Innovating editorial practices: academic publishers at work | Research Integrity and Peer Review | Full Text

"Journals independent of large commercial publishers tend to have less hierarchically structured processes, report more flexibility to implement innovations, and to a greater extent decouple commercial and editorial perspectives....

This is in line with the dominant view on the changing status of publishers, which requires the publishers to take considerable action. Part of this action, driven by the shift towards more open access publishing, consists of a changing focus on ‘what the community wants’. While previously librarians would be the main source and spokesmen of ‘what the community wants’, publishers are quickly shifting their attention towards needs and desires of researchers, either in their role as authors or as reviewers, as exemplified in initiatives such as Publons, the use of the Journal Impact Factor to advertise to authors, publisher-facilitated preprint servers, or the appearance of mega-journals. This aligns with the publishers’ business needs: in the subscription-model, librarians were involved in deciding which subscriptions to buy, but in the open access model researchers themselves are more directly involved in deciding where to publish and hence where to spend money on publishing.

A stronger focus on transparency constitutes another trend among publishers that is fueled by external changes in the publishing landscape. By being more transparent about publishing work, for instance by showing how many reviewers had to be invited, publishers can demonstrate the effort that goes into the review process, thereby showing their added value: “We need to do a better job in showing how we have added value. Being open about review and the system is a way of doing this” (senior manager)...."