Comment to the article ‘Characteristics of gender studies publications: Abibliometric analysis based on a Swedish population database’ by Therese So¨derlund andGuy Madison (Scientometrics, 2015). From the position of relevant expertise within genderstudies and bibliometrics, this text offers a critique of the present study and some suggestionsof alternative ways forward. It analyses (1) the object of study of the article (theterms used to denominate the field, keywords and methods to make sample selection), (2)technical issues and the question of language in relation to international citations andimpact factor, and (3) the views presented in the article regarding gender studies andpolitical ideology.

2. Concluding recommendations

2.1 Overall

• Academic books, particularly those published in Sweden and publically funded, should be made available via an open access version;
• Academic books should undergo an independent peer-review process;
• A national consortium should be set up that organizes a peer-review process for academic books and provides guidance on open access publishing;
• A consortium must work closely with existing publishing channels such as commercial publishers, Acta series and university presses;
• Peer-review should be single blind (i.e. reviewers are anonymous to authors but not vice versa) with two independent reviewers. New developments in peer-reviewing should be monitored for future potential application to academic books;
• We recommend that the consortium should be the responsibility of Swedish Research Council (SRC).
• We recommend that authors pay ca 10 000 SEK (non-refundable) for a peer review process; the remainder of the cost of the consortium should be covered as part of a national infrastructure;
• We recommend that publishers not be paid an extra sum to publish an OA version of a book, in recognition that they get peer review done cost-free;

2.2 Recommendations for National Funders

• National funding agencies should require for books that they support a freely accessible version and that the book has undergone independent peer review. We recommend funding agencies to increase the printing subsidy by 10 000 SEK to cover the cost of the peer review. It could also work if the 10 000 SEK could be included in project funding (or applied for separately in cases where project money comes from, e.g., a university and publishing subsidy from another source). A publishing subsidy of this nature would be in line with funders taking responsibility for the entire workflow associated with a project, from initiation to dissemination and ensuring high-quality output;
• Implementation of the first point also requires that someone takes central responsibility for the infrastructure required to allow an OA possibility for academic books (i.e. a national consortium for open academic books as outline here). Our suggestion is that this responsibility is taken by SRC, in their already given assignment to be Sweden’s national coordinator for OA.
• The issue of elite international publishers is going to require extra consideration in the short term. They do not generally offer an OA option (at present) yet resulting books are considered highly prestigious by universities and advantageous for a researcher’s career. Even reviewers of grant applications tend to put significant weight upon these books (as a tangential point, guidelines for grant application reviewers need to be consistent with OA requirements). The long-term goal can be total OA, but a short-term transition could include an exception for “level 2” publishers[1];

2.3 Consideration for publishers

• Be aware that in the academic world, open access, has gone from “why OA” (i.e. justifying and motivating the concept) to “how OA” (i.e. large-scale implementation). Focus to date has mainly been on journals, but interest is now coming to books;
• For researchers there is an expectation that material that they want to use is visible (searchable) online;
• While researchers still think a print version of a book is important, there is a growing number that questions the distribution and availability of print-only material;
• There is evidence that freely available, electronic versions of academic books increases sales of print editions[2]^,[3]. A freemium model, where a simple electronic version is freely available and where extra products (e.g. print version, more advanced electronic version) are available for a fee, is one business model in use for OA books.
• Academic books need as much as possible to go through a peer-review process;
• The role of the publishing in the book production process is very important and will continue to be. However, it is important to recognize how technology changes are affecting academia (both how it works and what is expected). University libraries are taking an increasingly active role in the publishing process to provide solutions for problems that researchers are noticing[4]. It can be quite probable that there will be a shift from smaller commercial publishers towards university presses in Sweden.

[1] As defined by http://dbh.nsd.uib.no/, or Swedish equivalent if developed.

