This study focuses on the academic publication processes in Saudi Arabia, the barriers that affect researchers' ability to carry out and publish research and the potential advantages and disadvantages offered by the Internet in the area of academic publishing. It addresses the readiness of researchers to adopt innovative approaches to publication including those based on electronic media. There are potential problems faced by researchers wishing to publish; these include length of time required to publish, low publication numbers, referees' demands and conditions, mailing difficulties, lack of communication between researchers and journals, delays in researchers' addressing the reviewers' amendments, the weaknesses of financial support, the cost of using and publishing articles, weaknesses in the distribution of academic journals, their limited international spread because of the use of the Arabic language more than other languages, delays in the printing of research because of the low capability of Universities' printing houses, (resulting from a lack of human and machinery resources), and finally the limited numbers of academic journals written in Arabic. In the view of the author, given that publication of papers and distribution of knowledge through the Internet is faster, more efficient and more effective than the traditional approach; many of the current procedures could be improved through the use of this medium. The data collection and analysis presented in this study addresses the extent to which such benefit could be realised in practice. This research reviews the limitations of research publishing in Saudi Arabia by focusing on the nature of academic journals, in terms of their numbers and purpose, the barriers that academic staff faced when they wished to publish their research work in local or international academic journals, and the attitudes of academics towards electronic publishing and publishing in general. The research comprises interviews, case studies, and questionnaire methods. The most prominent findings from this study are the lack of encouragement for academic staff to conduct and publish research, lack of financial support to the research publishing sector, lack of a research publishing infrastructure and a lack of private sector support for funding research and publishing. An interesting finding is that unlike many other countries, there is no culture of volunteering for work that does not provide direct financial benefit. This could be an important factor affecting the adoption of an online open publishing approach in which reviewers and editors are not paid directly for the work. This research leads to recommendations aimed at giving more focus to academic staff, the application of some regulations and incentives to encourage increased academic research and publishing, increasing the financial support to the research publishing sector, to automate the research publishing process, discarding some unnecessary elements of the process, encouraging and rewarding voluntary work in supporting research publishing, and encouraging the private sector to improve and support academic research in general and research publishing specifically. In conclusion, this study focuses on the academic publication process; the potential advantages and disadvantages offered by the Internet, and the attitudes of scholars towards electronic publishing. This research ultimately aims at proposing and implementing suitable processes and policies to solve these problems and to identifying means of overcoming the research publishing barriers in Saudi Arabia.

The purpose of this commentary is to discuss the context and theoretical underpinnings that form the basis of my four publications, and how these works have made a meaningful contribution to the study of American socio-political discourse in general, and to the study of American historical music in particular. The study of American political history has principally focused on traditional primary and secondary sources for such inquiry: contemporary letters, journals and diaries, books, official documents, newspapers and other periodicals. One major primary source that has been largely overlooked is that of published music. Two factors have precipitated this oversight: historically, traditional musicology ignored popular music as having no scholarly legitimacy. Secondly, most repository institutions have ignored, or are unaware of, the historical context and relevance of socio-political sheet music, cataloging it as a one-dimensional artifact defined almost exclusively in musical terms such as “vocal,” “instrumental,” or “ballads,” and not for its historical context and non-musical relevance. Published music encompasses far more than just notation, structure and form; it illuminates a plethora of human activity far beyond the composer-listener archetype: performance, publishing, commercial enterprise, and socio-political context are only a few of these extra-musical facets of published music that can tell us not only about the composer and music itself, but also about the society in which it was created. It was the purpose of my four published works submitted herewith to begin to remedy these issues by illuminating a source of contemporary discourse that can shed a different light on history; a discourse oriented towards the popular masses rather than the educated elite. These four works broaden contemporary discourse in American history by providing historians with the knowledge of, and access to, this vast wealth of untapped resource material.

