Archery is the art, practice, or skill of using bows to shoot arrows. A person who shoots arrows with a bow is called a bowman or an archer. Someone who makes bows is known as a bowyer, someone who makes arrows is a fletcher, and someone who manufactures metal arrowheads is an arrowsmith.
A bow consists of a semi-rigid but elastic arc with a high-tensile bowstring joining the ends of the two limbs of the bow. An arrow is a projectile with a pointed tip and a long shaft with stabilizer fins (fletching) towards the back, with a narrow notch (nock) at the very end to contact the bowstring.
To load an arrow for shooting (nocking an arrow), the
archer places an arrow across the middle of the bow with the bowstring
in the arrow's nock. To shoot, the archer holds the bow at its center
with one hand and pulls back (draws) the arrow and the bowstring with the other (typically the dominant hand). This flexes the two limbs of the bow rearwards, which perform the function of a pair of cantilever springs to store elastic energy.
Typically while maintaining the draw, the archer aims the shot intuitively or by sighting along the arrow. Then archer releases (looses) the draw, allowing the limbs' stored energy to convert into kinetic energy transmitted via the bowstring to the arrow, propelling it to fly forward with high velocity.
A container or bag for additional arrows for quick reloading is called a quiver.
When not in use, bows are generally kept unstrung, meaning
one or both ends of the bowstring are detached from the bow. This
removes all residual tension on the bow and can help prevent it from
losing strength or elasticity over time. Many bow designs also let it
straighten out more completely, reducing the space needed to store the
bow. Returning the bowstring to its ready-to-use position is called stringing the bow.
The oldest known evidence of arrows comes from South African sites such as Sibudu Cave, where likely arrowheads have been found, dating from approximately 72,000–60,000 years ago.
In Eurasia, the bow and arrow reappears around the Upper Paleolithic. After the end of the last glacial period, use of the bow seems to have spread to every inhabited region, except for Australasia and most of Oceania.
The earliest probable arrowheads found outside of Africa were discovered in 2020 in Fa Hien Cave, Sri Lanka.
It has been dated to 48,000 years ago. "Bow-and-arrow hunting at the
Sri Lankan site likely focused on monkeys and smaller animals, such as
squirrels, Langley says. Remains of these creatures were found in the
same sediment as the bone points."
The earliest definite remains of bow and arrow from Europe are
possible fragments from Germany found at Mannheim-Vogelstang dated
17,500–18,000 years ago, and at Stellmoor dated 11,000 years ago. Azilian points found in Grotte du Bichon,
Switzerland, alongside the remains of both a bear and a hunter, with
flint fragments found in the bear's third vertebra, suggest the use of
arrows at 13,500 years ago.
At the site of Nataruk in Turkana County, Kenya, obsidian
bladelets found embedded in a skull and within the thoracic cavity of
another skeleton, suggest the use of stone-tipped arrows as weapons
about 10,000 years ago.
The oldest extant bows in one piece are the elmHolmegaard bows from Denmark which were dated to 9,000 BCE. Several bows from Holmegaard, Denmark, date 8,000 years ago. High-performance wooden bows are currently made following the Holmegaard design.
The Stellmoor bow fragments from northern Germany were dated to about 8,000 BCE, but they were destroyed in Hamburg during the Second World War, before carbon 14 dating was available; their age is attributed by archaeological association.
Bow and arrow pictured in the coat of arms of the historical province of Savonia
The bow was an important weapon for both hunting and warfare from prehistoric times until the widespread use of gunpowder weapons in the 16th century. It was also common in ancient warfare, although certain cultures would not favor them. Greek poet Archilocus expressed scorn for fighting with bows and slings.
Organised warfare with bows ended in the early to mid-17th
century in Western Europe, but it persisted into the 19th century in
Eastern cultures, including hunting and warfare in the New World. In the Canadian Arctic bows were made until the end of the 20th century for hunting caribou, for instance at Igloolik. The bow has more recently been used as a weapon of tribal warfare in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa; an example was documented in 2009 in Kenya when Kisii people and Kalenjin people clashed, resulting in four deaths.
The British upper class led a revival of archery as a sport in the late 18th century. Sir Ashton Lever, an antiquarian and collector, formed the Toxophilite Society in London in 1781, under the patronage of George, then Prince of Wales.
Construction
Parts of the bow
The basic elements of a bow are a pair of curved elasticlimbs, traditionally made from wood, joined by a riser. Both ends of the limbs are connected by a string known as the bow string. By pulling the string backwards the archer exerts compression force on the string-facing section, or belly, of the limbs as well as placing the outer section, or back, under tension.
While the string is held, this stores the energy later released in
putting the arrow to flight. The force required to hold the string
stationary at full draw is often used to express the power of a bow, and
is known as its draw weight, or weight.
Other things being equal, a higher draw weight means a more powerful
bow, which is able to project heavier arrows at the same velocity or the
same arrow at a greater velocity.
