Academic publishing
The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature".
Both open and closed journals are sometimes funded by the author paying an article processing charge, thereby shifting some fees from the reader to the researcher or their funder.
The Internet has facilitated open access self-archiving, in which authors themselves make a copy of their published articles available free for all on the web.
It was not at all unusual for a new discovery to be announced as a monograph, reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Isaac Newton and Leibniz used this approach.
The Royal Society was steadfast in its not-yet-popular belief that science could only move forward through a transparent and open exchange of ideas backed by experimental evidence.
Early scientific journals embraced several models: some were run by a single individual who exerted editorial control over the contents, often simply publishing extracts from colleagues' letters, while others employed a group decision-making process, more closely aligned to modern peer review.
When the commercial publishers raised the subscription prices significantly, they lost little of the market, due to the inelastic demand for these journals.
For example, the ARL found that in "1986, libraries spent 44% of their budgets on books compared with 56% on journals; twelve years later, the ratio had skewed to 28% and 72%.
Data analysis with open source tools like Unpaywall Journals empowered library systems in reducing their subscription costs by 70% with the cancellation of the big deal with publishers like Elsevier.
Ellison in 2011 reported that in economics the dramatic increase in opportunities to publish results online has led to a decline in the use of peer-reviewed articles.
Peer review is a central concept for most academic publishing; other scholars in a field must find a work sufficiently high in quality for it to merit publication.
The origins of routine peer review for submissions dates to 1752 when the Royal Society of London took over official responsibility for Philosophical Transactions.
Rena Steinzor wrote: Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work.
The process of peer review is organized by the journal editor and is complete when the content of the article, together with any associated images, data, and supplementary material are accepted for publication.
The full automation of the proof correction cycles has only become possible with the onset of online collaborative writing platforms, such as Authorea, Google Docs, Overleaf, and various others, where a remote service oversees the copy-editing interactions of multiple authors and exposes them as explicit, actionable historic events.
[43] Academic authors cite sources they have used, in order to support their assertions and arguments and to help readers find more information on the subject.
Technical reports, for minor research results and engineering and design work (including computer software), round out the primary literature.
Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended for broad public consumption or academic libraries.
Some critics complain that this de facto system has emerged without thought to its consequences; they claim that the predictable result is the publication of much shoddy work, as well as unreasonable demands on the already limited research time of young scholars.
Some scholars have called for a publication subvention of a few thousand dollars to be associated with each graduate student fellowship or new tenure-track hire, in order to alleviate the financial pressure on journals.
The reason this term is misleading is due to the existence of many other models, including funding sources listed in the original the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration: "the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves".
To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example, intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues.
[citation needed] The fastest scientific output growth rate over the last two decades has been in the Middle East and Asia with Iran leading with an 11-fold increase followed by the Republic of Korea, Turkey, Cyprus, China, and Oman.
[66] Iran, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa were the only developing countries among the 31 nations that produced 97.5% of the most cited scientific articles in a study published in 2004.
[72] Many items on the list could be argued to be of value primarily to the publishers themselves, e.g. "Make money and remain a constant in the system of scholarly output".
The latter is a task that should not be underestimated as it effectively entails coercing busy people into giving their time to improve someone else's work and maintain the quality of the literature.
In addition, one of the biggest tensions in this space is associated with the question if for-profit companies (or the private sector) should be allowed to be in charge of the management and dissemination of academic output and execute their powers while serving, for the most part, their own interests.
There are significant researcher-facing inefficiencies in the system including the common scenario of multiple rounds of rejection and resubmission to various venues as well as the fact that some publishers profit beyond reasonable scale.
This would allow authors to make informed choices, rather than decisions based on indicators that are unrelated to research quality, such as the JIF.
Yet, in the current system, publishers still play a role in managing processes of quality assurance, interlinking and findability of research.
