Meredith T. Niles, Lesley A. Schimanski, Erin C. McKiernan, and Juan Pablo Alperin

“ Namely, the increased volume of academic publishing may influence how academics perceive academic publishing expectations. Faculty at academic institutions assume that strong research and publication records are necessary in their review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process [4] [5] [6] . Furthermore, faculty express concerns about the amount and type of publishing expected of them (i.e., that it should be in prestigious journals with high journal impact factors (JIF) ) and their capacity to achieve the amount of publications expected by their universities [7] . ”

“ These conversations should consider that, in an environment in which there is a growing number of ways in which faculty can share their work, and in which there is an ever increasing number of works available, many faculty are most interested in choosing academic publishing venues that have a readership of interest and find journal metrics or other factors related to prestige and monetary incentives less important. ”

“ We find that respondents most value journal readership, while they believe their peers most value prestige and related metrics such as impact factor when submitting their work for publication. Respondents indicated that total number of publications, number of publications per year, and journal name recognition were the most valued factors in RPT. Older and tenured respondents (most likely to serve on RPT committees) were less likely to value journal prestige and metrics for publishing, while untenured respondents were more likely to value these factors. ”

“ Finally, journal cost was a more important factor for women than for men (mean 4.14 compared to 3.16, p = 0.001) .
Compared to their own perceptions of important priorities when publishing, respondents perceived differences in how their peers rate important factors for publishing (Fig 2, Table 2) . Considering the mean responses, the top factors respondents thought their peers felt were important included: (1) the overall prestige of the journal/publisher/venue, (2) the JIF, and (3) both the readership they want to reach and the journal/publisher/venue being regularly read by their peers. ”

“ To analyze statistically significant differences between variables, we selected appropriate statistical tests based on the distribution of data including the Kruskal Wallis test, chi square tests, Wilcoxon Rank sum test, and Spearman’s correlations for non-parametric data and one-way analysis of variance and Pearson’s correlations for continuous data. ”

“ In one of these (model 4) , older people have increased odds (b = 1.37, p = 0.019) of valuing society journals in publication decisions and in another (model 10) men have reduced odds (b = 0.40, p = 0.001) of finding cost important for publication decisions (i.e., women are more likely to find cost important in publication decisions) . In another model (model 2) , it is not demographic characteristics, but faculty behavior (the number of peer-reviewed publications per year) that results in increased odds of faculty valuing journal readership (b = 1.68, p = 0.003) . ”

“ A total of 338 people (22%) from 55 different institutions responded to the survey. Of these, 84 (25%) were faculty at Canadian institutions and the remaining 254 (75%) were from the United States; 223 (66%) were from R-Type institutions, 111 (32%) from M-Type institutions, and 4 (1%) from B-Type institutions. Responses were then anonymized, leaving only the institution type and discipline along with the survey responses for analysis, as per the research protocol filed with the Office of Research Ethics at Simon Fraser University (file number: 2018s0264) . ”