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How to obtain a list of the 100 largest scientific publishers sorted by journal count? Existing databases are unhelpful as each of them inhere biased omissions and data quality flaws. This paper tries to fill this gap with an alternative approach.

The content coverages of Scopus, Publons, DOAJ and SherpaRomeo were first used to extract a preliminary list of publishers that supposedly possess at least 15 journals. Second, the publishers' websites were scraped to fetch their portfolios and, thus, their “true” journal counts.

The outcome is a list of the 100 largest publishers comprising 28.060 scholarly journals, with the largest publishing 3.763 journals, and the smallest carrying 76 titles. The usual “oligopoly” of major publishing companies leads the list, but it also contains 17 university presses from the Global South, and, surprisingly, 30 predatory publishers that together publish 4.517 journals.

Additional data sources could be used to mitigate remaining biases; it is difficult to disambiguate publisher names and their imprints; and the dataset carries a non-uniform distribution, thus risking the omission of data points in the lower range.

The dataset can serve as a useful basis for comprehensive meta-scientific surveys on the publisher-level.

The catalogue can be deemed more inclusive and diverse than other ones because many of the publishers would have been overlooked if one had drawn from merely one or two sources. The list is freely accessible and invites regular updates. The approach used here (webscraping) has seldomly been used in meta-scientific surveys.

Book piracy represents a threat to the publishing industry, while for the society, book piracy provides some benefits. The purpose of this study is to examine views of readers, authors and publishers in Lithuania on book piracy’s benefits to society.

This study uses phenomenography to examine readers’, authors’ and publishers’ reflections on book piracy’s potential social benefits. The authors collected research data via semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with 10 participants from each group (readers, authors and publishers – a total of 30 interviews).

Six qualitatively different categories of attitudes were revealed, namely, that book piracy provides easier and more convenient access to books, helps readers save money, pushes readers to read more, helps for authors to gain more popularity, provides wider access to books and provides consumers with moral satisfaction. The similarities between readers’, authors’ and publishers’ views on benefits of book piracy outweigh the differences.

Theoretical background indicates that stakeholders’ explicitly stated attitudes towards book piracy contribute to their book piracy intentions. This study hopes to help publishers in Lithuania confront the challenge of book piracy and develop effective strategies to attenuate a normative framework with four actionable recommendations to help professionals in the publishing industry to better address book piracy.

Book piracy continues to perplex publishers, in part because they lack a clear understanding of the social and psychological underpinnings of book piracy. This study aims to develop such an understanding by filling gap in the literature on book piracy: the lack of work on readers’, authors’ and publishers’ perceptions of book piracy’s individual and social benefits.

The American trade‐book industry offers a rather unique challenge for the application of theories and principles of competitive strategy. Despite the mergers with and acquisitions by publishing and entertainment conglomerates: (a) publishing housing (and their imprints, or divisions) continue to be small; (b) profit margins are low; (c) the synergy that was expected by the mergers into multimedia and entertainment companies has not been achieved; and, (d) the trade‐book industry continues to defy the predictions that electronic and other media will totally absorb and eclipse physical books.

It is proposed that public libraries have a duty to collect material from alternative publishers (in both fiction and non‐fiction and in all media) to better reflect the diversity of their communities. This paper aims to investigate the links between alternative publishing and public libraries in Scotland.

Two surveys (based on the 1979 Alternative Acquisitions Project) were carried out of alternative publishers and public libraries in Scotland. Questions were based on those in the 1979 survey, except where updated to accommodate new technologies. A literature review was also carried out to contextualise survey findings.

While alternative publishers and public libraries were aware of each other, alternative publishers faced many hurdles in getting their material in public libraries. For their part, public libraries were constrained by budgets but wanted to extend support for alternative publishing.

This paper re‐uses a previously tried and tested methodology to create a comparable and up to date study of an area of publishing often overlooked. Alternative publishing is revealed as a flourishing area, despite trends towards fewer and larger publishing outlets. Public libraries are seen as having a vital role to play in giving an outlet to alternative publishing.

The aim of this study is to analyse the disciplinary coverage of Thomson Reuters' Book Citation Index database focusing on publisher presence, impact and specialisation.

