This Master’s thesis aims to map and analyse publishing patterns at two academic departments at the University of Gothenburg - the department of Physics and the department of History. The investigation has been guided by a set of questions: Who chooses to publish their scientific outcomes? In which forums do they publish findings? In what kind of media are the results published? What type of findings get to be published? The departments' publication lists have been examined, covering the years 2004-2007. Furthermore, ten scientists have been asked to describe factors contributing to their individual publishing pattern. The analysis leans on communication theory and in particular on three concepts developed by information scientists Rob Kling and Geoffrey McKim. Their notions of trustworthiness, publicity and accessibility were created as both analytical and instrumental devices. Here, they are used analytically to describe and interpret publishing patterns. The comparison of the two departments' publishing patterns reveals both similarities and differences. They differ in their choices of publication media and types of publications. However, both departments regarded publishing as acts of communication. Hence, they shared a will to communicate scientific findings and (among other factors) this will emerged as an important incitement for choosing to publish at all. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The natural sciences and the humanities are associated with differentpublishing patterns. Open Access publishing are mainly associated withthe publishing patterns of the natural sciences. Many Swedishuniversities and research funders are proponents of Open Accesspublishing, what will that trend mean to the scholars with a publishingpattern not corresponding to Open Access? In this paper literary scholarsare interviewed for the purpose of learning the motives and strategieswhich form their publishing pattern, and how they relate to Open Accesspublishing. The results show that literary scholars are less competitiveand hold a more gentle knowledge-sharing ideal, than natural scientists.The drive to gain acknowledgment and the recognition of colleagues inorder to collect academic capital as Bourdieu describes the academicfield is still present though. The literary scholars publishes theirmaterials to a greater degree than natural scientists in a variety offormats, such as cultural magazines, books, Festschrifts and bookreviews. They value the exchange of information with non-academics aswell as colleagues. However, increased focus on productivity measuredin cited articles are threatening their non-academic publishing. OpenAccess offers a way of keeping the information exchange with nonacademics,while still enabling publishing in academic journals. Thestudy results show that the low degree of Open Access publishing amongliterary scholars are due to their assessment of what type of publicationwill lead the most efficient publishing, that it is a practical decision eventhough the Open Access ideals are appealing to the scholars. / Program: Bibliotekarie

The main aim in this thesis is to analyse the attitudes of fivearchaeologists at the Department of History, University ofGothenburg, on the subject of scholarly publishing injournals. The investigation has been led by a set of questionsconcerning the motives and conditions for submitting articlesto scholarly journals.The primary way of collecting emprical data is based onsemistructured qualitative interviews. To get a broaderpicture, the publishing patterns of the archaeologists at theDepartment of History were mapped using the databaseGöteborgs universitets publikationer (GUP). A documentstudy was also conducted.The analysis uses Björk & Holmström’s The net value ofsubmission model to highlight which factors are assumed toinfluence an author when submitting to a scientific journal.This model is reduced and developed to six aspects whichmore or less effect the decision making of the author whenpublishing an article in a scientific journal. These six aspectsare: culture, strategy, medium/form, readership, prestige andperformance.The results of the investigation show that a set of factorsinfluence the publishing decision. As a disciplinetraditionally rooted in the humanities, the archaeologists atthe Department of History have established a scientific wayof publishing. Motives and attitudes to journal publishingshow that all aspects, in varying degrees, are important indeciding where to submit an article. / Program: Bibliotekarie