Charting the Open Access scholarly journals landscape in the UAE
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Vol.:(0123456789) Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03349-0 1 3 Charting theOpen Access scholarly journals landscape intheUAE MohamedBoufarss1 Received: 17 October 2019 / Published online: 25 January 2020 © The Author(s) 2020 Abstract The purpose of this study is to chart the scholarly journal landscape in the UAE in order to provide a scientific perspective on research productivity, distribution, and access in the country and lay the foundations for further research in this area. The study aims also to contribute to research endeavoring to paint a global picture of scholarly publishing. We carried out a mapping of scholarly journals published in the UAE compiled from international and local sources. The resulting journal list was studied focusing on the share of OA titles, language of publication, discipline, and type of publisher. Our results show that: (1) 534 journals are published in the UAE and that the share of OA is quite noteworthy with about 64% of all online journals; (2) the APC-based OA model is prevalent with around 75% of OA journals levying a publication fee; (3) UAE journals are predominantly in English while the number of Arabic-language journals is marginal; (4) science, technology and medicine prevail as the most prevalent subject areas of the journals; and (5) commercial publishers control most of the publications especially in the medical field. The study lays a foundation for further studies on scholarly journals in the UAE. The combination of regional indexes and international directories to measure the country’s scholarly journal output can also be replicated and built upon for other countries where the major international bibliometric databases do not provide a comprehensive representation of scholarly publishing activities. Keywords Open Access· Scientific publications· Scholarly publishing· DOAJ· ROAD· Ulrichsweb Introduction Research is increasingly playing a pivotal role in the economic and social development of nations, especially as more countries are seeking to shift to the knowledge-economy. In the words of Marginson (2012, p. 18), “Research is a public good that enables other public goods and private goods.” Consequently, there is mounting pressure on governments to * Mohamed Boufarss Mohamed.bouf[email protected] 1 Faculty ofInformation Technology andCommunication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
1708 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 tap into the opportunities it provides for economic prosperity and well-being of citizens (Macilwain 2010). One way of achieving this is through boosting investments in research universities which are at the center of the global knowledge economy (Altbach 2013). The UAE higher education system is, by all means, at a fledgling stage. The oldest university, UAE University, was established in 1977. As new entities, the universities in the UAE, along with other countries in the Middle East, have been preoccupied with absorbing the increasing numbers of students (Luescher 2016). The UAE higher education gross enrollment ratio (GER) more than doubled between 2007 and 2016 (Kamal 2018) making it one of the fastest growing in the region (Alpen Capital 2018). Massification of education shifts HEIs’ focus from building research capacity to teaching and affects the country’s ability to develop a flagship research university. However, Wilkins (2010) asserts that leading UAE universities have recently shown keenness to produce high quality “world-class research”. In 2017, the UAE government pledged to boost funding of research as part of the “National Strategy for Higher Education 2030” (Gulf News 2017). This culminated in 2019 with the announecement of a AED 4 billion research and development fund (Sanderson and Khan 2019). There are signs indicating that thesemeasures are having an effect on research output. A quick scan of Scival article counts shows that articles by authors with UAE affiliations have increased from about 1977 articles in 2013 to 3753 in 2017. Research conducted by these university scholars is often expressed as “legitimized scientific and scholarly knowledge, which is published in key journals” (Altbach 2013, p. 8). Because of the unique quality assessment of peer-review, publications in scholarly journals are often considered first-rate scientific knowledge output (Tijssen 2015). With journals being vital instruments for enabling research and its dissemination, they are often at the heart of research assessment debates. Research assessment relies heavily on publication metrics to measure the international competitiveness of universities and indirectly nations. Meo etal. (2013) argue that bibliometric indicators are essential tools as they quantify the quantity and quality of research output. However, journal indexes and directories that constitute the basis for a country’s research productivity assessment and in-depth bibliometric analyses such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD), Ulrichsweb, Scopus, Web of Science and Scimago are far from exhaustive in capturing all peer-reviewed journals. Almost all these sources tend to be biased towards English language journals (Björk 2019; Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2015). Even in the case of effectively indexed journals, shortcomings in metadata often call for extensive manual data collection in bibliometric studies. However, these international tools have remained central to research assessments as they index many journals and even provide quantitative measures such as impact factors extensively used to assess the impact and quality of research. In a study of research universities in the US and Canada, McKiernan etal. (2019) reveal that impact factors are still widely adopted for academic evaluation. Until recently, such journal directories and impact measures did not exist in Arab countries. However, attempts are being made regionally to highlight the role of local and non-English language journals in scientific knowledge dissemination. Three noteworthy successful initiatives focusing on Arabic journals are The Arab Impact Factor, Directory of Free Arab Journals, and The Arabic Citations and Impact Factor. Another ambitious project has been recently announced by Elsevier and Association of Arab Universities. It involves hosting an Arab Journals Platform on Elsevier’s Digital Commons (“Journals published by Arab…” 2019). Unfortunately, the absence of a reliable national source of essential scholarly publishing data makes the study of OA in the UAE a hard task and justifies the conduct of this journal publishing landscape analysis.
