Going Open Access: The Attitudes and Actions of Scientific Journal Editors in China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
1 Introduction
This paper aims to clarify the attitudes and actions of editors of scientific journals in China regarding OA publications. Although it is clear, the logical framework of the introduction to explain why the research objectives are significant is unclear.
The main focus is inevitably on OA policy in China, but the review of global OA trends, especially recent OA journals, is insufficient. For example, I do not understand why BioMedCentral is mentioned now. Plan S should be an important event as background information to understand the OA policy of the journal Nature, but it is not clearly stated. I don't understand what you are trying to say here as the first point of the article. In the first part of the introduction, I do not understand what you want to say and what you consider to be the important points as a global trend of OA.
Do you mean to say that the number and the ratio of OA journals in China is high compared to the global ratio of OA journals? Or do you want to say that Gold OA is low at 2%? Or are you saying that the number of journals included in DOAJ is low?
"While Chinese journals are 58 actively supporting international OA programs, there is a lack of unified standards," is vague and unclear. It is not clear what the problem is.
If you say "in China, universities, societies, and research institutions are the main sponsors of scientific journals", I would like you to mention the number of journals published by these institutions out of 4,963 journals. If the fact that the main sponsors are different from those in Europe and the U.S. is also important as a background for the awareness of editors, it should also be clearly stated.
・In L47, there is a punctuation mark and spaces in the middle of words.
2 Literature Review
The title of section 2.2 is “Editors’ Actions Towards OA”, but the first paragraph of 2.2 seems to be editors’ opinion.
If, as RQ, the status of OAJ in China also affects the editors' attitudes and actions, the description of OAJ trends in China in section 2.3 may be too brief. Reference 4 cited in the introduction is considered to be a reference on the latest OAJ situation in China. Instead of writing the Introduction and the Literature Review separately, including them as an independent section would be better to introduce more concrete data on the OAJ situation in China.
The structure of the review needs to be rethought to make it easier to understand, and comparisons between Europe, the U.S., and China need to be made explicitly in terms of journal editors' awareness of OAJ, researchers' awareness of OAJ, and the national OAJ situation, respectively.
At the end of the literature review or in the RQ, it is necessary to explicitly state how authours view the current situation regarding OAJ in China. Otherwise, it is not clear why it is an important research issue to clarify the attitudes and actions of editors of Chinese journals.
3 Results
(1) Lack of examples of actual interview responses makes it difficult to understand expressions that summarize perceptions (attitudes).
- In 4.1.1, there are no examples of interview responses, so it is difficult to understand the expression that summarizes the editors' awareness.
- I took "they" in "their understanding of it is outdated" (L219) to mean all the interviewees. Is that correct? Or does it mean that only the latter others' understanding of it is outdated?
- L221-223 "Some editors (35.29%) recognized that OA is a publishing mode that requires authors to pay, while others (29.41%) understood that it facilitates the dissemination and use of journals." I am not sure what the latter half (while others) means. Did the latter not understand that OA is an "authors to pay" model, but rather perceive it as a strategy to encourage more use of journals by distributing them for free? Since these are the results of the interviews, please describe the summarized results with more specific expressions.
(2) Insufficient description or explanation of the number, figures, and ratio.
- It seems that the number of editors who mentioned in section 4.1.3 disadvantage is smaller than the number of editors who mentioned advantage, but how many editors are there? In other words, are the five editors who mentioned "Damage reputation" and the five who mentioned "Decrease quality" the same editors?
- Lines 402-408 Similarly, how many people does "40% of interviewed editors" refer to? I would think 40% of all 17 people surveyed or 40% of the 9 Chinese journal editors, but that would be 6.8 and 3.6, respectively.
- The number of "Some (25%)" in lines 387-400 is how many? From 4.3, it is assumed that Chinese journals and English journals are separated, but nowhere is it stated how many 100% are. 25% out of 9 is 2.25, but 25% of 4 non-standard OA journals is 1.
- The number of editors of English journals surveyed should be 8 according to Table 1. Is the number of editors different from the number of journals?
- In Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, it is not stated how many journals are in the 100% range. Are there 11 English-language journals in total in Fig.2?
- In line 455, "Of the nine English journals, eight are currently collaborating with...", which nine journals are you referring to? Are there not 11 English-language journals in total?
(3) Insufficient explanation of the current situation in China and the background context, and some parts are not understandable.
- In lines 372-374 it is not clear what the "non-standard OAJs" are. No standard OA processes or criteria are defined. "non-standard OAJs" provide free access to resources on the official website but do not adhere to the standard OA process and criteria.
- In line 378, does “this particular journal” mean a Non-OA journal? If so, the Non-OA journal would be easier to understand.
- In line 385, what exactly is the "exclusive agreement" with CNKI? It is necessary to explain why OA is not possible with this "exclusive agreement". This explanation appears after line 403, but it should be explained earlier, or it should be clearly stated that it will be explained later.
- In line 388, it is not clear what exactly "providing them with free access to academic information services and knowledge-sharing platforms”.
