The current system of scholarly publishing is often criticized for being slow, expensive, and not transparent. The rise of open access publishing as part of open science tenets, promoting transparency and collaboration, together with calls for research assesment reforms are the results of these criticisms. The emergence of new open access publishers presents a unique opportunity to empirically test how universities and countries respond to shifts in the academic publishing landscape. These new actors challenge traditional publishing models, offering faster review times and broader accessibility, which could influence strategic publishing decisions. Our findings reveal a clear division in European publishing practices, with countries clustering into two groups distinguished by the ratio of publications in new open access journals with accelerated review times versus legacy journals. This divide underscores a broader shift in academic culture, highlighting new open access publishing venues as a strategic factor influencing national and institutional publishing practices, with significant implications for research accessibility and collaboration across Europe.
(Abridged) Scientific publishing is undergoing major change, driven by a shift toward open access (OA), the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), and growing demands for transparency, reproducibility, and equity. At the same time, rapid growth in article output strains editors and reviewers and means that metrics and speed can eclipse quality and rigor. To better understand how the community is responding, Astronomy \& Astrophysics (A\&A) commissioned the {A\&A Survey on Trends and Challenges in Scientific Publishing}, which documents community opinion on journal choice, peer review, OA, research evaluation, and the role of AI, with the goal of informing future editorial policies and the wider conversation on sustainable, ethical, and equitable scientific communication. Distributed online in May 2025 to \SI{28787} A\&A authors and co-authors, the survey drew \SI{2944} responses from 69 countries by its closing date. The responses were clear. Journal quality and reputation are the most decisive factors in deciding where to publish, followed by cost. The principal worry about peer review is reviewer expertise and fairness rather than speed. Citation counts are still a
The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor is hindered by monetary restrictions for publishing one's findings and accessing other scientists' reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large portion of publishing media owned by private, for-profit companies that do not reinject academic publishing benefits into the scientific community, in contrast with journals from scientific societies. As the academic world is not exempt from economic crises, new alternatives are necessary to support a fair publishing system for society. After summarizing the general issues of academic publishing today, we present several solutions at the levels of the individual scientist, the scientific community, and the publisher towards more sustainable scientific publishing. By providing a voice to the many scientists who are fundamental protagonists, yet often powerless witnesses, of the academic publishing system, and a roadmap for implementing solutions, this initiative can spark increased awareness and promote shifts towards impactful practices.
The field of scientific publishing that is served by LaTeX is increasingly dependent on the availability of metadata about publications. We discuss how to use LaTeX classes and BibTeX styles to curate metadata throughout the life cycle of a published article. Our focus is on streamlining and automating much of publishing workflow. We survey the various options and drawbacks of the existing approaches and outline our approach as applied in a new LaTeX style file where we have as main goal to make it easier for authors to specify their metadata only once and use this throughout the entire publishing pipeline. We believe this can help to reduce the cost of publishing, by reducing the amount of human effort required for editing and providing of publication metadata.
Electronic publishing opportunities, manifested today in a variety of electronic journals and Web-based compendia, have captured the imagination of many scholars. These opportunities have also destabilized norms about the character of legitimate scholarly publishing in some fields. Unfortunately, much of the literature about scholarly e-publishing homogenizes the character of publishing. This article provides an analytical approach for evaluating disciplinary conventions and for proposing policies about scholarly e-publishing. We characterize three dimensions of scholarly publishing as a communicative practice -- publicity, access, and trustworthiness, and examine several forms of paper and electronic publications in this framework. This analysis shows how the common claim that e-publishing "substantially expands access" is over-simplified. It also indicates how peer-reviewing (whether in paper or electronically) provides valuable functions for scholarly communication that are not effectively replaced by self-posting articles in electronic media.
Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was approximately ~47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth - if any - in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applic
With the development of Big Data and cloud data sharing, privacy preserving data publishing becomes one of the most important topics in the past decade. As one of the most influential privacy definitions, differential privacy provides a rigorous and provable privacy guarantee for data publishing. Differentially private interactive publishing achieves good performance in many applications; however, the curator has to release a large number of queries in a batch or a synthetic dataset in the Big Data era. To provide accurate non-interactive publishing results in the constraint of differential privacy, two challenges need to be tackled: one is how to decrease the correlation between large sets of queries, while the other is how to predict on fresh queries. Neither is easy to solve by the traditional differential privacy mechanism. This paper transfers the data publishing problem to a machine learning problem, in which queries are considered as training samples and a prediction model will be released rather than query results or synthetic datasets. When the model is published, it can be used to answer current submitted queries and predict results for fresh queries from the public. Comp
Making available and archiving scientific results is for the most part still considered the task of classical publishing companies, despite the fact that classical forms of publishing centered around printed narrative articles no longer seem well-suited in the digital age. In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. Here we propose to design scientific data publishing as a Web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies. Based on a novel combination of existing concepts and technologies, we present a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data. We show how this approach allows researchers to publish, retrieve, verify, and recombine datasets of nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and we argue that this architecture could be used for the Semantic Web in general. Evaluation of the current small network shows that this system is efficient and reliable.
In this transformative world, changes are happening in all the fields, including scholarly communications are trending in the academic area of publication and access to the resources, especially emerging the wave of open access, open science and open research. The study aims to investigate the digital publishing behaviour of manuscript authors. This study applied a quantitative approach and survey questionnaire method. The researcher collected the data from 251 authors, editors, and peer-reviewers from 45 countries worldwide. The research mainly focuses on the importance, need, and author preference for open access journals. Everyone cannot use and access subscription-based journals; the critical reason is the cost of purchasing a tremendous amount. As an independent researcher, developing countries and other impoverished countries, researchers can give the utmost importance to open access journals. The author also wishes to publish a journal in open access only. The findings reveal that most authors like to publish digital and print in both formats, with chargeless publications. Open access publishing has a vital role with researchers, scholars, and students because accessing the
The aim of this article is to familiarize the user with the Web publishing of the files obtained by Flash. The article contains an overview of Macromedia Flash 5, as well as the running of a Playing Flash movie, information on Flash and Generator, the publishing of Flash movies, a HTLM publishing for Flash Player files and publishing by Generator templates.
In the marketing of video games made by self-publishing, independent developers, there is common advice to market a game using the social media platform Twitter. However, the advice that stems from industry sources is somewhat contradictory, and many self-publishing independent developers elect not to use Twitter at all. This presents an opportunity for researchers to investigate this tension and determine if using Twitter does have a causal influence on the successful release of a game by using relatively recent developments in causal data science techniques. In this sense, this paper highlights these causal inference developments while simultaneously informing self-publishing independent developers whether they should indeed market their games using Twitter. It was found that using Twitter results in an average increase of 85.4 reviews during release week, corresponding to a 314% positive difference. Using Twitter also doubles the chance of reaching a critical 10-review inflection point threshold on release week. These effects, however, are moderated by the characteristics of the game, expressed as 'tags', yet in no case is the effect of Twitter use reduced to 0. Based on these f
Academic publishing is continuously evolving with the gradual adoption of new technologies. Blockchain is a new technology that promises to change how individuals and organizations interact across various boundaries. The adoption of blockchains is beginning to transform diverse industries such as finance, supply chain, international trade, as well as energy and resource management and many others. Through trust, data immutability, decentralized distribution of data, and facilitation of collaboration without the need for centralized management and authority, blockchains have the potential to transform the academic publishing domain and to address some of the current problems such as productivity and reputation management, predatory publishing, transparent peer-review processes and many others. In this paper, we outline the technologies available in the domain of permissioned blockchains with focus on Hyperledger Fabric and discuss how they can be leveraged in the domain of academic publishing.
A large number of survey papers are being published in blockchain since the first survey appeared in 2017. A person entering into the field of blockchain is faced with the issue of which blockchain surveys to read and why? Who is publishing these surveys and what is the nature of these surveys? Which of the publishers are publishing more such surveys and what are the lengths of the published surveys? Which kind of survey is getting more citations? Which of the authors is collaborating on such surveys? etc. All these questions motivated us to analyze the trends in publishing blockchain surveys. In this paper, we have performed a bibliometric analysis on $801$ surveys or review papers published in the field of blockchain in the last approximately five years. We have analyzed the papers with respect to the publication type, publishers and venue, references, citations, paper length, different categories, year, countries, authors, and their collaborations and found interesting insights. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind and hope to provide better understanding of the field.
