Scholarly Communication and Publishing Issues

What You Can Do

Encourages authors, editors, readers, and administrators to provide leadership in thinking about scholarly publishing so that it is economically sustainable. Offers recommendations to authors about retaining selected rights or copyright ownership of scholarly output. Provides information to help authors, editors, and referees choose which journals to support.

Things You Can Do to Make a Difference

Authors and Editors

• Consider using your influence by the choices you make about where to publish, and about service as a reviewer or member of an editorial board.
• Examine the pricing, copyright, and licensing agreements of journals you contribute to as an author, reviewer, or editor. To help you, please see:
  • Expensive Journals Profile
  • Contracts for Stanford Authors with Publishers — Things to Consider
  • Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving
  • NERL Principles for Electronic Journal Licenses
• Support affordable scholarly journals, such as by volunteering articles and labor in the production, review and editing of journal content.
• For authors, consider submitting your article to low-cost non-profit journals for publication.
• For editors of journals, consider moving your journal to a different publisher.
• Investigate your campus intellectual property policies and participate actively in their development.

Campus Community Members

• Use, promote, and cite journals that commit to reasonable pricing practices.
• Encourage discussion of scholarly communication issues and proposals for change in your department and school.
• Accept high quality, electronic-only publications in promotion and tenure discussions.
• Support your library’s efforts to take cost into consideration in making decisions about journal subscriptions.
• Support your library’s participation in activities to help transform scholarly publishing in accord with academic values.
• Invite library participation in faculty departmental meetings and graduate seminars to discuss these issues.

Society Members

• Support actively your society’s electronic publishing program by submitting papers, reviewing, and serving on editorial boards.
• Encourage your society to maintain user-friendly access terms.
• Encourage your scholarly society to maintain reasonable prices and modest price increases for its publications.
• If your society has its publications produced by a commercial publisher, suggest alternatives such as moving to a non-profit publisher.
• Explore ways to support society activities from sources other than revenue from publications.

Copyright Guidelines

• Contracts for Stanford Authors with Publishers — Things to Consider
• Stanford Copyright Reminder
• More info on Copyright

Tools to Help Evaluate Journals

• Expensive Journals Profile
• Journal Citation Reports [Tutorial]
• Ulrich’s Periodical Directory

For comments, questions, and suggestions, please contact your Library Subject Specialist.