(4) Others
The opinion on the disadvantage of OAJ in 4.1.3 seems reasonable, but does it contradict the statement in 4.1.1 that the understanding of OAJ is outdated? Or does it mean that the understanding of the five persons who expressed their opinions on disadvantage is not outdated but correct?
Conclusion
In line 476, "most Chinese editors have a basic understanding of OA, they lack a comprehensive knowledge of it. Understanding of editors is only mentioned in 4.1.1, lines 220-226. Does the fact that 35% of the authors understood the payment model mean that they lack a comprehensive knowledge of it? Do not at least the editors of English-language journals affiliated with international publishers (8 or 11 editors) have a comprehensive understanding of the international OA model? If not, the authors need to report a little more carefully in their results on the basis of including this point and stating it in their conclusions.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
I thank the authors for putting together this very interesting and informative article about the perceptions of OAJs among Chinese scholarly journal editors.
I learned a bit from this article and think only small clarifications and changes are needed for it to make a good contribution to the literature.
I have only one large concern which is about the interview coding process and the lack of detail describing it in Sec. 3.2. I am not familiar with the NVivo software and there needs to be more detail on how the 'Concerns', 'Advantages', 'Disadvantages', 'Motivations', and 'Obstacles' categories were determined. These seem somewhat obvious but there were no definitions or attempts to understand the groupings described in the Methods section. This needs to be fixed before publication.
Otherwise my comments are minor, I list them below in no particular order.
- In line 129, the phrase 'lack of evaluation system' is not clear. What do you or the editors mean by this? OAJs can be evaluated in the same way (and often are) as closed/paywalled journals.
- line 250, OA does not necessarily enable readers to reuse data. The definition only requires that the final product be free to read. Reuse of data is an Open Science principle, which is conceptually different from OA and OAJs.
- lines 289 and 290, the problems around integrity and IP rights also happen regularly with closed/paywalled journals. (See the Retraction Watch website for plenty of evidence for this.) It should be clear to readers that this problem has nothing to do with OAJ in particular but affects all scholarly/scientific journals.
- lines 327-329, the conclusion that China "needs" local Chinese infrastructure is totally unsubstantiated by any evidence in the paper. Chinese-language OAJs would be far better off NOT using local Chinese infrastructure and instead using DOAJ, which has very clear and not exceptionally onerous requirements for application. Using existing international infrastructure would save Chinese journal editors time, and effort, and increase their audience.
- line 342, the acronym or meaning of CNKI should be explained the first time it is used.
- lines 372-375 and Figure 1, I was confused about what "standard OAJs" were being referred to. What standards did the editors have in mind? What standards do the authors have in mind here? There are various standards that might apply so specifying exactly what the editors are thinking here is necessary.
- lines 449-452, the quote here is indicated as coming from 01CNF, a Chinese-language journal editor. But it is in Sec. 4.3.2 about English-language journals. Why isn't it in Sec. 4.3.1? Or is it mislabeled and actually came from and English-language editor?
- lines 462-473, I found this paragraph bizarre and sad. Does this editor 12ENGF not know about Open Journal Systems the software from Public Knowledge Project? https://pkp.sfu.ca/software/ojs/ Or about EPrints? Or Omeka? There are out-of-the box solutions that already exist, the poor woman does not need to build her own ship. I encourage you to mention Open Journal Systems at this point in your manuscript.
- lines 509-515, please move the Limitations and Future Directions section before the Conclusion. No further editing of the paragraph is needed.
- line 505 and line 507, there are mentions of the "distinctive Chinese characteristics" and "unique features of" China's journals. But this is the end of the paper and I didn't read anything about what these unique and distinctive things are. I found this confusing, if there are such features, you should point them out and emphasize them earlier in the text so that non-Chinese readers will understand what you authors or the editors are writing about. I am not implying that such things don't exist, but they must be clarified for readers who do not know about the Chinese context.
- line 576, citation 28 is missing an author.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
English quality is excellent.
There is one convention that is missed and should be fixed and a few minor typos.
The convention: 'English' or 'Chinese' when not referring to language directly typically refers to nationalities or ethnicities. I suggest rewording to 'English-language' and 'Chinese-language' for clarity.
Typos/clarity: line 351, remove 'of', should be "According to several (% interviewed editors"; line 366 - Table 6, capitalize 'L' in "lack"; line 268, change 'reader' to readers; lines 221 and 222, this should be rephrased to make it clear that editors think or believe that OA "requires authors to pay", because of course Diamond OA does not require this, rather 35.29% of editors don't know about Diamond OA or don't understand it.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The Introduction and Literature Review has been completely revised, and the logical flow to the research purpose has been organized to make the paper easier to understand. Errors in the interview results have also been corrected. The discussion of the results could be deepened a little more, but overall, I judged the paper to be acceptable.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
This second version is clearer.
I still think that it could be improved by stressing the distinctions between editors' views and authors' views and by explaining more about the interview coding. I raised both of these issues in my first review and they were not addressed. However, this second version is publishable.
I thank the authors for their contribution to our understanding of the acceptance of OA in China.