The various parts of the bow can be subdivided into further
sections. The topmost limb is known as the upper limb, while the bottom
limb is the lower limb. At the tip of each limb is a nock, which is used
to attach the bowstring to the limbs. The riser is usually divided into
the grip, which is held by the archer, as well as the arrow rest and
the bow window. The arrow rest is a small ledge or extension above the
grip which the arrow rests upon while being aimed. The bow window is
that part of the riser above the grip, which contains the arrow rest.
In bows drawn and held by hand, the maximum draw weight is determined by the strength of the archer.
The maximum distance the string could be displaced and thus the longest
arrow that could be loosed from it, a bow's draw length, is determined
by the size of the archer.
A composite bow
uses a combination of materials to create the limbs, allowing the use
of materials specialized for the different functions of a bow limb. The
classic composite bow uses wood for lightness and dimensional stability
in the core, horn to store compression energy, and sinew
for its ability to store energy in tension. Such bows, typically Asian,
would often use a stiff end on the limb end, having the effect of a
recurve. In this type of bow, this is known by the Arabic name 'siyah'.
An arrow usually consists of a shaft with an arrowhead attached to the front end, with fletchings and a nock at the other.
Modern arrows are usually made from carbon fibre, aluminum, fiberglass,
and wood shafts. Carbon shafts have the advantage that they do not bend
or warp, but they can often be too light weight to shoot from some bows
and are expensive. Aluminum shafts are less expensive than carbon
shafts, but they can bend and warp from use. Wood shafts are the least
expensive option but often will not be identical in weight and size to
each other and break more often than the other types of shafts.
Arrow sizes vary greatly across cultures and range from very short ones
that require the use of special equipment to be shot to ones in use in
the Amazon River jungles that are 2.6 m (8.5 feet) long. Most modern arrows are 55 to 75 cm (22 to 30 inches) in length.
Arrows come in many types, among which are breasted, bob-tailed, barreled, clout, and target. A breasted arrow is thickest at the area right behind the fletchings, and tapers towards the (nock) and head. A bob-tailed arrow is thickest right behind the head, and tapers to the nock. A barrelled arrow is thickest in the centre of the arrow. Target arrows are those arrows used for target shooting rather than warfare or hunting, and usually have simple arrowheads.
For safety reasons, a bow should never be shot without an arrow
nocked; without an arrow, the energy that is normally transferred into
the projectile is instead directed back into the bow itself, which will
cause damage to the bow's limbs.
The end of the arrow that is designed to hit the target is called the
arrowhead. Usually, these are separate items that are attached to the
arrow shaft by either tangs or sockets. Materials used in the past for
arrowheads include flint, bone, horn, or metal. Most modern arrowheads
are made of steel, but wood and other traditional materials are still
used occasionally. A number of different types of arrowheads are known,
with the most common being bodkins, broadheads, and piles. Bodkin heads are simple spikes made of metal of various shapes, designed to pierce armour.
A broadhead arrowhead is usually triangular or leaf-shaped and has a
sharpened edge or edges. Broadheads are commonly used for hunting.
A pile arrowhead is a simple metal cone, either sharpened to a point or
somewhat blunt, that is used mainly for target shooting. A pile head is
the same diameter as the arrow shaft and is usually just fitted over
the tip of the arrow.
Other heads are known, including the blunt head, which is flat at the
end and is used for hunting small game or birds, and is designed to not
pierce the target nor embed itself in trees or other objects and make
recovery difficult. Another type of arrowhead is a barbed head, usually used in warfare or hunting.
Bowstrings may have a nocking point marked on them, which serves to
mark where the arrow is fitted to the bowstring before shooting.
The area around the nocking point is usually bound with thread to
protect the area around the nocking point from wear by the archer's
hands. This section is called the serving.
At one end of the bowstring a loop is formed, which is permanent. The
other end of the bowstring also has a loop, but this is not permanently
formed into the bowstring but is constructed by tying a knot into the
string to form a loop. Traditionally this knot is known as the archer's
knot, but is a form of the timber hitch. The knot can be adjusted to lengthen or shorten the bowstring. The adjustable loop is known as the "tail". The string is often twisted (this being called the "flemish twist").
Bowstrings have been constructed of many materials throughout history, including fibres such as flax, silk, and hemp. Other materials used were animal guts, animal sinews, and rawhide. Modern fibres such as Dacron or Kevlar are now used in commercial bowstring construction, as well as steel wires in some compound bows. Compound bows have a mechanical system of pulley cams over which the bowstring is wound. Nylon is useful only in emergency situations, as it stretches too much.
Types of bow
There is no single accepted system of classification of bows.
Bows may be described by various characteristics including the
materials used, the length of the draw that they permit, the shape of
the bow in sideways view, and the shape of the limb in cross-section.
Commonly-used descriptors for bows include:
By side profile
Recurve bow:
a bow with the tips curving away from the archer. The curves straighten
out as the bow is drawn and the return of the tip to its curved state
after release of the arrow adds extra velocity to the arrow.
