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Scientific publishing today

Bo-Christer Björk

Nordic Doctoral Seminar 2006

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Effects of Internet

• A lot of the stuff is electronic• Also revenue models are changing

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Open Access

• Can be financed in many ways• Open Source like• Author payments• Funders pay• Advertising

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Why benchmarking

• Journals can be seen as service providers to authors

• Often authors base their decision where to submit on very incomplete information

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”Net value of submission”

• Infrastructure• Readership• Prestige• Performance

INFRASTRUCTURE

CV value of publication

Net value of submission

Service level of journal

Technicalfeaturesof journal

Authorcharges

Journal resourcesand infrastructure

Publication delay

Quality of the review process

Submissionrejection risk

Subscriptionprice

Marketing effort

Inclusion in indexes

Individualsubscribers

Institutionalsubscribers Readership

Web downloads

Impact factor

Journal prestige

Journal ranking

Publisher’sprestige

Regional and topical fit of readership

Electronic alertsubscribers

Impact on practitioners

Impact on scientists

Scientific levelof journal

Journal rejectionrate

READERSHIP

PRESTIGE

Citations

Institutionalrewardschemes

PERFORMANCE

Papercirkulation

-

-

-

-

Prestige of editorialboard

INFRASTRUCTURE

CV value of publication

Net value of submission

Service level of journal

Technicalfeaturesof journal

Authorcharges

Journal resourcesand infrastructure

Publication delay

Quality of the review process

Submissionrejection risk

Subscriptionprice

Marketing effort

Inclusion in indexes

Individualsubscribers

Institutionalsubscribers Readership

Web downloads

Impact factor

Journal prestige

Journal ranking

Publisher’sprestige

Regional and topical fit of readership

Electronic alertsubscribers

Impact on practitioners

Impact on scientists

Scientific levelof journal

Journal rejectionrate

READERSHIP

PRESTIGE

Citations

Institutionalrewardschemes

PERFORMANCE

Papercirkulation

-

-

-

-

Prestige of editorialboard

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TABLE 1: Peer-reviewed journals in the IT in construction domain

Journal name Abbreviation Founding

year Publisher

Articles in

2004

Automation in Construction

AIC 1992 Elsevier 57

Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering1 CACIE 1985 Blackwell 35

Construction Innovation2

CI 1993 Arnold 16

Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction ITcon 1996 CIB 27

International Journal of Architectural Computing IJAC 2003 Multi-

Science 32

International Journal of Design Computing IJDC 1997 University

of Sydney

3

IT in architecture, engineering and construction3 IT-AEC 1999 Millpress 264

Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering

JCCE 1987 ASCE 39

Total number of articles

235

In the following these journals are very briefly introduced.

1 Previously known as Microcomputers in Civil Engineering 2 Previously known as International Journal of Construction Information Technology 3 Previously known as Computer Integrated Design and Construction 4 Since the journal stopped publishing in mid 2004 the Figure is from 2003

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Overlap between editorial boardsITcon (56)

constructionInnovation (28)

Automation in Construction (21)

42

17

15

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33,3

26,1

21,3

14,1

10,68,6

7,1

0,0 0,0

ECAM CACIE CME CI AIC IJAC JCCE Itcon IJDC

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21,8

18,7

18

6,7

0 5 10 15 20 25

IEEE Trans.

AIC

CI

ITcon

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Acceptance rates

• ITcon 0,55• CME 0,51• JCCE 0,47• ALPSP journals 0,42• DOAJ 0,64• DOAJ Excluding

BiomedCentral and ISP journals 0,55

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Table 3. Geographic Spread of Authors (%) and Total Number of Authors and Articles per Journal*

ITcon CI JCCE AIC CACIE Percentage of

authorships

North America 20,2 13,7 66,7 21,4 45,8 37,5%

South America 0 0 0,2 0 0 0,1%

Africa 1 0 0,7 0 0 0,3%

Great Britain 25,3 24 4,5 14,7 3 12,1%

Central Europe 15,8 5,1 4 7,5 8,7 8,1%

Northern Europe 21,5 1,1 0 0,3 1,5 4,2%

South & East Europe 6,4 1,7 1,4 2 7,2 3,8%

Asia 8,4 33,2 20,9 48,9 32,1 29,5%

Australia & Oceania 1,4 21,2 1,6 5,2 1,7 4,5%

Total number of authorships 287 175 425 410 402 100,0%

Total number of articles (N=768) 107 69 167 274 169

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# average number of downloads since publication

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

months since publication of paper

# downloads per month

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Dowloads in one month

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 45 49 53 57 61 65 69 73 77 81 85 89 93 97 101 105 109 113 117 121

ITcon paper

# of downloads

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Number of downloads vs. months on-line

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600

Number of downloads

Months on-line

Amor et al 2002

Special issue on eWork and eBusiness 2003

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TABLE 6: Copyright policies of a select number of journals

AIC CACIE CI ITcon IJAC1 IJDC JCCE2 LCJ3

Does not allow posting

Allows preprint only

Allows postprint as personal

version X X

Allows posting of copy of

published PDF

Allows any of the above but

with a delay X

Open access from the start

X X

X

Open access with a delay

Author retains copyright

X partially

1 Status unclear, see http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php 2 Status unclear, see http://www.pubs.asce.org/journals/submisscp.html 3 LCJ stands for Lean Construction Journal <http://www.leanconstructionjournal.org/>

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Futher work

• The method is currently being applied to e-commerce journals

• Should be tested for areas where there are open access alternatives (biomedicine?)

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Conference publishing

• Most bigger conferences are run using electronic submission and reviewing systems

• Some home made• Some Open Source• Some commercial

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Conference

• Some conferences leave the material open access

• Some do CD-ROM:s• Some have external publishers

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Cases

• CIB W78 (OA)• ECPPM• COMBINING FORCES - Advancing

Facilities Management and Construction through Innovation June 13-16, 2005 Helsinki

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REFERENCES

Björk, Bo-Christer, Turk, Ziga, Holmström, Jonas. Benchmarking scientific journals from the submitting author’s viewpoint. Accepted for Publication, Learned Publishing, Vol 19 No. 2, April 2006

 Björk, Bo-Christer, Turk, Ziga, Holmström, Jonas. The Scholarly Journal Re-

engineered: A Case Study of an Open Access Journal in Construction IT, Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction, ITcon, Vol. 10, 2005, pp.349-371,http://www.itcon.org/

 Kaufman-Wills Group, The facts about Open Access, ALPSP, 2005