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The purpose of this paper is to outline the evolution of University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) journal hosting service from the initial phase of setting up a server to host journals through to the point of offering a suite of library publishing services. The UIC has been hosting Internet-based journals since the 1990s.

In this study, challenges and steps taken for inclusion in PubMed, archiving in PubMed Central and developing policies and parameters of support are discussed.

Venturing into the world of Library as Publisher is not the decision that should be taken lightly, but supporting affordable scholarly publishing, when successful, is rewarding.

This paper will be of value to libraries considering offering journal hosting services.

To establish the how far the leading psychiatric journals from the USA and UK show any favouritism to researchers from the journals' host countries. Retrospective review of original data‐based research reports published in 2006 from the five highest impact general psychiatric journals.British authors were 10 times more likely to appear as authors in two general psychiatry journals that are UK based than the three USA based journals (odds ratio=10.37 CI=8.95 to 12.02). American authors were 13 times more likely to publish in three leading three American psychiatry journals compared to British journals (odds ratio=14.27 CI=12.39 to 16.45). It is difficult to explain why researchers appear so much more likely to appear as authors in the host countries' journals other than by invoking some form of bias or favouritism in journals' editorial procedures. This creates a particular disadvantage for research outside the USA and UK.Research is funded and disseminated based on publications in high impact medical journals. If medical journals are xenophobic, that is they preferentially publish articles from their host countries, this severely disadvantages research in less developed countries, of which, many host no medical journals. For example simple, inexpensive research, such as the provision of non‐proprietary antidepressants and antipsychotics or measures to prevent the epidemic of alcohol and tobacco related problems in developed countries may be hugely beneficial to millions of people, but this is unlikely to be researched or disseminated if medical journals are xenophobic.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the degree of accessibility of a set of electronic journals that are hosted on widely used online scientific journal publishing platforms and whose content quality has already been certified. Two studies were performed, in which the accessibility of the selected platforms was studied in 2011 and 2016.

The research was performed on publishing platforms than hosted more than 20 journals about human behaviour and factors that may influence it. The evaluation was carried out following the methodology described by the Web Accessibility Initiative in their Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology.

The results show that, in spite of an improvement in accessibility, all the analysed electronic consultation platforms contain errors that could hinder their users’ access to their content. The incidence of errors found varies considerably among platforms. As the user interface of each platform analysed is common to all the online scientific electronic journals it hosts, the results obtained are valid for all other journals hosted on a given platform.

Obtained results were valid in the date and time the websites were analysed. Changes made on the websites since then make that the results of an accessibility analysis would be different.

Analysed platforms would require taking steps to ensure their accessibility.

Users with disabilities cannot use these platforms appropriately due to the accessibility problems found. The lack of web accessibility also has implications regarding visibility of published articles and common users.

This work offers a systematic analysis that includes manual accessibility evaluation, which has not been performed in scientific article publishing platforms to the extent presented in this paper. Articles found in the literature perform automatic analyses, which lack the depth of a manual one. Besides, when manual accessibility analysis is performed, usually the home page of a platform or journal alone is considered.

Using an institutional theory perspective this paper aims to examine the influence of multinational corporations (MNCs) on host country institutional environments.

This is a conceptual piece that introduces the concept of the country institutional profile (CIP) as a useful theoretical framework for analyzing the host country institutional environment.

The existing model that describes the MNC as a social change agent within host country institutions is extended. This is accomplished by utilizing the CIP as a more formal conception of the host country institutional environment. The model is then used to examine a specific case of the MNC impact on the host country level of environmentalism.

The value of the contribution lies in the application of the CIP for analyzing the host country institutional environment. Furthermore, this framework is applied to the case of the MNC's impact on host country environmentalism.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether open accessibility of medical journals published in Africa may influence journals’ citation impact.

An evaluative informetric research approach was used to compare 134 health and medical (H&M) journals hosted in the African Journals Online (AJOL) database. Harzing’s Publish or Perish (PoP) software was used to extract the following publication and citation data from Google Scholar: citation counts, number of papers and the h-index of the journals. Three null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study.

A total of 65 open access (OA) and 69 non-OA H&M journals of African origin were found in AJOL. Only 20 African countries have journals hosted in AJOL, with more than 53% of them from Nigeria and 13.4% from South Africa. Findings reveal that non-OA H&M journals performed poorly in terms of citations compared with their OA counterparts. The t-test analysis revealed high significant difference in the citations and research impacts of OA and non-OA H&M journals published in Africa.

The study will assist in collection development in medical and health libraries globally and in Africa particularly. The study will also be a useful guide to journal publishers, health researchers and health workers providing information on where to publish and the journals to subscribe.

Apart from adding to the body of knowledge in scholarly communication in Africa, this study will go a long way in influencing policies in H&M research in Africa.

AJOL is the only online database hosting journals from all countries in Africa. Unfortunately, the quality and research impact of the journals in the database have not been adequately investigated. The paper adopted an informetric approach to evaluate H&M journals in Africa so as to provide wider insight on the contents and quality of the journals hosted in it.

The purpose of this research is to examine users preference and use of electronic journals in general, especially those published in a hosting system, Electronic Journal of the University of Malaya (EJUM)

The study utilized the survey method and employed an online questionnaire as the data collection instrument. A list of 330 users who registered with EJUM was selected and an e‐mail was sent to each with an invitation to complete the survey form linked to their mail. A total of 140 responses were returned, out of which 102 responses were usable.

