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Open research questions in Publishing and Scholarly Communication

32 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 2,522 Publishing and Scholarly Communication papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • While much attention has been paid to journals transitioning toward Diamond Open Access (OA), comparatively little is known about those moving in the opposite direction.

    Diamond Fractures: Tracing Journal Transitions Away from Diamond Open Access · 2026

  • Notable issues include a limited pool of active reviewers, a general reluctance to engage with scholars affiliated with institutions outside the region, and a widespread perception that peer review is insufficiently recognized within systems of academic promotion—factors that may contribute to a lack of motivation among reviewers.

    Peer Review at a Crossroads? A Critical Insight into the Scholarly Review Process in Humanities Journals in Bosnia and Herzegovina · 2025 · DOI

  • This article examines the evolution of peer review and the modern editorial processes of scholarly journals by analyzing a novel data set derived from the Royal Society’s archives and covering 1865-1965, that is, the historical period in which refereeing (not yet known as peer review) became firmly established.

    Managing the Growth of Peer Review at the Royal Society Journals, 1865-1965 · 2019 · DOI

  • This paper will address open questions regarding the implementation of new review procedures, the occurrence rate of various peer review procedures and their distribution over scientific disciplines or academic publishers, as well as the motivations for editors or publishers to engage in novel review procedures.

    Journal Peer Review and Editorial Evaluation: Cautious Innovator or Sleepy Giant? · 2019 · DOI

  • Findings While the academic literature relating specifically to OAMJs is relatively sparse, discussion in other fora is detailed and animated, with debates ranging from the sustainability and ethics of the mega-journal model, to the impact of soundness-only peer review on article quality and discoverability, and the potential for OAMJs to represent a paradigm-shifting development in scholarly publishing.

    Open-access mega-journals · 2017 · DOI

  • ” This history is not only joyful but resolutely heterodox, offering fresh take ups and original readings of Boas (Holly Swyers), Frazer (Victor Kumar), and Mauss (Stephanie Frank); appreciations of important but under-recognized figures like Elizabeth Colson (Shannon Morreira) and Alfred Métraux (Edgardo Krebs); as well as an unusual reading of Lévi-Strauss as a successor to the German romantics (Andrew Brandel).

    The dark, the joyful, and the parodic · 2016 · DOI

  • The major talking point around this historic award in 2013 was the decision of its organizers to admit American novels to the competition, when previously it had been limited to any novel published in England and in English by nearly anybody, so long as the author was not from the United States.

    Booker Prize 2014* · 2015 · DOI

  • These data were collected for a representative set of journals which indicated that: acceptance rates for the journals varied widely; most of the journals existed for at least 10 years; most of the journals did not have an ISI impact factor or EigenfactorTM Score; the ERIC database was the predominant indexing resource; and there were no published lists of journals in these subjects compiled from expert opinion.

    Criteria for Evaluating Journals in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and the Life Sciences · 2012 · DOI

  • However, empirical research on the perspectives of multilingual editors beyond the Anglophone center of scholarly publishing is an under-researched area.

    The complicated terrain of editorial peer review in Anglocentricglobal academic publishing · 2025 · DOI

  • They misinterpret or misapply ideas; they have not explored the weaknesses in the current literature on their subject, or they are not sufficiently mature in the subject to spot those weaknesses.

    Qualities of papers we like: An editorial perspective · 2024 · DOI

  • The rate of survival of community-led open access journals are not well known or documented, but the resourcing challenges of journals that rely on institutional goodwill to fund platforms and volunteer editors and reviewers is real.

    Editorial: Two Decades of Open Access, Practice-Led Learning and Teaching Research · 2024 · DOI

  • for Practitioners This paper suggests practitioners and administrators at research institutions treat scholars’ metrics presented in Scopus or other bibliometric databases with caution while evaluating ethnic scholars’ contributions.

    How Different Are Johnson and Wang? Documenting Discrepancies in the Records of Ethnic Scholars in Scopus · 2024 · DOI

  • Future research can be built on this paper by expanding the size of the analytical samples and extending similar analyses on comparable data harvested from other bibliometric platforms.

    How Different Are Johnson and Wang? Documenting Discrepancies in the Records of Ethnic Scholars in Scopus · 2024 · DOI

  • Finally, a few interviewees reported that they opted for predatory journals for faster and easy publication as they have insufficient research capacity.

    Why do some authors from developing countries publish papers in predatory journals? Evidence from phone interviews · 2023 · DOI

  • It is concluded that academic communication, despite its breadth and diversity (or precisely because of it), should be studied by a unified discipline that, thanks to a holistic vision, helps to overcome its main problems.

    Scholarly Communication: A Discipline that should be promoted · 2023 · DOI

  • While peer review, an essential part of journal processes, has received considerable attention in the scholarly and the popular press, much of it critical, the role of the chief editor remains rather shadowy and underexplored.

    Editing a higher education journal: Gatekeeping or development? · 2021 · DOI

  • Research to date has witnessed the mounting significance of logical connectors in writing including scientific journal articles; however, little is known as to whether the usage of such connectors may correspond to a varying degree of journal quality.

    Exploring logical connectors in journals with different indexing levels: A comparison between international and national indexed journals · 2019 · DOI

  • This study, which is part of the call for junior reviewers from Infancia & Aprendizaje (I&A), aims to contribute to the scarce literature on peer review processes by developing and analysing a training proposal designed to help junior researchers begin to take part in the peer review process.

    Being a researcher is not only a matter of publishing: learning to review scientific articles / No solo de publicar viven los investigadores: aprender a revisar artículos científicos · 2017 · DOI

  • Although copies of these proceedings can be obtained for perusal through libraries, they are scarce and were not available electronically at the time of this writing.

    “Let us Give the Light to Them”: Bookending the First Century of <i>Music Educators Journal</i> · 2015 · DOI

  • Journals also vary widely in their philosophies of publishing, evident in their specifications or instructions- to-authors documents (Hardre & Mortensen, in review).

    The Power and Strategic Art of Revise-and-Resubmit: Maintaining Balance in Academic Publishing. · 2013

  • The paper considers three scenarios to account for the relative lack of replication research in learned journals and goes on to suggest a number of ways in which this situation can be remedied.

    Who needs replication? · 2013 · DOI

  • In addition, while the breadth and depth of coverage in this book is impressive, some areas relevant to the book professions—preservation, for instance—are lacking.

    The Literature of the Book (review) · 2007 · DOI

  • Abstract Building and maintaining a journal collection in communication studies is complicated by a lack of agreement on what communication is, what constitutes a communication journal, and the subsequent inconsistencies in the indexing and abstracting tools for the discipline.

    The Communication Journal Collection · 2006 · DOI

  • Few studies have assessed the perceptions subject specialist librarians have about the quality of academic publishers’ output in specific disciplines.

    An Assessment of Publisher Quality by Political Science Librarians · 2000 · DOI

  • Similar data are presented for various combinations of seven Suggestions for coordination among services and further study of true extent of overlap between Old Testament Abstracts and New Testament Abstracts are made.

    Title Coverage of Seven Indexes to Religious Periodicals · 1997

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32 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 2,522 Publishing and Scholarly Communication papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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