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The purpose of this paper is to discuss Google visibility of five large STM publishers (Elsevier, Emerald Publishing, Springer, Taylor & Francis and John Wiley & Sons) with the aim to focus on and investigate various upcoming current issues and challenges of the publishing industry regarding discoverability, promotion strategies, competition, information-seeking behavior and the impact of new information technologies on scholarly information.

The study is based on data retrieved through two commercial online tools specialized in retrieving and saving the data of the domain's visibility in search engines: SEMrush (“SEMrush – Online Visibility Management Platform”) and Ahrefs (“Ahrefs – SEO Tools & Resources To Grow Your Search Traffic”). All data gathering took place between April 15 and the May 29, 2019.

The study exhibits the significance of Google visibility in the STM publishing industry taking into consideration current issues and challenges of the publishing activity.

This is a “new” trend, certainly of great significance in the publishing industry. The research is conducted in this paper and the theoretical background will be offered to the study of this issue.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of open access institutional repositories (IR) in enhancing the global visibility and impact of Nigerian scholarly publication.

This is a literature‐based opinion paper which examines the problem of open access IR in Nigeria providing pragmatic suggestions that would address the challenges of making Nigerian scholarly publications accessible internationally.

While the paper acknowledges several problems that impede the building of open access IR, it equally highlights some necessary requirements for the building of IR with a road map for the development of functional IR in Nigeria.

The proliferation of universities and other higher institutions that are in one way or the other engaged in research activities suggests that Nigeria would have generated a lot of research to facilitate speedy development. Available evidence shows that in recent years scholarly publications in Nigeria lack viable means of global dissemination, which has reduced the global visibility of many publications from the country. This paper focuses on the current situation in scholarly publications in Nigeria and examines the need for building of institutional open access repositories and its influence in the dissemination of scholarly research from the country to the international scholarly community.

The originality of the paper is purely the proposal for the building of IR in Nigeria which includes creation of awareness on IR, government sponsorship of IR, development of information and communication technology infrastructure, use of effective advocacy, submission of electronic theses and dissertations, and self‐archiving mandate. The paper concludes that open access IR are the most viable means of ensuring the global visibility and impact of Nigerian scholarship.

This study seeks to examine the management of local content materials for open access institutional repositories in Nigeria.

A survey research design was adopted for this study. A total of 85 librarians from seven government funded universities in South East Nigeria were used for the study.

From the findings 15 local content materials were identified as relevant for publication in institutional repositories. Similarly a major method of acquiring these local contents is by encouraging staff to deposit their publications in the university libraries. It was also found out that providing a subject index to the local contents and their digitization were effective methods of organizing the materials for the institutional repository. The findings also showed that an increase in the visibility of the authors, promotion of university ranking and efficient dissemination of research findings were among the benefits of publishing in institutional repositories. The problems and strategies of publishing in institutional repositories were also identified through the findings.

This study will serve as a useful guide for university administrators and librarians who are interested in developing their institutional repositories using local contents available to them. It will also be of great value to project managers who are engaged in the digitization of their local contents.

Research works generated in Nigeria and other developing countries are poorly disseminated and therefore lack global visibility. The publication of these research findings in institutional repositories of individual universities will not only improve the visibility and utilization of the research but will also increase the global ranking of the universities and researchers who have published the works in the repository.

This paper is on the use of local content information resources in building institutional repositories in Nigerian university libraries. These studies will be useful for university libraries, particularly in developing countries, that intend to build their institutional repositories.

The purpose of this paper is to relate the problems identified about scholarly journal publishing in Malaysia to establish motivation for the system development; to describe the design of MyCite, a Malaysian citation indexing system and to highlight the added value to journals and articles indexed through the generation of bibliometrics performance reports.

The system uses a rapid prototyping method, modeling the functions identified in the Web of Science databases and Scopus, as the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia requires the system to be ready within a year, mainly to help improve the quality, accessibility and performance of Malaysian scholarly journals.

The paper shows the relational tables and module functions in MyCite; highlights the value added to bibliographic data through performance reports of authors, journals, institutions, country and bibliographical control of Malaysian journals; and provides performance tables of top authors, rank list of 75 journals by yearly impact factor, and other bibliometric indices.

The paper highlight the problems in gaining access to full contents of journals, authors' adoption of variant names, and the vast variations in referencing style adopted by publishers, which may result in inaccurate counting and lost citations.

The strength of MyCite is in its reference editor module, which is a programme that segments article references into manageable chunks that helps speed up the data preparation for citation counting. MyCite improves the availability and visibility of Malaysian journals, enriches national research content, and provides better knowledge of national research outputs funded by universities and research institutions.

Cyber-bullying is a form of harassment that is perpetrated using electronic media. The practice has become increasingly common especially with the growing ubiquity of social media platforms. Most cyber-bullying cases inevitably occur on Facebook because it is the most preferred social media platform. However, little is known about cyber-bullying research in Kenya. This paper aims to analyse the quantity, quality, visibility and authorship trends of scholarly publications on cyber-bullying from and/or about Kenya.

