Current Students and Staff

// University News

19 Oct 2015

Project exploring open-access mega-journals awarded funding

A partnership between the School of the Arts, English and Drama, School of Business and Economics and the Information School at Sheffield University, has secured £450,000 Arts and Humanities Research Council funding for a two-year project investigating open-access mega-journals.

Dr Stephen Pinfield from Sheffield University is leading on the project, with co-investigators Dr Jenny Fry and Claire Creaser, assisted by Valérie Spezi, leading Loughborough’s involvement.

Research will include interviews with major stakeholders in the publishing industry, focus groups, bibliometrics-based studies of mega-journals and a large-scale survey of researchers. Assembling this evidence will allow the team to draw conclusions of interest to researchers, publishers, research managers and policymakers.

Mega-journals are making a real impact on how academics approach publishing their work and the scope of these journals is unprecedentedly wide. Mega-journals completely reverse the trend of increasing specialisation in academic publishing by creating massive openly-available databases of multi-disciplinary research content.