Publications | Special Issue : New Frontiers for Openness in Scholarly Publishing

"Open Scholarship (also often called Open Science) is reshaping the scope and nature of scholarly publishing in its technological, social, legal, economic, and ethical dimensions. However, while more and more transparency is now often expected of researchers, major elements of scholarly publishing processes and the policies that govern them remain relatively opaque. Peer review and editorial selection remain largely hidden from view, business models and operating costs often lack transparency, proprietary platforms and technologies create walled gardens for research, licensing and metadata restrictions limit re-use, and data about all these processes are usually kept closed. How might the wider scholarly publishing ecosystem benefit from increased interoperability, transparency, and accessibility of processes and data?

Here, we welcome contributions that seek to investigate how increased interoperability, transparency, and accessibility of processes and data could aid scholarly publishing to best serve the needs of scholarship and wider society. Equally, critical views that engage with the benefits of ‘closed’ or proprietary systems are encouraged. Our intention is to increase the critical discourse surrounding this rapidly evolving landscape, and we encourage submissions from the global research community.

This issue especially welcomes contributions that address the following:

• Open and interoperable infrastructure, platforms, services, and tools
• De-centralisation, open-source or community-driven efforts
• Benefits and drawbacks of transparency and harmonisation of policies for peer review, preprints, ethics, data-availability, licensing, etc.
• Transparency of costs (e.g., APCs, subscriptions, big deals)
• Business models for publishing
• Openness in editorial processes, including peer review and editorial selection
• Interoperable metadata, for instance, openness of citation data and other sources for metrics
• Data-sharing to optimise editorial processes
• Social, political, and economic arguments for the different aspects of ‘open scholarship’
• Publishing’s place in the evolving scope of research in modern society
• The intersection of scholarly publishing and (changing) research norms...."