1709 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 Preliminary scan of some local journals reveals that local institutions tend to publish journals that focus on local issues and priorities. These types of journals, which usually publish and distribute articles at no cost to the author or the reader, are often popular among a close circle of experts and colleagues (Nasser and Abouchedid 2001) resulting in authors becoming visible locally but invisible globally (Hanafi (2011). These journals are also rarely listed in international directories. This may be due to an oversight by the editors of the importance of making their publications visible or failure to meet increasingly demanding inclusion criteria of these indexes and databases as demonstrated by Khalifa (2017). Therefore, these editors miss the opportunity to increase the impact of their journals and to have a wider social and economic impact beyond their proximate environment. While research on different aspects of journal publishing has been conducted in other parts of the world such as by Björk (2019), Shen (2017), and Wang etal. (2018), no study could be identified on journal publishing in the UAE. Therefore, this study is an important expansion of research on scholarly journal publishing and OA. The more specific research questions are: How many academic journals are published in the UAE? In what languages are these journals published? What is the share of OA journals in the UAE? What are the subject areas of these journals? First, this study reviews relevant literature pertaining to the problem being investigated. The literature review covers aspects such as DOAJ as a source of OA data, English versus other languages in scholarly publishing and inclusion of Arab journals in international bibliometric indexes. Second, we outline the methodology for the study. This involves scanning all major international directories for information on journals published in the UAE, gathering data on existing journals directly using Web searches and browsing HEI websites, and harvesting all titles from any locally or regionally developed directories and lists. The study investigates the different aspects and characteristics of these journals such as language of publication, OA status, subject areas, publication charges, and type of publisher. The final part of this study summarizes and discusses findings and link them to the regional and global context as well as relevant studies conducted in other countries and areas. Literature review Literature on journal scholarly publishing can be perceived to branch out to discuss seven aspects outlined by Wulf and Meadows (2016) namely: publishing ecosystem, publication ethics, publishing business model, peer review, metrics, tools, and licenses. In an increasingly global journal publishing ecosystem, other aspects such as local languages are also discussed. Research pertaining to scholarly publishing ecosystem often brings into play stakeholders such as libraries, publishers and scholars. Publishing business model literature, on the other hand, addresses questions of publication cost, funders, OA models and associated mechanisms. For the sake of staying within the scope of this study, we will review only research related to some of these elements such as language of publication, metrics, indexing tools, OA, and publication fees.