Reflex bow:
a bow whose entire limbs curve away from the archer when unstrung. The
curves are opposite to the direction in which the bow flexes while
drawn.
Composite bow: a bow made of more than one material.
By cross-section of limb
Longbow:
a self bow with limbs rounded in cross-section, about the same height
as the archer so as to allow a full draw, usually over 1.5 m (5 feet)
long. The traditional English longbow was usually made of yew wood, but other woods are also used.
Flatbow: the limbs are approximately rectangular in cross-section. This was traditional in many Native American societies and was found to be the most efficient shape for bow limbs by American engineers in the 20th century.
Other characteristics
Takedown bow:
a bow that can be disassembled for transportation, usually consisting
of three parts: two limbs and a riser, in addition to the string.
Compound bow: a bow with mechanical amplifiers to aid with drawing the bowstring. Usually, these amplifiers are asymmetric pulleys called cams (though they are not actually cams) at the ends of the limbs, which provide a mechanical advantage (known as the let-off) while holding the bow in full draw. Such bows typically have high draw weights and are usually drawn with a release aid with a trigger mechanism for a consistently clean release.
Crossbow: a bow mounted horizontally on a frame similar to a firearm stock, which has a locking mechanism for holding the bowstring at full draw. Crossbows typically shoot arrow-like darts called bolts or "quarrels", rather than normal arrows.
Footbow:
a bow meant to be used with the legs and arms while lying down and
used in the current distance record for the furthest arrow shot.
Scientific and technical journal publications per million residents (2013)
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses.
The part of academic written output that is not formally published but
merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review
or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review
quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal,
publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, although many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary,
and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. There is
also a tendency for existing journals to divide into specialized
sections as the field itself becomes more specialized. Along with the
variation in review and publication procedures, the kinds of
publications that are accepted as contributions to knowledge or research
differ greatly among fields and subfields. In the sciences, the desire
for statistically significant results leads to publication bias.
Academic publishing is undergoing major changes, as it makes the
transition from the print to the electronic format. Business models are
different in the electronic environment. Since the early 1990s,
licensing of electronic resources, particularly journals, has been very
common. An important trend, particularly with respect to journals in the
sciences, is open access
via the Internet. In open access publishing, a journal article is made
available free for all on the web by the publisher at the time of
publication. Both open and closed journals are sometimes funded by the
author paying an article processing charge,
thereby shifting some fees from the reader to the researcher or their
funder. Many open or closed journals fund their operations without such
fees and others use them in predatory publishing. The Internet has facilitated open access self-archiving, in which authors themselves make a copy of their published articles available free for all on the web. Some important results in mathematics have been published only on arXiv.
History
The Journal des sçavans (later spelled Journal des savants), established by Denis de Sallo,
was the earliest academic journal published in Europe. Its content
included obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. The first issue appeared as a twelve-page quartopamphlet on Monday, 5 January 1665, shortly before the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, on 6 March 1665.
At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was
controversial and widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for a new
discovery to be announced as a monograph, reserving priority for the discoverer, but indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Isaac Newton and Leibniz used this approach. However, this method did not work well. Robert K. Merton,
a sociologist, found that 92% of cases of simultaneous discovery in the
17th century ended in dispute. The number of disputes dropped to 72% in
the 18th century, 59% by the latter half of the 19th century, and 33%
by the first half of the 20th century. The decline in contested claims for priority
in research discoveries can be credited to the increasing acceptance of
the publication of papers in modern academic journals, with estimates
suggesting that around 50 million journal articles have been published since the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions. The Royal Society
was steadfast in its not-yet-popular belief that science could only
move forward through a transparent and open exchange of ideas backed by
experimental evidence.
Early scientific journals embraced several models: some were run
by a single individual who exerted editorial control over the contents,
often simply publishing extracts from colleagues' letters, while others
employed a group decision-making process, more closely aligned to modern
peer review. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that peer
review became the standard.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Scientific Publishing
The COVID-19 pandemic
hijacked the entire world of basic and clinical science, with
unprecedented shifts in funding priorities worldwide and a boom in
medical publishing, accompanied by an unprecedented increase in the
number of publications. Preprints servers become much popular during the pandemic, the Covid situation has an impact also on traditional peer-review.
Covid has deepened the wests monopoly of science-publishing, "by
August 2021, at least 210,000 new papers on covid-19 had been published,
according to a Royal Society study. Of the 720,000-odd authors of these
papers, nearly 270,000 were from the US, the UK, Italy or Spain."