Today's peer review process for scientific articles is unnecessarily opaque and offers few incentives to referees. Likewise, the publishing process is unnecessarily inefficient and its results are only rarely made freely available to the public. Here we outline a comparatively simple extension of arXiv.org, an online preprint archive widely used in the mathematical and physical sciences, that addresses both of these problems. Under the proposal, editors invite referees to write public and signed reviews to be attached to the posted preprints, and then elevate selected articles to "published" status.
The Italian center for Astronomical Archives tries to provide astronomical data resources as interoperable services based on IVOA standards. Its VO expertise and knowledge comes from active participation within IVOA and VO at European and international level, with a double-fold goal: learn from the collaboration and provide inputs to the community. The first solution to build an easy to configure and maintain resource publisher conformant to VO standards proved to be too optimistic. For this reason it has been necessary to re-think the architecture with a modular system built around the messaging concept, where each modular component speaks to the other interested parties through a system of broker-managed queues. The first implemented protocol, the Simple Cone Search, shows the messaging task architecture connecting the parametric HTTP interface to the database backend access module, the logging module, and allows multiple cone search resources to be managed together through a configuration manager module. Even if relatively young, it already proved the flexibility required by the overall system when the database backend changed from MySQL to PostgreSQL+PgSphere. Another implement
A single highly cited article can give a big but temporary lift in its host journal's impact factor evidenced by the striking example of "A short history of SHELX" published in Acta Crystallographica Section A. By using Journal Citation Reports and Web of Science's citation analysis tool, we find a more general and continuous form of this phenomenon in the Particle Physics field. The highly-cited "Review of Particle Physics" series have been published in one of the major Particle Physics journals biennially. This study analyses the effect of these articles on the Impact Factor (IF) of the host journals. The results show that the publication of Review of Particle Physics articles has a direct effect of lifting the IF of its host journal. However the effect on the IF varies according to whether the host journal already has a relatively high or low IF, and the number of articles that it publishes. The impact of these highly cited articles clearly demonstrates the limitations of journal impact factor, and endorses the need to use it more wisely when deciding where to publish and how to evaluate the relative impact of a journal.
Global scholarly publishing has been dominated by a small number of publishers for several decades. We aimed to revisit the debate on corporate control of scholarly publishing by analyzing the relative shares of major publishers and smaller, independent publishers. Using the Web of Science, Dimensions and OpenAlex, we managed to retrieve twice as many articles indexed in Dimensions and OpenAlex, compared to the rather selective Web of Science. As a result of excluding smaller publishers, the 'oligopoly' of scholarly publishers persists, at least in appearance, according to the Web of Science. However, both Dimensions' and OpenAlex' inclusive indexing revealed the share of smaller publishers has been growing rapidly, especially since the onset of large-scale online publishing around 2000, resulting in a current cumulative dominance of smaller publishers. While the expansion of small publishers was most pronounced in the social sciences and humanities, the natural and medical sciences showed a similar trend. A major geographical divergence is also revealed, with some countries, mostly Anglo-Saxon and/or located in northwestern Europe, relying heavily on major publishers for the disse
Large-scale digitization in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) created the conditions for providing access to collections as data. It opened new opportunities to explore, use and reuse digital collections. Strong proponents of collections as data are the Innovation Labs which provided numerous examples of publishing datasets under open licenses in order to reuse digital content in novel and creative ways. Within the current transition to the emerging data spaces, clouds for cultural heritage and open science, the need to identify practices which support more GLAM institutions to offer datasets becomes a priority, especially within the smaller and medium-sized institutions. This paper answers the need to support GLAM institutions in facilitating the transition into publishing their digital content and to introduce collections as data services; this will also help their future efficient contribution to data spaces and cultural heritage clouds. It offers a checklist that can be used for both creating and evaluating digital collections suitable for computational use. The main contributions of this paper are i) a methodology for devising a checklist to create and assess d