The electronic journals are used for searching new information, reading full‐text articles, reading abstracts, and browsing the table of contents. Users are led to EJUM by chance while browsing the internet (41.8 per cent) when searching using Google, through citations obtained from conference papers, from articles or citations in databases. About 50 per cent of respondents rated the journals as “good” and 20.6 per cent rated “fair”. Respondents prefer keywords (28.9 per cent) and title (24.3 per cent) searches. The majority of respondents (70 per cent) prefer articles in PDF. The majority of respondents read the abstracts first to determine relevance before downloading the articles. Respondents believe that electronic journals will either co‐exist with print journals (46.2 per cent) or replace the print journals (25.5 per cent) or supplement (25.5 per cent) them. Users indicate the functions and features preferred in electronic journals.

A HTML indexing page is created to automatically harvest the meta labels from the contents pages of journal issues, which is captured by Googlebot of Google Scholar. This strategy improves accessibility as Google Scholar provides citation and publication counts for articles and authors. A quality matrix for an electronic journal system is presented

The study shows the extent to which e‐journals are used in Malaysia and provides a matrix of usability features which potential electronic journal publishers could consider.

Open access journals (OAJs) offer immediate, free and unrestricted online access to the scholarly literature. The purpose of this study is to trace the status and characteristics of OAJs published across the globe. Various trends that have evolved in OAJ market have been studied.

The study is based on data collected from one of the largest OA journal directory – Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The data were downloaded on 02 January 2018 and details of OAJs added to DOAJ till 31 December 2018 were harvested, codified and further analyzed in SPSS software. A Microsoft-Excel template application – MAKESENS – developed by Finnish Meteorological Institute (Finland) in 2002, was explored to perform Mann–Kendall Test and Sen’s Slope Estimates.

A less score of OAJs offer access to their archival content. An increasing trend is witnessed in the OAJ publishing with Elsevier, Sciendo and BioMed Central (BMC) as the top publishers. Majority of publishers are from high-income zone countries, followed by upper-middle and lower-middle zone countries. Majority of OA publishers are from the UK, Indonesia and Brazil. A lesser score of journals offer article processing charges and/or author submission charges. Majority of OAJs from high- and lower-middle-income zone countries levy submission/processing charge to authors compared to OA journals from upper-middle- and lower-income zone countries (p < 0.01). OJS stays a prioritized platform for hosting OA journal content. Portico and CLOCKSS/LOCKSS are mostly used for long-term preservation purposes. Majority of OAJs from high-income zone countries participate in digital arching initiatives compared to ones from other income zones. Majority of the journals adopt a peer review (double-blind peer review, blind peer review, peer review and open peer review) process for validation of their scholarly content. The time lag between submission and publication ranges from one to 53 weeks, with majority of OAJs having a time lag of 11-20 weeks. Creative Commons Licenses are mainly adopted by OAJs.

As the study is based on the data offered by DOAJ, any gaps in the DOAJ data will also get reflected in the study. Further, there might be other OAJs also that have yet to show compliance with DOAJ standards and get indexed with it.

The study tries to showcase the current status and characteristics of OAJs.

To provide an insider's review of the journal management and publishing software, Open Journal Systems (OJS), from the Public Knowledge Project, which the author directs at the University of British Columbia.

The paper outlines the history, development, and features of OJS, including some of the experimental aspects, as well as early research results and work underway, on which it is based.

OJS (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) is an open source solution to managing and publishing scholarly journals online, which can reduce publishing costs compared to print and other traditional publishing processes. It is a highly flexible editor‐operated journal management and publishing system that can be downloaded for free and installed on a local web server.

OJS has been designed to reduce the time and energy devoted to the clerical and managerial tasks associated with editing a journal, while improving the record keeping and efficiency of editorial processes. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of journal publishing through a number of innovations, from making journal policies more transparent to improving indexing.

The purpose of this paper is to presents the very recent development of e-journal publishing services at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte. In 2011, the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte created a new unit in the library, the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), which partners with faculty and graduate students in the use of digital and networked research tools to create, disseminate and store new knowledge. E-journal publishing and hosting are among the suite of services offered by the DSL, and we currently publish three journals (https://journals.uncc.edu/).

This report provides an overview of the context of our library’s decision to begin publishing journals, including a discussion of our university’s becoming more research-intensive, our university system mandating increased efficiencies and sharing research with the state citizens, and the library’s own goals of raising awareness of and supporting open access. Also outlined are the technical and procedural choices made, important activities undertaken to develop, define and publicize the new services, campus response to the service and next steps.

This report provides detailed accounting of how a large academic library implemented an electronic publishing service to support open access scholarship. Important activities such as marketing communication, policies development and technical/procedural activities are defined and results described. The report provides observation and lessons learned for academic libraries in development and support of electronic journals.

Library as the publisher is a new concept. This report will be of interest to many libraries who are considering offering publishing services and to libraries that currently offer publishing services.

The purpose of this paper is to examine recent trends that have affected university presses (UPs). The increased reliance on digital resources and fiscal constraints within higher education has forced UPs to re-evaluate their position with the scholarly communication system. Responses include an increased focus on partnerships, new forms of publication, changing business models and better meeting customers’ needs.

The authors have reviewed publications on UPs from the past five years and added their viewpoints on current and future trends.

UPs must adapt to resource scarcity and current trends in scholarly communication to remain viable.

Both UPs and academic libraries may gain insights on how to meet the needs of researchers and scholars within a changing environment.

This paper summarizes and evaluates a broad spectrum of research on UPs.