Conversations around scholarly publishing often focus on the cost of the publications for authors and readers but overlook questions about the labour that goes into creating these publications. Who is doing this work? How are journal staff and editorial boards compensated? What is the labour structure of these publications? These are important questions for understanding the scholarly communications landscape and obtaining a holistic vision of its future.
As of 2019, there are over 1,000 active independent scholarly journal publishing in Canada. Anecdotally, we observe that many of them are small teams with overextended labour or as one author fears these are journals that “ limp along, with estimable doggedness, but are often one devoted editor away from the digital graveyard” (Pooley, 2019). From our positions working within library publishing and as journal editorial team members ourselves, we were surprised to find that there was no systematic documentation of this labour.
This presentation will introduce a new research project that seeks to understand who undertakes the labour in independent Canadian academic journal publishing and go over initial results from the first phase of data collection. We will include the study’s motivations, research question, and methodology and a brief review of current literature. The presentation will also include a preliminary analysis of the data, that will include types of editorial positions titles as well as the size of editorial teams.
At the end of the presentation, we will present our next steps and invite feedback from the audience on the study’s design and methodology on how they could use this information to better support the independent journals at their institution.
References
Pooley, J. (2019, September 3). The library solution: How academic libraries could end the APC scourge. Retrieved from https://items.ssrc.org/parameters/the-library-solution-how-academic-libraries-could-end-the-apc-scourge/
Slides can be downloaded at
https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/presentations/7w62fd646?locale=en
