Corpus Attributes of Online Journals and Websites as Basis for a Free Publication Management Model

Today, to publish an academic paper requires experience not only in ‘doing’ the research itself but understanding how it is made available online or in print. This study, an excerpt, has profiled websites and journal articles indexed from the Directory of Open Access Journals during mid-2020 in the field of Science Education, with the end in mind of proposing a publication management model for beginning ‘authors’. Using an exploratory mixed method design, this excerpt of the study extracted 185 corpus websites and 103 corpus journal articles from more than 5 million article records of DOAJ. Findings revealed that United States topped the countries with the highest number of corpus and that majority of these journals do not charge submission or article processing charges from authors, yet content crawling was observed in most of the journals. Analysis of corpus articles reported sub-sections consistently included in their submission indicative of an international pattern among accepted articles. Recommendations included the proposal to develop a publication management model for beginning ‘authors’ in state universities and colleges in the Philippines.


INTRODUCTION
Globally speaking, the trend is going for open access publications. Sharing of information within the scientific community is integral to scientific inquiry. This allows other researchers to build upon the research of their colleagues, thereby expanding the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Moreover, scientific data can be reevaluated by the community, which can serve as a feedback mechanism to improve practice and promote the integrity of science. Unfortunately, access to research articles can be blocked by a paywall. This limits access to scholarship not only to researchers but also undergraduate and graduate students who need to read scientific articles for a course or for their theses. Moreover, a researcher cannot ascertain the appropriateness of the article to their study since they only get a glimpse of the article through its title and abstract. With the rising cost of subscription-based journals libraries might not be able to have all the journals they need (Albert, 2006), which adds to the difficulties in libraries amid budget cuts in Philippine state colleges and universities. This proves as a block to scientific knowledge, especially in developing countries such as the Philippines. However, this issue has been countered for the last three decades with the rise of Open Access (OA). Here, an electronic copy of an article is made accessible to the public via the Internet for free (Albert, 2006). In the "gold" model, instead of the reader paying for access to the article, the author, or their funder or institution, pays a fee to offset publishing costs (Grant-Kels, 2017). Alternatively, the author can self-archive in an online repository, known as the "green" model. According to Parker (2013), to support OA, scientists most commonly use the argument that sharing data will facilitate scientific advancements and decrease the incidence of repetition of effort. This is because OA allows researchers to quickly disseminate their results to a global audience (Grant-Kels, 2017). Another argument used in support for OA is that researchers have an accountability to the public, and therefore, the public must have access to research funded by taxpayer money (Grant-Kels, 2017; Parker, 2013). However, in subscription-based models of journal publication, it is the publishers and not researchers who own the copyright, and profit from publiclyfunded research despite academics doing the research itself and peer review for free (Grant-Kels, 2017).
Yet despite the noble intentions of OA, there are still some ethical issues that surround it which need to be addressed. First, in the "gold" model of OA, researchers pay a fee to offset the cost of producing their articles (Parker, 2013). Although this is beneficial to the public and other researchers, an author from a low-income setting might find it hard to publish due to the costs they must shoulder (Parker, 2013). Also, according to Bealle (2016), this can be exploited by "low-quality publishers" which he called 'predatory publishers,' that try to maximize their profits by publishing more papers at the expense of quality. These publishers can try to lure researchers into publishing using spam e-mail (Bealle, 2016). In fact, Bohannon (2013) created an article on a fictitious medicine that has been accepted by more than half of the publishers he sent it to despite the paper's flaws.
However, some academics have questioned the use of the term "predatory," since authors might be the ones actively seeking these publishers to circumvent the system in an effort to avoid peer review (Memon, 2019). Instead, Memon (2019) proposes the use of the terms "deceptive or parodical journals" and "low quality legitimate journals" and has even created a criteria for differentiating among the two and "high quality open access journals." These criteria, or perhaps, checklists that help identify dodgy journals can instead be used as a guide, rather than a blacklist of potential predatory publishers that Neylon (2017, cited in Smart, 2017) points out to be unreliable and unethical. Or, authors may choose to produce their article with a publisher listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This online directory claims to index and "provides access to high-quality, open access, peerreviewed" journals.
Clearly, Philippine Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) can capitalize on the benefits offered by OA. Just like in other countries, Filipino academics are required to publish. However, with the ethical issues associated with models of the OA, a set of guidelines must be crafted on publishing that is contextualized to the Philippine setting. This study can help address this by describing the strategies, trends, and practices in journal management of open access online science journals in Region I. Appropriate changes to practice can be made in institutions based on the results of this study to help Filipino researchers publish their work with credible open access publishers and avoid their articles from being mistrusted due to associations with, or being exploited for financial gain by a questionable publisher.