1710 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 Scholarly journals intheArab World While Journal des Sçavans, which started publication in 1665, was the first publication to be dubbed an academic journal (Banks 2018), there is some ambivalence on what constitutes the first scholarly journal in the Arab world. Some claim that Syria spearheaded the Arab scholarly journal publishing with The Transactions of The Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences in 1852 (Salisbury 1853). Others believe it was Ya’sub medical journal from Egypt in 1865 (Sidqi 2009). On the other hand, Al-Muqtataf, published circa 1876 in Lebanon, was considered by some scholars as the “mother of all Arab scholarly journals” (Badran 2014). The situation in the Gulf countries was slightly different as the first “journals” didn’t start until the beginning of the 20th century with Majallat Al-Kuwait which started in 1929 (Sayed 2015). In the absence of clear data, it can be assumed that the first scholarly journals in the UAE were issued in the beginning of the 80s after the establishment of the United Arab Emirates University. Arab scholarly journals have come a long way in the last few decades with a lot of journals converting to online and some even jumping on the OA wagon. There seems also to be an upsurge of studies on the different aspects of Arab scholarly journals. In an overarching study of Arab journals indexed in Scopus and WoS, Abd Al-Mukhtar (2019) states that 484 journals are indexed in Scopus and 62 in Web of Science. In another study looking at the situation in Oman, Jabriyah etal. (2017) identified 11 scholarly journals in the country. Of their many recommendations, they stated that these journals could benefit from technical and financial support such as from the Scientific Research Council. They also noted the need for these journals to join regional and international directories such as DOAJ and DEFAJ. In a study of scholarly communication behavior of social sciences and humanities Arab scholars in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Shehata and Elgllab (2018) discovered that these scholars tend to publish in predatory journals because it is easier and faster to publish in them. In a slightly different study with similar respondents, Shehata (2019) concludes that the researchers chose to publish in printed journals as the promotion systems seem to favor them over exclusively online publications. He also discovered that the promotion mechanisms shun co-authored research and thus researchers tend to collaborate less with other international authors. Furthermore, he states that these researchers rely on Arabic resources to back their research. However, it can be argued that the creation of the Directory of Free Arab Journals (DFAJ) in 2013, the Arab Impact Factor in 2015, and the Arabic Citations and Impact Factor (ARCIF) in 2016 are key milestones in Arab scholarly publishing as they signal a maturity of the scholarly journals landscape in the Arab World. Share ofOA journals Even though the concept of OA journals dates back to well before the Internet with some journals being circulated through mailing lists in the 80s (Laakso etal. (2011), the advent of the last ushered in a new era where OA journals have become an integral part of the scholarly publishing landscape. The shift of funding from subscription to other models such as institutional sponsorships and article processing fees did not only motivate the creation of new OA journals but also led some toll-access journals to flip to OA. Most previous bibliometric studies on the share of OA publications are at the article level (Björk etal. 2010; Laakso and Björk 2012; Archambault etal. 2013, 2014; Piwowar etal. 2018). Therefore, Laakso’s etal. (2011) and Fukuzawa’s (2017) research on OA
1711 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 journals, albeit old, remain a reference on the share of these journals. Laakso etal. (2011) revealed a staggering annual progress of 18% in OA journals against an average of 3.5% for all journals between 1993 and 2003. Fukuzawa (2017) asserts that the share of OA journals more than doubled between 2004 and 2012 moving from about 7–15% of all journals. This steady progress in OA has been corroborated by a recent groundbreaking preprint of Piwowar etal. (2019). Based on their findings that about a third of all articles are OA and that these OA articles received more than half of all article views in 2019, they predict a sustained decline of the closed access model with 44% of all articles being available as OA and their share in article views rising to 70% by 2025. In addition to journals which were started with an OA publishing model from the outset, mounting pressure from scholarly publishing stakeholders such as funders, governments and authors is leading a lot of journals to flip from a subscription-based access to OA (Solomon etal. 2016). Furthermore, this study reveals eight internal major drivers of journals converting to OA. These revolve around an increase in these eight aspects: readership, citation rates, advertising revenue, submissions, financial security, competitiveness, additional external funding, and independence. Interestingly, the number of journals flipping to OA is quite interesting as Solomon etal. (2013) estimated that 53% of OA journals in their sample had flipped to OA. APC‑based Open Access model Libraries discontent with the toll-access model and the ensuing financially restrictive “big deals” resulted in their revolt against this model (McKenzie 2018). This dissatisfaction has manifested itself in increasing deal cancellations as demonstrated by SPARC (2019) cancellation data and in increasing cases of libraries negotiating the inclusion of OA and article processing charges (APCs) in the same deals (Morais and Borrell-Damián 2019). The drawbacks of serials bundling into big deals as well as the advent of and success of many OA journals motivated the emergence of the APC-based publishing model. Authorside payments, which were popular among journals in the late 70s, were reintroduced by some journals with the advent OA (King and Alvarado-Albertorio 2008). It is noteworthy, however, that most OA journals do not charge any publication fees (Crawford 2015; Johnson etal. 2018). The APC-based OA model is apparently effective. It contributed around 49% of all OA articles in 2011 (Laakso and Björk 2012). Furthermore, the spike in the UK OA output between 2009 and 2016 was attributed to APCs and Gold OA (Larivière and Sugimoto 2018). Other European countries are apparently adopting this model. 40% of EU universities are financially supporting Gold OA (Morais and Borrell-Damián 2019). Moreover, Crawford (2019a) estimated that the global revenue from APCs was over 649 million USD in 2018. But not everyone believes APC-based OA is a solution. Thibault etal. (2018) and Green (2018) assert that these fees did not solve the serials crisis and that Green OA remains the ultimate solution to boost OA. APC-based publishing was also criticized by Shah and Gul (2013) and Tenopir etal. (2017) as it disadvantages authors who cannot afford APCs especially from developing countries. This concern is shared by Beasley (2016) who believes that APCs constitute a significant economic barrier to stakeholders such as “authors, institutions, funding agencies and governments”. Furthermore, there are currently no mechanisms in place to guarantee that APCs are offset by lower subscription costs (Björk and Solomon 2014a, b).