The authors conducted a descriptive study in which they examined coverage by discipline, publisher distribution by field and country of publication, and publisher impact. For this purpose the Thomson Reuters' subject categories were aggregated into 15 disciplines.

Humanities and social sciences comprise 30 per cent of the total share of this database. Most of the disciplines are covered by very few publishers mainly from the UK and USA (75.05 per cent of the books), in fact 33 publishers hold 90 per cent of the whole share. Regarding publisher impact, 80.5 per cent of the books and chapters remained uncited. Two serious errors were found in this database: the Book Citation Index does not retrieve all citations for books and chapters; and book citations do not include citations to their chapters.

There are currently no studies analysing in depth the coverage of this novel database which covers monographs.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the theory and practice of peer review in open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs typically operate a “soundness-only” review policy aiming to evaluate only the rigour of an article, not the novelty or significance of the research or its relevance to a particular community, with these elements being left for “the community to decide” post-publication.

The paper reports the results of interviews with 31 senior publishers and editors representing 16 different organisations, including 10 that publish an OAMJ. Thematic analysis was carried out on the data and an analytical model developed to explicate their significance.

Findings suggest that in reality criteria beyond technical or scientific soundness can and do influence editorial decisions. Deviations from the original OAMJ model are both publisher supported (in the form of requirements for an article to be “worthy” of publication) and practice driven (in the form of some reviewers and editors applying traditional peer review criteria to OAMJ submissions). Also publishers believe post-publication evaluation of novelty, significance and relevance remains problematic.

The study is based on unprecedented access to senior publishers and editors, allowing insight into their strategic and operational priorities. The paper is the first to report in-depth qualitative data relating specifically to soundness-only peer review for OAMJs, shedding new light on the OAMJ phenomenon and helping inform discussion on its future role in scholarly communication. The paper proposes a new model for understanding the OAMJ approach to quality assurance, and how it is different from traditional peer review.

This is the first of a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open‐archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. The paper concludes that self‐archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retain rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to compare the lists of publishers in SPI (Spain) and the lists of VIRTA (Finland), in order to determine some of the potential uses of a merged list, such as complementing each other; and, second, to assess the effects of cross-field variability in the SPI rankings on the potential uses identified in the previous objective.

VIRTA and SPI lists were matched and compared in terms of level and number of submissions (VIRTA) and prestige (SPI).

There is a set of international publishers common to both information systems, but most publishers are nationally oriented. This type of publisher is still highly relevant for scholars. Consequently, a merge of national lists would provide useful information for all stakeholders involved in terms of grounding information for the rating of foreign, non-international publishers. Nevertheless, several issues should be considered in an eventual merging process, such as the decisions related to the use of field-specific rankings or general rankings.

If merged, ratings ought to be kept separately. Ratings of national publishers can be imputed in other systems’ evaluation process, thus making the merging process potentially useful.

This research explores obstacles and opportunities for merging scholarly publishers’ lists from an empirical perspective. It provides groundwork for future efforts toward supra-national combinations of publishers’ lists.

Presents the findings of part of a research project into the relationships between academic authors and publishers. Discusses the attitudes of authors towards publishers, looking at the relationship of authors” attitudes and behaviour. Outlines some implications for publishers” policies. Investigates the similarities between the market for academic manuscripts and other markets, and also the differences. Examines the essential features of markets and the marketing process. Indicates that publishers may need to review both the terms of their contracts and the procedures they adopt in order to be successful.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly syllabi.

Syllabus mentions of 15,117 books from 27 publishers were searched for, manually checked and compared with Microsoft Academic (MA) citations.

Most books published by Ariel, Síntesis, Tecnos and Cátedra have been mentioned in at least one online syllabus, indicating that their books have consistently high educational value. In contrast, few books published by the most productive publishers were mentioned in online syllabi. Prestigious publishers have both the highest educational impact based on syllabus mentions and the highest research impact based on MA citations.

The results might be different for other publishers. The online syllabus mentions found may be a small fraction of the syllabus mentions of the sampled books.

Authors of Spanish-language social sciences and humanities books should consider general prestige when selecting a publisher if they want educational uptake for their work.

This is the first study assessing book publishers based on syllabus mentions.