Digital Publishing Habits, Perceptions of Open Access Publishing and Other Access Publishing: Across Continents Survey Study

TL;DR

This study investigates global digital publishing habits, emphasizing the importance and preference for open access journals among authors, editors, and reviewers, highlighting the shift towards costless, open scholarly communication.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on author preferences and perceptions regarding open access publishing across different countries and scholarly roles.

Findings

Most authors prefer publishing in both digital and print formats.

Open access publishing is considered vital for costless access.

Open access journals are viewed as equal in quality to paid journals.

Abstract

In this transformative world, changes are happening in all the fields, including scholarly communications are trending in the academic area of publication and access to the resources, especially emerging the wave of open access, open science and open research. The study aims to investigate the digital publishing behaviour of manuscript authors. This study applied a quantitative approach and survey questionnaire method. The researcher collected the data from 251 authors, editors, and peer-reviewers from 45 countries worldwide. The research mainly focuses on the importance, need, and author preference for open access journals. Everyone cannot use and access subscription-based journals; the critical reason is the cost of purchasing a tremendous amount. As an independent researcher, developing countries and other impoverished countries, researchers can give the utmost importance to open access journals. The author also wishes to publish a journal in open access only. The findings reveal that most authors like to publish digital and print in both formats, with chargeless publications. Open access publishing has a vital role with researchers, scholars, and students because accessing the articles is costless. The researcher publishing the manuscript is more important than the quality of the content also important in scholarly publication. Nowadays, open-access peer-reviewed journals are also equal to the paid journals.