In the 1960s and 1970s, commercial publishers began to selectively
acquire "top-quality" journals that were previously published by
nonprofit academic societies. When the commercial publishers raised the
subscription prices significantly, they lost little of the market, due
to the inelastic demand for these journals. Although there are over 2,000 publishers, five for-profit companies (Reed Elsevier, Springer Science+Business Media, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage) accounted for 50% of articles published in 2013. (Since 2013, Springer Science+Business Media has undergone a merger to form an even bigger company named Springer Nature.) Available data indicate that these companies have profit margins of around 40% making it one of the most profitable industries, especially compared to the smaller publishers, which likely operate with low margins. These factors have contributed to the "serials crisis"
– total expenditures on serials increased 7.6% per year from 1986 to
2005, yet the number of serials purchased increased an average of only
1.9% per year.
Unlike most industries, in academic publishing the two most important inputs are provided "virtually free of charge".
These are the articles and the peer review process. Publishers argue
that they add value to the publishing process through support to the
peer review group, including stipends, as well as through typesetting,
printing, and web publishing. Investment analysts, however, have been
skeptical of the value added by for-profit publishers, as exemplified by
a 2005 Deutsche Bank analysis which stated that "we believe the
publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process... We
are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly
and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins
wouldn't be available."
A crisis in academic publishing is "widely perceived"; the apparent crisis has to do with the combined pressure of budget cuts at universities and increased costs for journals (the serials crisis).
The university budget cuts have reduced library budgets and reduced
subsidies to university-affiliated publishers. The humanities have been
particularly affected by the pressure on university publishers, which
are less able to publish monographs
when libraries can not afford to purchase them. For example, the ARL
found that in "1986, libraries spent 44% of their budgets on books
compared with 56% on journals; twelve years later, the ratio had skewed
to 28% and 72%."
Meanwhile, monographs are increasingly expected for tenure in the
humanities. In 2002 the Modern Language Association expressed hope that electronic publishing would solve the issue.
In 2009 and 2010, surveys and reports found that libraries faced
continuing budget cuts, with one survey in 2009 finding that 36% of UK
libraries had their budgets cut by 10% or more, compared to 29% with
increased budgets. In the 2010s, libraries began more aggressive cost cutting with the leverage of open access and open data. Data analysis with open source tools like Unpaywall Journals empowered library systems in reducing their subscription costs by 70% with the cancellation of the big deal with publishers like Elsevier.
Several models are being investigated, such as open publication models or adding community-oriented features.
It is also considered that "Online scientific interaction outside the
traditional journal space is becoming more and more important to
academic communication".
In addition, experts have suggested measures to make the publication
process more efficient in disseminating new and important findings by
evaluating the worthiness of publication on the basis of the
significance and novelty of the research finding.
In academic publishing, a paper is an academic work that is usually published in an academic journal.
It contains original research results or reviews existing results. Such
a paper, also called an article, will only be considered valid if it
undergoes a process of peer review by one or more referees
(who are academics in the same field) who check that the content of the
paper is suitable for publication in the journal. A paper may undergo a
series of reviews, revisions, and re-submissions before finally being
accepted or rejected for publication. This process typically takes
several months. Next, there is often a delay of many months (or in some
fields, over a year) before an accepted manuscript appears.
This is particularly true for the most popular journals where the
number of accepted articles often outnumbers the space for printing. Due
to this, many academics self-archive a 'preprint' or 'postprint' copy of their paper for free download from their personal or institutional website.
Some journals, particularly newer ones, are now published in electronic form only.
Paper journals are now generally made available in electronic form as
well, both to individual subscribers, and to libraries. Almost always
these electronic versions are available to subscribers immediately upon
publication of the paper version, or even before; sometimes they are
also made available to non-subscribers, either immediately (by open access journals) or after an embargo
of anywhere from two to twenty-four months or more, in order to protect
against loss of subscriptions. Journals having this delayed
availability are sometimes called delayed open access journals.
Ellison in 2011 reported that in economics the dramatic increase in
opportunities to publish results online has led to a decline in the use
of peer-reviewed articles.
Note: Law review is the generic term for a journal of legal scholarship in the United States, often operating by rules radically different from those for most other academic journals.
Peer review is a central concept for most academic publishing; other
scholars in a field must find a work sufficiently high in quality for it
to merit publication. A secondary benefit of the process is an indirect
guard against plagiarism
since reviewers are usually familiar with the sources consulted by the
author(s). The origins of routine peer review for submissions dates to
1752 when the Royal Society of London took over official responsibility
for Philosophical Transactions. However, there were some earlier examples.
While journal editors largely agree the system is essential to
quality control in terms of rejecting poor quality work, there have been
examples of important results that are turned down by one journal
before being taken to others. Rena Steinzor wrote:
Perhaps the most widely recognized
failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of
high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were
initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far
as the editor of Philosophical Transaction's 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner's report of the first vaccination against smallpox.
"Confirmatory bias" is the unconscious tendency to accept reports
which support the reviewer's views and to downplay those which do not.
Experimental studies show the problem exists in peer reviewing.