METHODOLOGY
Design. This study, an excerpt, employed an exploratory sequential mixed methods research. Qualitative research methodologies are used to explore why or how a phenomenon occurs, to develop a theory, or describe the nature of an individual's experience, while quantitative methodologies address questions about causality, generalizability, or magnitude of effect (Creswell, 2012). As to the corpus, the study is international in scope, and largely abstract in nature. The Directory for Open Access Journals, or DOAJ, has been considered as the primary source of data. As to the validators and staff during data-collection, they are affiliated with the Philippine Association of Research Practitioners, Educators, and Statistical Software Users (PARESSU), Inc duly registered at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Philippines, or SEC.

Corpus Selection.
To select online science journals as sources of data in this study, the researcher identified inclusion criteria as minimum requirements. The inclusion criteria as minimum requirements include the following: [1] The journal must be available online during the conduct of the study which is during the summer period of SY 2019-2020; [2]The journal must be open access or that the articles published are freely downloadable, and could be shared; [3] The journal must be in the dissemination of science and science-related research articles, research or review articles; [4] The journal must be found under the Directory of Open Access Journals at the time of data-collection; [5] The language of the journal should be in English; and [6]The journal must have at least one (1) published article online.   It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students, and scholar as well as for the general public. When a text is subjected to web-based voyant tools at voyant-tools.org, the software provides a report on analysis of the text, or said to be corpus.
Score Validation. Three (3) validators would be considered for the study who must possess the following minimum requirements as inclusion criteria: [1] Has authored an article published at least in an online Philippine journal; [2] Must have at least 3 citation counts in google scholar; [3] Must have at least an h-index of 2 in google scholar; and [4] Must presently be part of an Editorial Team of any local Philippine Journal, preferably a lay-out editor, or copy editor. In this study, evaluation was done properly to avoid bias and prejudice on the part of the researchers and research assistants. To ensure impartiality, several assistants were tapped to perform the following tasks: selecting document websites as corpus, retrieving information from DOAJ, coding variables in SPSS, downloading document article transcripts, validation, and revalidation. To ensure non-communication, research assistants were not informed as to who performed a task prior to them and who will perform a task after them.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
On Profiled WEBSITES.  In terms of article processing charges, the table indicates that the open access science journals do not charge any processing fees for article publication (102, 55.1%). In terms of submission fee, the table displays that the open access science journals do not charge any processing fees for article submission (181, 97.8).
In terms of waiver policy, the table shows that the open access science journals do not have any waiver policy for the payment of article processing charges, for those journals which do ask for APCs from their submitting authors (138, 74.6%). In his study with special focus on article processing charges and waiver policies among authors without paying institution, Burchardt, 2014, claimed that the statement from the world's 27 largest Open Access publishers reveals through their questionnaires that only four will automatically waive the APC for authors from the poorest developing countries, as identified in the World Bank classification of countries. Half of the publishers indicate that you can apply to have the APC waived. No publisher automatically gives a waiver to the unemployed, pensioners, and so on.
In terms of digital archiving, the  In the study of Camara & Ventayen (2019) on document transcripts among multidisciplinary journals, they found similar findings and that while the arrangement varies from one journal to another, majority of the transcripts contained the following in the paper itself in the following sequence: 1. Title of the Multidisciplinary Journal; 2. Journal Volume the paper was published; 3. Journal Issue No the paper was published; 4. Year or series the paper was published; 5. Website the paper could be accessed; 6. Name of the Author; 7. Affiliation of the Author; 8. Email or contact of the Author; 9. Short Bionote of the author; 10. Page number of the paper in the issue; 11. Date paper was received by the editor; 12. Date revised paper was received; 13. Indexing of the journal; 14. Tables and graphs in the body; and 15. (some) Picture of the author.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This study concludes that scholarly publication does not only confine itself with the standard principles and theories spoken by 'experts', but is as well manifested in various websites that contained various journal, and by extension from the published articles that are found therein. Consistency on parameters as found in various journals strongly suggest of common practices in journal management, and common practices in journal writing are manifested as well. The researchers recommend the use of these findings to develop and propose a publication management model that will provide free publication, especially to researchers in the Philippines. The 4-AA Model (Camara, et al., 2021) is recommended as well for integration in the Proposed Publication Model, as well as the monitoring of indicators for Quality Journal Management as given by Oclay, et al, 2020.