[2] John Hilton III and David Wiley (2010) The Short-Term Influence of Free Digital Versions of Books on Print Sales, the Journal of Electronic Publishing (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.101)

[3] Eelco Ferwerda (2012) Preliminary results from two OAPEN projects (http://www.against-the-grain.com/2012/11/open-access-book-publishing-case-studies/)

[4] Helena Francke (2013), Publicera! Svenska forskningsbiblioteks arbete med publiceringsfrågor, Svensk biblioteksförening

In 2002, Linköping University Electronic Press began development of a journal article reviewing support system (JARSS) as a tool for Editors of electronic journals. The system-s database contains submitted articles, abstracts and other secondary information, reviews, and e-mail communication for the purpose of submission, reviewing and final acceptance. The interface maintains a log of all events pertaining to the article and the associated status changes. The successive status options of an article (received, under review, conditional accept, etc.) correspond to the editorial workflow. JARRS has been used since its inception to run the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), an Elsevier publication. In essence a service is offered to take care of the technical aspects of journal publication, allowing editors more time to solicit papers of high quality.

Since 1997 LiU E-Press has published five electronic journals and provided a support service to the editorial team of one further journal that is published by Elsevier. Two examples are (Hygiea Internationalis (http://www.ep.liu.se/ej/hygiea/) and International Journal of Ageing and Later Life (IJAL - http://www.ep.liu.se/ej/ijal/index.html))). What became apparent early on was that the process of keeping track of papers, referees and the reviewing process took a substantial amount of time. In 2004, LiU E-Press developed an internet-based, editorial support service, Journal Article Review Support System (JARSS) to be used by editorial teams to assist in keeping track of submitted articles. The users for the system include authors, reviewers, and editors and each user has access only to that information and those tools which are relevant to them. For example, an editor sees when an article is submitted and can then draw from a list of reviewers to begin the refereeing process. The editorial window also allows an editor to see the status on reviews (whether they have come in, whether they are overdue, etc.) and on the paper (whether it has been revised etc.). Of particular note is the integration of email communication and the handling of attachments and other files (e.g. reviewers comments). JARSS has been tested extensively on Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), published by Elsevier and LiU E-Press is now offering this Journal Publication Service to anyone wishing to publish an open access journal. In some research areas, notably the humanities, there is a strong interest in niche journals publishing two or three issues a year in a highly specialized area. Coupled with electronic publishing, novel concepts such as interactive articles, poster-journals, advanced media articles, etc., the arguments for a university research area to seriously consider operating an international journal and gaining the increased visibility that goes with it are strong and in fact we are seeing significant interest. Our experiences with JARSS will be discussed, including a demonstration.  

In industrial reactive flow systems such as furnaces and gas turbines, there are considerable variations in the temperature and concentrations of species along different spatial directions. Functional principal component analysis (fPCA) can be used to study the temporal (or spatial) evolution of reactions in a reactive flow system, and to develop simplified kinetic models to describe this behaviour. A comprehensive kinetic mechanism for CO oxidation is used to demonstrate application of fPCA to identify important reactions as a function of time. In conventional PCA, the eigenvalue-eigenvector decomposition specifically transforms the variations associated with the time (or spatial directions) and species into loadings that represent only the reactions. However, fPCA produces functional loading vectors (xi) over bar (1)(t) which are functions of time or distance, whose elements are referred to as functional loadings. The functional loading vectors are the eigenfunctions of the covariance matrix associated with the sensitivity trajectories. The functional loadings are used to identify reactions playing a significant role, possibly as a function of time, and are used to develop a reduced kinetic scheme from a detailed kinetic mechanism.

The role of NO-sensitized oxidation during the product-gas entrainment of a low-NO,,, multi-jet, natural gas burner is investigated. A detailed kinetic mechanism for the NO-sensitized oxidation of CH4, consisting of 483 reactions and 69 species, is used for the kinetic analysis. An eigenvalue-eigenvector decomposition is performed on normalized sensitivity coefficients to study the important reactions using principal component analysis (PCA), and the loadings corresponding to the largest eigenvalue are used to identify the reaction pathways of NO-sensitized oxidation. The main reaction pathway is most strongly affected by the temperature profile and equivalence ratio. Also, a reduced kinetic scheme of 110 reactions and 47 species is developed by eliminating reactions with small loadings. The temporal evolution of reactions is investigated using functional PCA, in which the functional loadings reflect the importance of reactions as a function of time. A discretization approach is used to perform the functional PCA.