There are various types of peer review feedback that may be given prior to publication, including but not limited to:
Single-blind peer review
Double-blind peer review
Open peer review
Publishing process
The process of academic publishing, which begins when authors submit a manuscript to a publisher, is divided into two distinct phases: peer review and production.
The process of peer review is organized by the journal editor and
is complete when the content of the article, together with any
associated images, data, and supplementary material are accepted for
publication. The peer review process is increasingly managed online,
through the use of proprietary systems, commercial software packages, or
open source and free software. A manuscript undergoes one or more
rounds of review; after each round, the author(s) of the article modify
their submission in line with the reviewers' comments; this process is
repeated until the editor is satisfied and the work is accepted.
The production process, controlled by a production editor or publisher, then takes an article through copy editing, typesetting,
inclusion in a specific issue of a journal, and then printing and
online publication. Academic copy editing seeks to ensure that an
article conforms to the journal's house style,
that all of the referencing and labelling is correct, and that the text
is consistent and legible; often this work involves substantive editing
and negotiating with the authors. Because the work of academic copy editors can overlap with that of authors' editors, editors employed by journal publishers often refer to themselves as “manuscript editors”. During this process, copyright is often transferred from the author to the publisher.
In much of the 20th century, such articles were photographed for printing into proceedings and journals, and this stage was known as camera-ready copy. With modern digital submission in formats such as PDF, this photographing step is no longer necessary, though the term is still sometimes used.
The author
will review and correct proofs at one or more stages in the production
process. The proof correction cycle has historically been
labour-intensive as handwritten comments by authors and editors are
manually transcribed by a proof reader
onto a clean version of the proof. In the early 21st century, this
process was streamlined by the introduction of e-annotations in Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat,
and other programs, but it still remained a time-consuming and
error-prone process. The full automation of the proof correction cycles
has only become possible with the onset of onlinecollaborative writing platforms, such as Authorea, Google Docs, and various others, where a remote service oversees the copy-editing interactions of multiple authors and exposes them as explicit, actionable historic events. At the end of this process, a final version of record is published.
Academic authors cite sources they have used, in order to support
their assertions and arguments and to help readers find more information
on the subject. It also gives credit to authors whose work they use and
helps avoid plagiarism. The topic of dual publication (also known as self-plagiarism) has been addressed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), as well as in the research literature itself.
Each scholarly journal uses a specific format for citations (also
known as references). Among the most common formats used in research
papers are the APA, CMS, and MLA styles.
Scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature is a large
industry which generated $23.5 billion in revenue; $9.4 billion of that
was specifically from the publication of English-language scholarly
journals. Most scientificresearch is initially published in scientific journals and considered to be a primary source. Technical reports, for minor research results and engineering and design work (including computer software), round out the primary literature. Secondary sources in the sciences include articles in review journals (which provide a synthesis of research articles on a topic to highlight advances and new lines of research), and books for large projects, broad arguments, or compilations of articles. Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended for broad public consumption or academic libraries.
A partial exception to scientific publication practices is in many fields of applied science, particularly that of U.S. computer science research. An equally prestigious site of publication within U.S. computer science are some academic conferences.
Reasons for this departure include a large number of such conferences,
the quick pace of research progress, and computer science professional society support for the distribution and archiving of conference proceedings.
Social sciences
Publishing in the social sciences
is very different in different fields. Some fields, like economics, may
have very "hard" or highly quantitative standards for publication, much
like the natural sciences. Others, like anthropology or sociology,
emphasize field work and reporting on first-hand observation as well as quantitative work. Some social science fields, such as public health or demography, have significant shared interests with professions like law and medicine, and scholars in these fields often also publish in professional magazines.
Humanities
Publishing in the humanities
is in principle similar to publishing elsewhere in the academy; a range
of journals, from general to extremely specialized, are available, and university presses
issue many new humanities books every year. The arrival of online
publishing opportunities has radically transformed the economics of the
field and the shape of the future is controversial.
Unlike science, where timeliness is critically important, humanities
publications often take years to write and years more to publish. Unlike
the sciences, research is most often an individual process and is
seldom supported by large grants. Journals rarely make profits and are
typically run by university departments.
The following describes the situation in the United States. In
many fields, such as literature and history, several published articles
are typically required for a first tenure-track job, and a published or forthcoming book is now often required before tenure. Some critics complain that this de facto
system has emerged without thought to its consequences; they claim that
the predictable result is the publication of much shoddy work, as well
as unreasonable demands on the already limited research time of young
scholars. To make matters worse, the circulation of many humanities
journals in the 1990s declined to almost untenable levels, as many
libraries cancelled subscriptions, leaving fewer and fewer peer-reviewed
outlets for publication; and many humanities professors' first books
sell only a few hundred copies, which often does not pay for the cost of
their printing. Some scholars have called for a publication subvention
of a few thousand dollars to be associated with each graduate studentfellowship or new tenure-track hire, in order to alleviate the financial pressure on journals.
Potential readership of Open Access material is far greater than
that for publications where the full-text is restricted to subscribers.