1712 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 English predomination ofscholarly publishing Different languages, from Sumerian to Greek, Arabic, Latin, and recently French, German and English, have served as the main lingua franca of scholarly communication throughout the ages (Hamel 2007). English has, however, become the de facto language of international science in recent decades (Research Trends 2008;Cianflone 2014). Van Weijen (2012) estimates that around 80% of all journals indexed in Scopus were in English. Banks (2018) has even put the share of English publications at over 90% in 2005. As English is dominant in high ranking international journals, Hamel (2007) made an unequivocal statement that research findings must be published in English if their authors seek recognition from peers. English hegemony in scholarly publishing is echoed beyond English-speaking countries to encompass speakers of other languages, including Arabic (Al-Aufi 2012). This domination implies that many non-native English speakers have already adopted English for preparing publications (Hamel 2007). In the case of Arab authors, Al-Aufi (2012) cites several reasons. First, adoption of English as a language of teaching science disciplines in most Arab academic institutions resulted in researchers writing in English. Second, Arabic scholarly journals are nonexistent or very limited in some disciplines. Finally, dwindling Arabic publications put pressure on Arabic journals that fail to attract quality research articles and eventually perish. Crawford (2019b) seconds this assumption when he states that dominance of English had an impact on local journals of which the majority have witnessed a shrinkage. Al-Aufi’s (2012) respondents have also argued against publishing in Arabic journals because of their lower quality, limited distribution, and little positive impact on job offers or promotions. This Arab scholars’ preoccupation with international impact, citations and recognition has been echoed by MoChridhe (2019) who states that due to the “snowball effect of existing impact metrics”, non-English language papers will receive less citations. Even though Arabic has been sidelined by English as the predominant language of science, one can argue along the lines of Hamel (2007) that democratization of science and promoting public debates dictates using local languages. Similarly, Curry and Lillis (2018) warn that this globally spreading trend is a threat to scholarship as it entails “loss of knowledge locally” and shackling the “development of local research cultures and societies more broadly”. Van Weijen (2012) asserts that even though English continues to be the preferred language of publishing, a reasonable amount of research especially in the soft sciences is still published in native languages. Non-native English authors such as Arab scholars are disadvantaged even further as they strive to increase impact and exposure through OA. In making the case against the dominance of English as it relates to OA, MoChridhe (2019) argues that the cost of editing articles often paid by these scholars constitutes another “hidden paywall”. These researchers may be compelled to pay extra costs related to translating, proofreading and editing their publications on top of publication fees. Journal indexes andOA data DOAJ is often used as a source of data in different bibliometric studies analyzing the share of OA journals. Yet, numerous studies reveal that DOAJ is not a perfect resource for all studies on OA publishing growth. It does not, by design, provide an exhaustive coverage of
1713 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 all OA journals (DOAJ 2019a, b), and exhibits bias against non-English journals as stated by Björk (2019). Björk (2017) estimates that there were around 20,000 OA journals in 2017 and that only 9000 of those were listed in DOAJ. However, this limitation is not exclusive to DOAJ. Laakso etal. (2011, p. 2) state that the “lack of comprehensive indexing for both OA journals and their articles” is compelling researchers to use alternative sources and data collection methods. Similarly, a comparative study of WoS and Scopus versus Ulrich’s directory by Mongeon and Paul-Hus (2015) unveiled biases in subject and language coverage. They, consequently, cautioned against using these services in comparative studies and called for the development of local and subject-specific indexes. This has been also substantiated by Somoza-Fernández etal. (2018). In their study of The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), they concluded that it has limitations in terms of geographical and language coverage. Nevertheless, having a comprehensive and inclusive tool would be very quixotic,to say the least. For this reason and in the absence of a more comprehensive and inclusive tool, DOAJ remains an invaluable resource. It has helped provide some idea on the global and regional OA journals landscape. Low presence of journals from the UAE and the Middle East in international indexes and directories may be due to many reasons. Nasser and Abouchedid (2001) alluded to sub-par