Focus and Scope

Insights: the UKSG journal (2048-7754) aims to support UKSG's mission to connect the information community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication, specifically to:

provide a forum for the communication and exchange of ideas between the many stakeholders in the global knowledge community
disseminate news, information and publications, and raise awareness of services that support the scholarly information sector.

Our editorial policy is to inform and stimulate debate about topical issues and provide a forum for debate. Issues contain a mix of articles written by librarians, publishers, vendors, academics and other industry experts. We welcome submissions of research articles and case studies from the scholarly information sector, along with commissioning content such as conference reviews, editorial comment and features on people in the global knowledge community.

From 1988 to 2011, Insights was published as Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community. Serials has been fully digitised and is openly accessible at serials.uksg.org.

Publication Frequency

Articles accepted for publication in Insights are published continuously throughout the year. This allows us to publish them in a much more timely manner in what can be a fast moving environment. It will also enable us to promote the articles at an individual level, which we hope will raise their profile for our wide readership.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as themes become complete.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons licence agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. For a list of generic and subject specific repositories that meet our peer review criteria, see here.

Insights articles are published under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC BY), although other more restrictive licences will be considered. Article processing charges are supported by UKSG. Articles in the journal do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the journal, its editors or UKSG. More detailed information may be found under Submissions.

Journal Archiving

UKSG and Ubiquity Press focus on making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. Content is also archived around the world to ensure long-term availability.

Insights is indexed by the following services:

CrossRef, JISC KB+, SHERPA RoMEO, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), EBSCOHost, and Google Scholar and Cengage Learning. In addition, all journals are available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises CLOCKSS, LOCKSS and Portico archiving systems to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.

If the journal is not indexed by your preferred service, please let us know by emailing support@ubiquitypress.com or alternatively by making an indexing request directly with the service.

Publication Ethics

UKSG and Ubiquity Press are members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and Ubiquity Presss is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). The Press recognises its responsibility as a guardian of the scholarly record and takes an active role in establishing standards and policies in publication ethics.

The co-editors have committed to maintaining high editorial standards through rigorous peer review and strict ethical policies. They follow the COPE code of conduct and refer to COPE for guidance as appropriate. The journal and the publisher ensure that advertising and commercial interests do not impact or influence editorial decisions.

Publication Fees

Publication fees will NOT be charged to Insights authors.

The journal’s publishing platform charges the following publication fees but these are fully supported by UKSG.

If your paper is accepted for publication, the APC will be paid on your behalf by UKSG to cover all publication costs (editorial processes, web hosting, indexing, marketing, archiving, DOI registration, etc.). This approach maximizes the potential readership of Insights and allows the journal to be published open access as part of UKSG’s educational and charitable remit and to further the editorial policy which is to inform and to stimulate debate. For a breakdown of costs covered by UKSG, please click here.

Annotation and post-publication comment

The journal platform permits readers to leave comments and in-browser annotations via hypothes.is. Readers will require a hypothes.is account to create annotations, and will have the option to make these public or private. Comments may be moderated by the journal, however, if they are non-offensive and relevant to the publication subject, comments will remain online without edit.

Volume 36 - 2023

Research Articles

.jnl-nr0sjg{display:inline-block;color:inherit;}.jnl-nr0sjg:hover{text-decoration:none;}The Twitter accounts of scientific journals: a dataset

A free toolkit to foster open access agreements

Opinion Pieces

Ethical acquisitions in academic libraries: a simple idea without a simple solution

The Twitter accounts of scientific journals: a dataset