Details of contents can be read by specialised web harvesters.
Details of contents also appear in normal search engines like Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo, etc.
Open Access is often confused with specific funding models such as Article Processing Charges (APC)
being paid by authors or their funders, sometimes misleadingly called
"open access model". The reason this term is misleading is due to the
existence of many other models, including funding sources listed in the
original the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration:
"the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities
and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by
discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits
from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the
demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or
access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves". For
more recent open public discussion of open access funding models, see Flexible membership funding model for Open Access publishing with no author-facing charges.
Prestige journals using the APC model often charge several
thousand dollars. Oxford University Press, with over 300 journals, has
fees ranging from £1000-£2500, with discounts of 50% to 100% to authors
from developing countries. Wiley Blackwell has 700 journals available, and they charge different amounts for each journal. Springer, with over 2600 journals, charges US$3000 or EUR 2200 (excluding VAT).
The online distribution of individual articles and academic
journals then takes place without charge to readers and libraries. Most open access journals remove all the financial, technical, and legal barriers that limit access to academic materials to paying customers. The Public Library of Science and BioMed Central are prominent examples of this model.
Fee-based open access publishing has been criticized on quality
grounds, as the desire to maximize publishing fees could cause some
journals to relax the standard of peer review. Although, similar desire
is also present in the subscription model, where publishers increase
numbers or published articles in order to justify raising their fees. It
may be criticized on financial grounds as well because the necessary
publication or subscription fees have proven to be higher than
originally expected. Open access advocates generally reply that because
open access is as much based on peer reviewing as traditional
publishing, the quality should be the same (recognizing that both
traditional and open access journals have a range of quality). It has
also been argued that good science done by academic institutions who
cannot afford to pay for open access might not get published at all, but
most open access journals permit the waiver of the fee for financial
hardship or authors in underdeveloped countries. In any case, all authors have the option of self-archiving their articles in their institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories in order to make them open access, whether or not they publish them in a journal.
If they publish in a Hybrid open access journal,
authors or their funders pay a subscription journal a publication fee
to make their individual article open access. The other articles in such
hybrid journals are either made available after a delay or remain
available only by subscription. Most traditional publishers (including Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford University Press, and Springer Science+Business Media)
have already introduced such a hybrid option, and more are following.
The fraction of the authors of a hybrid open access journal that makes
use of its open access option can, however, be small. It also remains
unclear whether this is practical in fields outside the sciences, where
there is much less availability of outside funding. In 2006, several funding agencies, including the Wellcome Trust and several divisions of the Research Councils in the UK announced the availability of extra funding to their grantees for such open access journal publication fees.
In May 2016, the Council for the European Union agreed that from
2020 all scientific publications as a result of publicly funded research
must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally reuse
research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless
there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example,
intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues.
Growth
In recent decades there has been a growth in academic publishing in developing countries
as they become more advanced in science and technology. Although the
large majority of scientific output and academic documents are produced
in developed countries, the rate of growth in these countries has
stabilized and is much smaller than the growth rate in some of the
developing countries. The fastest scientific output growth rate over the
last two decades has been in the Middle East and Asia with Iran leading
with an 11-fold increase followed by the Republic of Korea, Turkey,
Cyprus, China, and Oman. In comparison, the only G8 countries in top 20 ranking with fastest performance improvement are, Italy which stands at tenth and Canada at 13th globally.
By 2004, it was noted that the output of scientific papers originating from the European Union
had a larger share of the world's total from 36.6% to 39.3% and from
32.8% to 37.5% of the "top one per cent of highly cited scientific
papers". However, the United States' output dropped from 52.3% to 49.4%
of the world's total, and its portion of the top one percent dropped
from 65.6% to 62.8%.
Iran, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa
were the only developing countries among the 31 nations that produced
97.5% of the most cited scientific articles in a study published in
2004. The remaining 162 countries contributed less than 2.5%. The Royal Society
in a 2011 report stated that in share of English scientific research
papers the United States was first followed by China, the UK, Germany,
Japan, France, and Canada. The report predicted that China would
overtake the United States sometime before 2020, possibly as early as
2013. China's scientific impact, as measured by other scientists citing
the published papers the next year, is smaller although also increasing.
Role for publishers in scholarly communication
There is increasing frustration amongst OA advocates, with what is
perceived as resistance to change on the part of many of the established
academic publishers. Publishers are often accused of capturing and
monetising publicly-funded research, using free academic labour for peer
review, and then selling the resulting publications back to academia at
inflated profits. Such frustrations sometimes spill over into hyperbole, of which "publishers add no value" is one of the most common examples.
However, scholarly publishing is not a simple process, and
publishers do add value to scholarly communication as it is currently
designed.
Kent Anderson maintains a list of things that journal publishers do
which currently contains 102 items and has yet to be formally contested
from anyone who challenges the value of publishers.