peer review tradition among Arab scholars as they usually publish through their own institutions’ journals without “proper editorial and refereeing process.” This was corroborated in a study by Khalifa (2017) which revealed that none of the 6 Arab OA journals he analyzed met the inclusion criteria in Scopus or WoS and only one met the requirements of DOAJ. In a global-scale study of DOAJ listed journals, Crawford (2019b) states that the UAE counts 15 journals in 2018. ROAD ISSN International Centere, on the other hand, lists around 85 UAE OA journals. The Directory of Free Arab Journals (DFAJ), a regional Arab OA journals directory, lists 5 journals under UAE. This huge disparity in reported numbers of UAE OA journals highlights the disparities in indexes inclusion criteria. Arab journals andimpact measures Bibliometrics can be loosely defined as the quantitative analysis of research literature using citations to measure the scientific impact of journals, institutions and authors. The most popular and widely used bibliometric indicator is the ISI Journal Impact Factor (JIF). This measure of journal quality and prestige was designed to be used by libraries to gauge which journals to subscribe to (Garfield 2006), but gradually became widely established as a proxy for single journal and scholar research quality. Kurmis (2003) and Vanclay (2009) have criticized this limitation of JIF as well as its discipline-related bias and prejudice. These shortcomings could not be rectified by other alternative journal impact measures such as Scimago Scientific Journal Rankings (SJR), Journal Usage Factor (JUF), Source Normalized Impact per Paper(SNIP), and Google h5-index. Altmetrics, introduced later, are meant to address some of the limitations of and compliment these outlet-based bibliometrics by tracking impact and visibility of individual research items through a capture of social media and other web statistics such as likes, shares, mentions, downloads, views and discussions. In recent years, two local impact factors targeting Arabic language journals have emerged in the Arab world. The Arab Impact Factor was established by the Association of Arab Universities. It released its first annual report in 2015 with only 29 journals. The
1714 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 Arab Impact Factor uses quantitative and qualitative evaluation criteria such as number of citations, academic originality and quality, editorial board, publication regularity, peerreview, and adherence to scholarly publishing ethics (Kabil 2015). The Arabic Citations and Impact Factor (ARCIF), however, was established by a commercial publisher, eMarifa. Its first report, released in 2016, included 362 Arabic journals. ARCIF website promises no bias against any discipline but does not disclose how differentiation between disciplines is factored in. One of the objectives it set for itself is to become a reference for improving the international rankings of Arab universities by eliminating bias against them. The Arab scholarly publishing landscape is expecting a new citation index in 2020. In partnership with Clarivate Analytics, the Egyptian Knowledge Bank will be launching TheArabic Citation Index (ARCI) (Skelton 2018). This tool aims to highlight the research output of the Arab countries especially in the humanities and social sciences which are often neglected in international databases such as ISI and Scopus as well as boost the international rankings of Arab universities (Sawahel 2018). Methodology Previous bibliometric studies of scholarly publishing landscapes in national contexts have utilized two distinct approaches. Journal level analyses such as Björk’s (2019), and article level studies such as Mikki etal. (2018) and Wang etal. (2018). Notwithstanding their approach, these studies reveal and corroborate the existence of a shortcoming in bibliometrics indexing services as identified by Mongeon and Paul-Hus (2015) and later by SomozaFernández etal. (2018). These services’ biases in subject, geographical and language coverage limits their effectiveness in comparative studies. In order to overcome these indexing coverage limitations, data for this study was aggregated in line with Björk’s (2019) methodology from a combination of local, regional and international sources. While Björk (2019) utilized Scopus as the main international non-OA dedicated source of journals published in the countries of interest, we have used Ulrichsweb which has proven to have more journal indexing coverage than some other indexes as stated by Mongeon and Paul-Hus (2015). This study opted to complement Ulrichsweb data with data from other sources. The following sources were used to extract data on all journals meeting criteria of being a scholarly peer-reviewed journal, active and from publishers registered in the UAE: • Scimago journal and country Ranking • Ulrichsweb Serials Directory • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) • Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) • SherpaRomeo • Websites of UAE higher education institutions • The Arabic Citations and Impact Factor (ARCIF) • