What makes for a happy scholarly journal? — University Affairs

"Over the last few years, several studies have been conducted to evaluate the financial impact of open access publishing requirements on scholarly journals, notably in the fields of the humanities, the social sciences, the arts and literature (Paquin 2015; Lefebvre 2018; Comité de suivi de l’édition scientifique [France] 2019). The majority of these studies relied on a socioeconomic perspective, with their authors attempting to calculate the budget required to operate a scholarly journal in an open access environment.

One study, Canadian scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, conducted in 2019 and published in 2021 under the supervision of Vincent Larivière, professor of information science at the Université de Montréal and the scientific director for Érudit, had this same objective: by surveying a pool of journals, its authors tried to identify the inputs and outputs – whether financial, material or symbolic – involved in the production of a scholarly journal. With the transition to open access accelerating both at home and abroad, questions about the sustainability of scholarly journals boil down to the nagging problem of finding the financial model that allows open access journals to operate...."