Many items on the list could be argued to be of value primarily to the
publishers themselves, e.g. "Make money and remain a constant in the
system of scholarly output". However, others provide direct value to
researchers and research in steering the academic literature. This
includes arbitrating disputes (e.g. over ethics, authorship), stewarding
the scholarly record, copy-editing, proofreading, type-setting, styling
of materials, linking the articles to open and accessible datasets, and
(perhaps most importantly) arranging and managing scholarly peer
review. The latter is a task that should not be underestimated as it
effectively entails coercing busy people into giving their time to
improve someone else's work and maintain the quality of the literature.
Not to mention the standard management processes for large enterprises,
including infrastructure, people, security, and marketing. All of these
factors contribute in one way or another to maintaining the scholarly
record.
It could be questioned though, whether these functions are
actually necessary to the core aim of scholarly communication, namely,
dissemination of research to researchers and other stakeholders such as
policy makers, economic, biomedical and industrial practitioners as well
as the general public. Above, for example, we question the necessity of
the current infrastructure for peer review, and if a scholar-led
crowdsourced alternative may be preferable. In addition, one of the
biggest tensions in this space is associated with the question if
for-profit companies (or the private sector) should be allowed to be in
charge of the management and dissemination of academic output and
execute their powers while serving, for the most part, their own
interests. This is often considered alongside the value added by such
companies, and therefore the two are closely linked as part of broader
questions on appropriate expenditure of public funds, the role of
commercial entities in the public sector, and issues around the
privatisation of scholarly knowledge.
Publishing could certainly be done at a lower cost than common at
present. There are significant researcher-facing inefficiencies in the
system including the common scenario of multiple rounds of rejection and
resubmission to various venues as well as the fact that some publishers profit beyond reasonable scale. What is missing most
from the current publishing market, is transparency about the nature
and the quality of the services publishers offer. This would allow
authors to make informed choices, rather than decisions based on
indicators that are unrelated to research quality, such as the JIF.
All the above questions are being investigated and alternatives could
be considered and explored. Yet, in the current system, publishers still
play a role in managing processes of quality assurance, interlinking
and findability of research. As the role of scholarly publishers within
the knowledge communication industry continues to evolve, it is seen as
necessary that they can justify their operation based on the intrinsic value that they add,and combat the perception that they add no value to the process.
A reviewer at the American National Institutes of Health evaluating a grant proposal
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's
suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type
of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity
occurs, e.g., medical peer review. It can also be used as a teaching tool to help students improve writing assignments.
Professional
Professional
peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to
improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. In
academia, peer review is used to inform decisions related to faculty
advancement and tenure. Henry Oldenburg (1619–1677) was a German-born British philosopher who is seen as the 'father' of modern scientific peer review.
A prototype professional peer-review process was recommended in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishāq ibn ʻAlī al-Ruhāwī
(854–931). He stated that a visiting physician had to make duplicate
notes of a patient's condition on every visit. When the patient was
cured or had died, the notes of the physician were examined by a local
medical council of other physicians, who would decide whether the
treatment had met the required standards of medical care.
Professional peer review is common in the field of health care, where it is usually called clinical peer review.
Further, since peer review activity is commonly segmented by clinical
discipline, there is also physician peer review, nursing peer review,
dentistry peer review, etc. Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting, law, engineering (e.g., software peer review, technical peer review), aviation, and even forest fire management.
Peer review is used in education to achieve certain learning
objectives, particularly as a tool to reach higher order processes in
the affective and cognitive domains as defined by Bloom's taxonomy.
This may take a variety of forms, including closely mimicking the
scholarly peer review processes used in science and medicine.
Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed (usually anonymously) by experts (or "peers") in the same field. Peer review helps the academic publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief, the editorial board or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference.
Peer review requires a
community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who
are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial
review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or
inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the
significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated
among its contemporaries. Peer review is generally considered necessary
to academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals.
However, peer review does not entirely prevent publication of invalid
research,
and as experimentally controlled studies of this process are difficult
to arrange, direct evidence that peer review improves the quality of
published papers is scarce.
Scholarly peer review has been subject to several criticisms, and
various proposals for reforming the system have been suggested over the
years. Many studies have emphasized the problems inherent to the
process of peer review. (see Squazzoni et al. 2017). Moreover, Ragone et al., (2013) have shown that there is a low correlation between peer review outcomes and the future impact measured by citations. Brezis
and Birukou also show that the Peer Review process is not working
properly. They underline that the ratings are not robust, e.g., changing
reviewers can have a dramatic impact on the review results. Two main
elements affect the bias in the peer process.
The first element is that referees display homophily
in their taste and perception of innovative ideas. So reviewers who are
developing conventional ideas will tend to give low grades to
innovative projects, while reviewers who have developed innovative ideas
tend, by homophily, to give higher grades to innovative projects.
The second element leading to a high variance in the peer review
process is that reviewers are not investing the same amount of time to
analyze the projects (or equivalently are not with the same abilities).
