January Issue of Learned Publishing is Now Available

In recognition of this 30th year of Learned Publishing, we dedicate our first issue of 2019 to questioning everything. Our goal is to examine the future of publishing through the window of evidence, rather than tradition and status quo. We invited diverse contributions who could bring fresh, honest thinking to some of our most widely held assumptions about scholarly and professional publishing. As special-issue editor, Andrew Plume, explains in his editorial, we aim to “Bring the facts, bust the myths.”

• Pollock and Michael kick off the original contributions in this issue with some Open Access (OA) mythbusting
• The debate continues in the article by Green, which asks if OA is affordable and evaluates the evidence around the financial models
• The article by Hartley and colleagues offers an intriguing answer to an old riddle: “When is a journal not a journal? When it’s a club.”
• McGlinchey and colleagues offer fresh data showing that compares peer reviewers selected by journal editorial office administrators vs. editorially-selected reviewers
• Smart and Gaston then show that the fear may be greater than the threat when it comes to plagiarism in journal submissions
• Frandsen reviews the literature on author motivations to contribute to so-called ‘predatory’ journals, busting the myth that they are unsuspecting victims
• Furthering our thinking about the pressures to publish, Drummond tackles one of the most talked-about issues of the year, the infamous ‘reproducibility crisis’
• Allen and colleagues report on progress with the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) initiative, which has the potential to fundamentally change the nature of authorship
• McGonagle-O’Connell and Ratan challenge the notion that open source software solutions are only marginally effective, arguing instead that they have transformative potential
• Upshall helps us see through the hype of artificial intelligence (AI) to understand that it is not a magic bullet solution to our publishing technology problems
• Kessler reviews a recent publisher white paper which refutes the idea that reference publishing has become irrelevant in the age of Google and Wikipedia
• Shifting attention to matters of terminology, Cook and Reynolds present a discussion of how the term ‘serial’ has increasingly fallen out of use during the transition from print to online
• Dyke suggests that today’s early-career researchers must publish in order to succeed in research, as well as excel at teaching, grant-writing, societal impact and more
• We close the issue with a student’s view about the value of a Masters in Publishing, where Charlotte Mauti shows us the face of one of the many publishing professionals who will lead our industry in the years to come

Happy reading!

Lettie Y. Conrad
North American Editor
Learned Publishing

NOTE: All articles are free to ALPSP & SSP members and journal subscribers; those editorials, reviews and articles using the ‘ALPSP Author Choice’ OA option, are now free to all. The journal is now live on the new Wiley platform, so come have a tour of our new site. SSP members – please log in to the member center on the SSP website to access the full content. Also, be sure to sign up to receive an email alert or RSS feed every time a new issue goes online.