This study was conducted as a systematic literature review. A meta-analysis approach was used. Bibliometrics approaches were used to conduct the analysis. Data on the publications was collected from Google Scholar using Harzing's “Publish or Perish” software and then analysed and presented using Microsoft Excel, Notepad and VOSviewer.

The study yielded 359 research publications on cyber-bullying in Kenya. There was a gradual increment in the number of publications, peaking in 2018. Nearly half of the publications have not been cited indicating low uptake of research on cyber-bullying in Kenya. It also emerged that most of the research has been published on subscription channels thereby restricting their visibility, access and use. Minimal collaboration in research on cyber-bullying in Kenya was also observed since 67.4% of the publications were written by a single (one) author. The authors conclude that the quantity, quality and visibility of research on cyber-bullying in Kenya is low.

This is an empirical study. The findings can be used to promote and mainstream research on cyber-bullying in Kenya.

This study aims to assess the scholarly communication competence of Zambian library and information science (LIS) professionals by evaluating their awareness, knowledge and practices regarding scholarly publication.

Applying a quantitative research approach, the study used a specially designed questionnaire. Responses from 57 professionals across universities and colleges in Zambia were gathered using convenience sampling. Data analysis involved descriptive statistics, mean and standard deviation calculations and t-values and p-values to understand respondents’ perceptions and knowledge of scholarly communication and publication.

The findings revealed significant gaps in respondents’ knowledge and awareness, particularly regarding predatory journals, journal selection factors, open-access models, publication challenges, reference management software (RMS) usage and research obstacles. The study underscored the necessity for increased training and capacity-building initiatives among Zambian LIS professionals to enhance their scholarly communication competence.

This research contributed to the field by highlighting deficiencies in scholarly communication awareness among Zambian LIS professionals. It emphasised the need for targeted interventions, awareness programs and educational support to improve academic literacy and scholarly publication practices. Additionally, the study suggested future research avenues, such as longitudinal studies and strategies for enhancing RMS adoption, to advance scholarly practices among Zambian professionals further.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways of improving the quality of Nigerian journals so that they would have global visibility and impact.

This is a literature‐based opinion paper which examines the implication of evaluating Nigerian academics using journal impact factors, despite its limitations, particularly to African scholars.

Revelations from available literature point to the fact that the use of journal impact factors is not an objective method of research evaluation, particularly in developing country like Nigeria. However, evaluation of research outputs remains critical in the overall socio‐economic, scientific and technological growth of any society. The creation of institutional repositories that are compliant with open archives initiatives by the relevant institutions in Nigeria would to a very large extent address the problem of visibility of research outputs coming from the country.

African scholars are disadvantaged by their work environment in the present global scholarly productivity. This paper proposes a number approaches to improve the quality and global visibility of Nigerian scholarly productivity so that journal impact factors should no longer be a parameter for research evaluation in the country.

The originality of the paper lies in the strategies proposed for improving the quality of journals in Nigeria.

This study aims to discuss a system constructed to satisfy scholars' personal information management requirements when collecting e‐documents, and to include generation of a citation format that can aid paper writing. The system compiles records and personal publications of specific domains collected by individual scholars to form a knowledge set for other scholars to use as a reference. It not only simplifies the data collection process, but also increases the visibility of scholars themselves, along with their papers.

This study analyzes the mechanism of increasing cited frequency of scholars' publications and aggregating relevant documents. It then enables the design of feasible system structures based on this mechanism to form a knowledge set by combining scholars' publications within specific academic domains. In addition, it expedites the gathering of relevant documents by scholars in order to create an accessible archive for subsequent researchers.

By way of an effective system for publication sharing, and not merely offering a reference for scholars in other relevant fields, this system can also improve the visibility of scholars' publications and further enhance the cited frequency of publications.

Combining collected documents and personal publications and sharing those with other scholars for reference can establish a highly effective personal research domain. It not only simplifies the data collection process, but also increases the visibility of personal academic works.

It is unclear whether regional rather than global or discipline-focussed preprint platforms as an innovation in the communication of science are removing any of the barriers faced by researchers in the scientific periphery or whether they are increasing access to and visibility of science from the periphery. In response, this paper focusses on the uptake, visibility and academic impact of regional preprint publishing platforms in two peripheral regions (Africa and Latin America) to gain insights into the use and possible impact of regional preprint servers.

Comparative quantitative analysis using bibliometric and altmetric data to compare six preprint servers (two regional, one global and three discipline-specific).

There is evidence of the uptake of regional preprint servers, but the uptake is comparatively modest compared with global and discipline-focussed preprint servers. The academic and social visibility of preprints available on regional preprint servers is comparatively lower when compared to other preprint servers. The preprint server SciELO preprint in comparison to AfricArxiv shows signs of increasing growth and visibility, but more time is required to reach any definitive conclusions.

The research is limited by the short timeframe that the regional preprint servers have existed compared to some of the other preprint servers. The absence of reliable data on the research populations by region or globally by discipline places limits on the comparability of the raw data.

The article provides for the first time a detailed empirical analysis of the contribution of preprint servers targeted at researchers from the scientific periphery to global science.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0153