Since joining Hindawi last autumn, I have been impressed by my colleagues’ dedication to Open Science and to supporting research communities. We are working on open publishing infrastructures to lead the Open Science publishing agenda and partnering with service providers to bring benefits to our authors around the world.
In this vein, we are pleased to announce today that we are shifting our journal model and appointing Chief Editors on a selection of titles during 2019.
The aim is to improve the way the journals support their communities and is in direct response to conversations we have had with authors and Editorial Board Members and consultations with policy makers, funding agencies, leading databases and Open Access organizations.
Many of these new Chief Editors already work with us as Editorial Board members and in their new roles can better champion their journals and Open Science practices, such as data sharing, within the wider academic community. They will also ensure we continue to develop these community journals in line with the academic requirements of their authors and readers which is becoming increasingly important in an era of Open Science, Open Access and Open Data. Although this could be considered as a step towards a more traditional model, we believe it demonstrates our faith in community titles led by Chief Editors in an Open Science future and will set us up to better support the academic communities which contribute to our titles for years to come.
The new Chief Editors will be directly involved with developing their journal’s Aims and Scope and will shape their individual community missions, aligned with our policies on data sharing and open dissemination of published peer-reviewed articles. With knowledge of their communities, our Chief Editors can ensure the outputs truly add value to them and are published and shared in all the relevant databases and repositories to make sure the key people will find, access, read, share and use the work published by these titles.
I am honored, humbled and excited to have this opportunity to serve the complex systems community as the Chief Editor of Complexity.
As Hiroki Sayama the new Chief Editor for Complexity said: “I am honored, humbled and excited to have this opportunity to serve the complex systems community as the Chief Editor of Complexity, the signature journal of this research field with nearly 25 years of history of publishing high-impact articles. I feel this is a responsibility vested on my shoulders, and I will do my very best.”
“There are already many open access journals out there, but it is sometimes questionable whether the original vision and mission of the Open Access movement are still kept. Luckily, Hindawi is fully committed to the core Open Access philosophy and values, and is open to implement changes and explore best practices with us. We can all work together to more efficient publication models that are accessible to both authors and readers while financially sustainable for the publisher”, he added.
Impact on the manuscript submission process
All manuscripts will continue to be screened by our internal teams before and after the formal editorial process. These checks ensure the manuscript is within the scope of the journal while ensuring potential ethical cases such as plagiarism, or citation manipulation, are handled appropriately before the Chief Editor is involved. Manuscripts that pass through into the editorial process will continue to undergo robust peer review by academics from the relevant research community, however the final decision to publish will now rest with the Chief or Associate Editor, where before it was with the Handling Editor.
We believe these journal model changes stand our journals in good stead for the future so they can better support academic communities and continue to advocate Open Science as broadly as possible.
We can’t wait to see the journals develop further to serve the academic community and we are delighted to welcome our new Chief Editors to the Hindawi family.
Sarah Greaves
Chief Publishing Officer
Hindawi