With the uncertainty that 2020 brought, no one was quite sure what to expect in 2021. As people all over the globe continued their teaching, learning, and research endeavors remotely, the need for greater content accessibility reached a critical point and publishers needed to adjust accordingly. With the leap into 2021, IGI Global embarked on a journey to increase its open access (OA) publishing presence to ensure greater content accessibility for all.
Over the past year, through collaborative effort between IGI Global’s staff, editors, review board members, and authors, this transition to full OA publishing led to many fruitful results, as
several of these journals are now seeing substantial increases to their usage and citation rates. For instance, the
Journal of Organizational and End User Computing (JOEUC), edited by Dr. Sang-Bing Tsai (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Zhongshan Institute, China and Research Center for Environment and Sustainable Development, Civil Aviation University of China, China), is one such example as it has benefitted from an impact factor increase from 1.882 in 2020 to 4.349 in 2021, with a strong growth trajectory anticipated in the 2022 volume year.
As the industry continues to shift from traditional publishing models to OA, it’s important to examine the numerous benefits of OA publishing, including:
- An 89% increase in citation impact and download rates, which leads to increased indexing potential
- Expedited and quality-centric publishing process (once papers are accepted, they are moved through to the production environment and available online in as little as 1-2 weeks).
- Higher discoverability and recognition, reaching wider professional communities and leading to opportunities for networking and collaboration
- Supports overall career advancement for researchers
- Freely accessible content to all within the research community
And OA publishing is not just limited to our journals, as interest in OA book chapter and full book publishing is also on the rise. IGI Global offers OA publishing for book chapters and full books as well, and we are set to release our first OA book publication,
Global View of Open Access and Scholarly Communications, edited by Dr. Daniel Gelaw Alemneh from the University of North Texas, USA, in the Spring of 2022, with many more soon to follow.
In the new year, all of our contributors will observe that IGI Global is committed to making OA publishing as attainable and seamless as possible and we will be working to provide resources for authors seeking funding for OA publishing, which includes IGI Global’s
Open Access Fee Waiver (Read & Publish) Initiative. Last year, more than 100 researchers were able to benefit from APC waivers as a result of this initiative. IGI Global also is expanding its presence through aggregation in a number of internationally-recognized OA repositories.
The takeaway with the expansion of OA is that there is interest and yet some hesitation. As with anything newly introduced, there are skeptics who have several questions, or simply do not yet fully understand how this new “thing” works. IGI Global provides countless resources for those who are unfamiliar with the OA processes as well as many
newsroom pieces that provide useful materials for such things as OA funding, indexing, publishing processes and more. In the year ahead, we are committed to continuing to provide as much information as possible regarding this movement.
In the last few weeks of the year, IGI Global looks back on all its OA changes, accomplishments, and the exciting new directions that are in store for 2022.
About IGI Global
Founded in 1988, IGI Global, an international academic publisher, is committed to producing the highest quality research (as an active full member of the Committee on Publication Ethics “COPE”) and ensuring the timely dissemination of innovative research findings through an expeditious and technologically advanced publishing process. Through their commitment to supporting the research community ahead of profitability, and taking a chance on virtually untapped topic coverage, IGI Global has been able to collaborate with over 150,000+ researchers from some of the most prominent research institutions around the world to publish the most emerging, peer-reviewed research across 350+ topics in 11 subject areas including business, computer science, education, engineering, social sciences, and more.
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