This liberated the journal, allowing us to slice and dice our content in all kinds of ways to meet the needs of readers and subscribers, including a daily online journal, a weekly print magazine with heavily abridged content largely for our owner’s members, a monthly academic print journal for libraries, and mobile apps.
Your CSE session also focused on the possibility to publish journal content and create citations on a rolling basis online instead of waiting to publish and index compiled journal issues. Can you explain how this rolling publishing model would work and what the benefits are?
TG: For the BMJ’s editorial and publishing teams it was a real challenge switching our thinking to ‘online first/born digital’. And that’s despite the fact that the BMJ was the first general medical journal to go online back in 1996 and the first, in 1998, to provide free full text online access to research articles to deposit the full text in PubMed Central, and to allow authors to retain the copyright of their articles. Until we flipped to continuous online first publication - or the rolling publishing model - for all content in 2008, our processes and schedules were still dominated by the need to deliver a weekly print journal. In the rolling model all articles are published online as they’re ready. We had to really rethink our process to make it more digitally-focused and make all kinds of practical changes such as getting the whole team together for a short morning huddle to prioritize work for each day. We do it standing up, and it keeps everyone on their toes.
What are the primary challenges to online-only publishing that journals must work through?
TG: Perhaps the biggest challenge for reputable, high quality, online-only OA journals now is bad behaviour of a growing minority of predatory and fake journals. To avoid being lumped together with the bad guys, good journals should ensure they promote, follow, and continue to develop principles of transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing.
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