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Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences 57 : 1 (2020) : 1-5

DOI:10.6120/JoEMLS.202003_57(1).editorial

EDITORIAL

Innovations and Social Responsibilities of Scholarly Journals

Our journal (JoEMLS) has been continuously working on innovations, and dedicating to taking social responsibilities of academic societies. Insights from running scholarly journals could be flexibly applied to a wide range of areas, and our innovative management policies could contribute to scholarly publishing fields of various academic subjects. When readers, manuscript contributors and journal managers all have a comprehensive understanding of meanings and contents of journal management policies, it is beneficial to academic communication. In terms of organizational structures and editorial policies of scholarly journal publishing, all of the involved staff members are fundamental supporters, and the key to the success of an scholarly journal is a set of clear and comprehensive policies on journal organization and editing, which is also the baseline of various domestic and international scholarly journal ratings. However, at present, most chief editors and editorial board members in Taiwan focus only on the authoritative of related subject fields, and many journal management teams have overlooked the expertise of scholarly journal publishing, due to rapid personnel turnover and insufficient prerequisite knowledge and professional training of journal editing. Only when the expertise of academic editing, publishing and managing receives an equal attention as the authoritative of academic fields, can a scholarly journal have a continuous development and progress.

It is the 50th year of JoEMLS, which has built a solid foundation of scholarly journal publishing. Our several changes and measures of digital transformation regarding journal organization and editorial policies have been acknowledged and praised by many domain experts. Readers, manuscript contributors and journal managers from various subject fields have sent us mails for asking about issues regarding referencing formats, manuscript submitting, publishing and managing of scholarly journals. There have been several scholarly journals in Taiwan adopting the value-added services of academic communication created by our journal; however, it is a pity that the superficial measures might be observed and imitated, but the embedded meanings and essence cannot be easily understood and captured. Therefore, we look forward to engaging in information communication and sharing through our varied platforms of scholarly communication. It not only helps permanently preserve the experiences, but also facilitates the goal of sharing accumulated knowledge and thoughts of scholarly publishing and managing among a comprehensive academic research society. It is expected to accumulate more powerful academic energy and bring about deeper influences on issue development of scholarly journal publishing and future studies on academic development in Taiwan. We have been constantly sharing new concepts regarding scholarly publishing, managing and editorial practices of JoEMLS, actively developing diverse application modules for innovative publishing, and providing a platform for other academic journal management teams to observe and learn. We also expect to meet the publication knowledge needs of the academic research community, to attend to the development of scholarly journals, and to promote correct and positive ideas and policies of journal management. We would like to become the bridge between any public-funded journal evaluation systems and editorial teams of journals, to facilitate the collaborations between these two groups. We aim to further help improve the academic productivity in Taiwan, build a quality environment of scholarly publishing, and contribute to the journal publishing and management in the research community of Chinese language societies of the world.

In Taiwan, these has not yet been any learned societies or associations like Council of Science Editors or Committee on Publication Ethics, for gathering scholarly journal publishing peers, providing academic services and professional consulting, and acting as a platform for communicating with domestic and international groups. However, a continuous and quality environment for scholarly journal publishing requires a set of “systemized” editorial works, leading chief editors to adopt correct and appropriate measures, for enhancing the overall quality of journal manuscripts and for providing comprehensive and useful advice on editorial work. Temporal expedients would never solve the true problems. To achieve the goals mentioned above, scholarly journal managers in Taiwan should reach a consensus, and work together to form a collaborative alliance of journals, and gradually expand its influence to set up a professional consortium. A mechanism like this will help and guide more journal publishing units to be equipped with sufficient capabilities for enhancing the publishing quality in their subject fields. It will also provide references for more scholarly journal publishers and invoke discussions. It is truly beneficial to the scholarly publishing environment.

Our journal has provided explanations on “Acting Together to Promote Innovation and Creativity in JoEMLS” in our Volume 55, Issue 2 (July 2018), and we have already realize these changes step by step. In the beginning of this Volume 57 Issue 1 (March 2020), we introduce our brand new design of web pages, and we also try to meet the browsing needs of various devices in our electronic version for reading on smart phones. The responsive web information is highlighted. We also demonstrate our passion for providing academic services through our Facebook Fan Page, and the Cite2Style (https://cite2style.blog/), a website for introducing and recommending references styles of academic writing. As to the Open Peer Review (OPR) system, which was launched in JoEMLS of 2019, among the 13 articles of three volumes in 2019 (56-2, 56-3, 57-1), authors and reviewers of eight manuscripts have agreed on making the review comments open. We have produced six general reports on OPR, with an additional individual report. In almost every issue, we worked hard to encourage part of our authors and reviewers to agree on OPR. At present, we adopt several flexible and combination modes, including anonymous, non-anonymous, comment disclosure, and comment partial disclosure, to realize the ideal of OPR step by step. In the long run, we look forward to seeing the OPR system in full operation.

In this Issue1 of Volume 57, we have accepted four manuscripts and rejected five, with a rejection rate of 55.6%. Several manuscripts are still in the review process. The four manuscripts published in this issue include “Study on Library and Information Science Master Alumni Employment and Master Program Value at Taiwan” by Mei-Ling Wang and Jing-Yu Chang; “A Study on MARC21 Transformation and Application for Linked Data” by Ya-Ning Chen and Dar-Maw Wen; “A Follow-Up Study of Inquiry-Based Integrated Information Literacy Curriculum in Junior-High Schools Level” by Lin Ching Chen, and “The Feasibility of Automated Topic Analysis: An Empirical Evaluation of Deep Learning Techniques Applied to Skew-Distributed Chinese Text Classification” by Yuen-Hsien Tseng. We would like to thank these scholars for their excellent contribution and generous permission for making the peer review’s comments and rebuttal open.

Jeong-Yeou Chiu

JoEMLS Chief Editor