Brezis and Biruku
show that this heterogeneity among referees will lead to seriously
affect the whole peer review process, and will lead to main
arbitrariness in the results of the process.
The peer process is also in use for projects acceptance. (For
projects, the acceptance rates are small and are between 1% and 20%,
with an average of 10%. In the European H2020 calls, the acceptance rate
is 1.8%.) Peer review is more problematic when choosing the projects to
be funded since innovative projects are not highly ranked in the
existing peer-review process. The peer-review process leads to
conformity, i.e., the selection of less controversial projects and
papers. This may even influence the type of proposals scholars will
propose, since scholars need to find financing for their research as
discussed by Martin, 1997:
"A common informal view is that it is easier to obtain funds for
conventional projects. Those who are eager to get funding are not likely
to propose radical or unorthodox projects. Since you don't know who the
referees are going to be, it is best to assume that they are
middle-of-the-road. Therefore, the middle-of-the-road application is
safer".
Other attempts to reform the peer review process originate among others from the fields of metascience and journalology.
Reformers seek to increase the reliability and efficiency of the peer
review process and to provide it with a scientific foundation.
Alternatives to common peer review practices have been put to the test, in particular open peer review, where the comments are visible to readers, generally with the identities of the peer reviewers disclosed as well, e.g., F1000, eLife, BMJ, and BioMed Central.
The European Union has been using peer review in the "Open Method of Co-ordination" of policies in the fields of active labour market policy since 1999. In 2004, a program of peer reviews started in social inclusion.
Each program sponsors about eight peer review meetings in each year, in
which a "host country" lays a given policy or initiative open to
examination by half a dozen other countries and the relevant
European-level NGOs. These usually meet over two days and include visits
to local sites where the policy can be seen in operation. The meeting
is preceded by the compilation of an expert report on which participating "peer countries" submit comments. The results are published on the web.
The State of California is the only U.S. state to mandate
scientific peer review. In 1997, the Governor of California signed into
law Senate Bill 1320 (Sher), Chapter 295, statutes of 1997, which
mandates that, before any CalEPA Board, Department, or Office adopts a
final version of a rule-making, the scientific findings, conclusions,
and assumptions on which the proposed rule are based must be submitted
for independent external scientific peer review. This requirement is
incorporated into the California Health and Safety Code Section 57004.
Medical peer review may be distinguished in four classifications:
Clinical peer review
is a procedure for assessing a patient's involvement with experiences
of care. It is a piece of progressing proficient practice assessment and
centered proficient practice assessment—significant supporters of
supplier credentialing and privileging.
Peer evaluation of clinical teaching skills for both physicians and nurses.
Scientific peer review of journal articles.
A secondary round of peer review for the clinical value of articles concurrently published in medical journals.
Additionally, "medical peer review" has been used by the American Medical Association
to refer not only to the process of improving quality and safety in
health care organizations, but also to the process of rating clinical
behavior or compliance with professional society membership standards.[33][34]
The clinical network believes it to be the most ideal method of
guaranteeing that distributed exploration is dependable and that any
clinical medicines that it advocates are protected and viable for
individuals. Thus, the terminology has poor standardization and
specificity, particularly as a database search term.
In engineering,
technical peer review is a type of engineering review. Technical peer
reviews are a well defined review process for finding and fixing
defects, conducted by a team of peers with assigned roles. Technical
peer reviews are carried out by peers representing areas of life cycle
affected by material being reviewed (usually limited to 6 or fewer
people). Technical peer reviews are held within development phases,
between milestone reviews, on completed products or completed portions
of products.
Extended peer review
Extended peer review
is the process of including people and groups with experience beyond
that of working academics in the processes of assuring the quality of
research. If conducted systematically, this can lead to more reliable,
or applicable, results than a peer review process conducted purely by
academics.
Pedagogical tool
Peer review, or student peer assessment,
is widely used in secondary and post-secondary education as part of the
writing process. This collaborative learning tool involves groups of
students reviewing each other's work and providing feedback and
suggestions for revision. While widely used in English and composition
classrooms, peer review has gained popularity in other disciplines
which require writing as part of the curriculum. These other disciplines
include those in the social and natural sciences.
Peer review in classrooms helps students become more invested in their
work, and the classroom environment at large. Understanding how their
work is read by a diverse readership before it is graded by the teacher
may also help students clarify ideas, and understand how to persuasively
reach different audience members via their writing. It also give
students professional experience that they might draw on later when
asked to review the work of a colleague prior to publication.
Critics of peer review in classrooms say that it can be
ineffective due to students' lack of practice giving constructive
criticism, or lack of expertise in the writing craft at large.
As a response to these concerns, instructors may provide examples,
model peer review with the class, or focus on specific areas of feedback
during the peer review process.
Instructors may also experiment with in-class peer review vs. peer
review as homework, or peer review using technologies afforded by
learning management systems online.
