Scholarly Communication in Sociology by Philip N. Cohen University of Maryland MIT Libraries Visiting Scholar April 20191 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 3 Overview .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Scholarly communication ....................................................................................................................... 3 How to use this primer ........................................................................................................................... 5 How it works ................................................................................................................................................ 5 Formats .................................................................................................................................................... 5 Working papers ..................................................................................................................................... 5 Preprints ............................................................................................................................................... 7 Conferences ........................................................................................................................................... 7 Journals and books ............................................................................................................................... 8 Peer review .............................................................................................................................................. 9 Journals ................................................................................................................................................ 9 Books ................................................................................................................................................... 13 Innovations in peer review .................................................................................................................. 14 Rights and licenses ................................................................................................................................ 15 1 The earlier versions benefited from comments by Micah Altman, Josh Bollick, Monica Granados, Isaac Leslie, Omar Lizardo, Jessica Polka, Dan Rudmann, Judy Ruttenberg, Kyle Siler, Peter Suber, Sara Thomas, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Kim Weeden, and Micah Zeller. 1/47 Professional norms and obligations ................................................................................................... 15 Copyright and licenses ........................................................................................................................ 16 Data, code, and other research materials ........................................................................................... 18 Who pays, who profits .............................................................................................................................. 20 Academic associations .......................................................................................................................... 22 For-profit publishers ............................................................................................................................ 25 Open access models ............................................................................................................................... 28 Gold, Platinum .................................................................................................................................... 28 Hybrid ................................................................................................................................................. 30 Green .................................................................................................................................................. 31 Pirate OA ............................................................................................................................................ 31 Preprint repositories ........................................................................................................................... 32 Libraries and metadata ............................................................................................................................ 33 Bibliometrics .......................................................................................................................................... 35 Impact factor ....................................................................................................................................... 35 Individual citation measures ............................................................................................................... 37 Altmetrics ............................................................................................................................................ 39 Recommendations ..................................................................................................................................... 41 Research ................................................................................................................................................. 41 Policy ...................................................................................................................................................... 43 Ownership ........................................................................................................................................... 43 Incentives ............................................................................................................................................ 44 Investment ........................................................................................................................................... 45 Personal .................................................................................................................................................. 45 Education ............................................................................................................................................ 45 Open practices .................................................................................................................................... 45 The value of our work ......................................................................................................................... 46 2/47 Introduction Overview Scholarly publishing takes place in an institutional arena that is opaque to its practitioners. As readers, writers, reviewers, and editors, we have no clear view of the system within which we’re working. Researchers starting their careers receive (if they’re lucky) folk wisdom and mythology handed down from advisor to advisee, geared more toward individual success (or survival) than toward attaining a systemic perspective. They may learn how to get their work into the right journals or books, but often don’t learn why that is the outcome that matters for their careers, how the field arrived at that decision, and what the alternatives are – or should be. Gaining a wider perspective is important both for shaping individual careers and for confronting the systematic problems we face as a community of knowledge creators and purveyors. This primer starts from the premise that sociologists, especially those early in their careers, need to learn about the system of scholarly communication. And that sociology can help us toward that goal. Understanding the political economy of the system within which publication takes place is necessary for us to fulfill our roles as citizens of the research community, as people who play an active role in shaping the future of that system, consciously or not. Responsible citizenship requires learning about the institutional actors in the system and how they are governed, as well as who pays and who profits within the field, and who wins or loses. Scholarly communication Before we can understand the political economy of scholarly communication, we need to know something about the structure of the information itself. To get to that point it’s helpful to step outside the discipline and see it from the perspective of libraries. Libraries are responsible for collecting, describing, disseminating, and preserving our research. In keeping with that perspective, I use the general term, scholarly communication rather than simply, “publishing.” Publishing is that thing you do to get your research out to readers, while scholarly communication is the system that encompasses that activity – “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.”2 Researchers share their work with various audiences through working papers, preprints, conference presentations, journal articles, and books. In addition to these research products, sociologists also blog, tweet, podcast, speak, and write for nonacademic publications about research. There once was a discrete, formal scholarly record,