The academic publishing sector in South Africa is facing many changes and challenges in a post- 1994 democracy. Most of these changes were brought about by the Higher Education Act No 101 of 1997. Challenges and new trends include new business and threats from multinational corporations; a limited buying market at higher education level; a need for localised content; new emerging technologies in publishing and knowledge distribution; the merging of 36 higher education institutions into 22; escalating book production costs and book prices; a non-book buying and book reading culture; illegal photocopying and widespread copyright infringement; changing student and lecturer profiles including the language of instruction; increasing pressure on academics to publish research; inefficient student loan schemes; decreasing library acquisition budgets and the transformation of the publishing industry itself in terms of BBBEE. Within the midst of all these challenges, publishers are faced with a new trend, that of selfpublishing of academic textbooks, which lecturers then prescribe to their own group of students. Self-publishing implies that authors undertake all processes related to publishing on their own, including the financial risk of publishing a book. There is a multitude of literature available on self-publishing, but very little focuses on this trend within the academic environment. A literature survey of self-publishing provided various reasons and conditions for the existence of the phenomenon. The researcher made use of two questionnaires that were sent to academic campus bookshops and academic self-publishing authors. From the results of these two surveys it is evident that academic self-publishing is an increasing trend in the higher education environment of South Africa. Reasons for self-publishing collected from the literature survey were supported by the empirical research findings from the two surveys. The main reasons for self-publishing in the academic environment include financial incentives; a volatile author-publisher relationship; issues of copyright and control; possible rejection suffered by authors; technological advances and a sense of community service among academics and lecturing staff. The study was able to prove the existence of academic self-publishing in the higher education environment of South Africa. Academic self-publishing is most apparent in the academic fields of Business, Economics and Management Sciences to the extent that it could have far-reaching financial impact on markets that are traditionally lucrative for commercial publishers. Commercial publishers are encouraged to engage with author associations and seek out possible new alternatives to satisfying author needs in a changing market place. / Dissertation (MIS)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Information Science / unrestricted

This dissertation thesis deals with electronic self-publishing of literary fiction, i.e. its publishing by the authors themselves, without involving publishers. Support from big technology companies led to unprecedented growth of this type of publishing in the 2010s and electronic self-publishing has in some countries become one of the standard ways of publishing. In spite of its expansion, electronic self-publishing is affected by many problems. The most prominent one is comparatively lower quality of many independently published e- books, mainly caused by limited knowledge of the publishing process from the side of the authors, many of which are not proper acquainted with publishing practices. The activities that should an independent author perform during the publishing process are the same as those performed by a publisher. Due to complicated character of some of these activities, many independent authors outsource them to other parties, or do not perform them at all. In the Czech Republic, electronic self-publishing is relatively undeveloped. It is true that there has probably been hundreds or thousands e-books published independently and that the number of downloads of these books is in hundreds of thousands copies. On the other hand, majority of this literature is offered for free or for...

Im Rahmen der Internationalen Open Access Week 2016 fand am 26.10.2016 die Veranstaltung "Open in Action at TU Chemnitz" statt. Der Vortrag des MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute - berichtet über die Aktivitäten des Open-Access-Verlages und die Vorteile für Autoren. Die Präsentation zeigt das Leistungsspektrum und gibt Auskunft über den Peer Review-Prozess. Seit 2015 hat die Universitätsbibliothek eine Institutionelle Vereinbarung mit dem MDPI geschlossen. Der Publikationsworkflow ist für Wissenschaffende einfach und transparent. / In the context of the International Open Access Week 2016, the event "Open in Action at TU Chemnitz" was held on 26 October 2016. The lecture of the MDPI – the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute – presents the past and current activities of the open access publisher and the author benefits. The presentation shows the procedures and the range of inhouse services in the editorial and the peer review process. The University Library of the Technische Universität Chemnitz has held an institutional membership with the MDPI AG since 2015. Thus, the publication and invoicing workflow is made simple and transparent for academics.

В нашей дипломной работе рассматривается феномен self-publishing как способ самостоятельного издания публикации, отражаются его история в России и в мире, виды self-publishing, принцип работы платформы Amazon. Таким образом, проводится практическое исследование публикаций на Amazon, выделяются основные характеристики наиболее продаваемых книг, что позволило нам сделать выводы о критериях успешности публикации. / The diploma paper examines the phenomenon of self-publishing as a way of independent publishing, reflects its history in Russia and in the world, types of self-publishing, the principle of publishing on Amazon. Thus, a practical study of publications on Amazon is carried out, the main characteristics of the best-selling books are highlighted, which allowed us to draw the conclusions about the criteria for publication success.

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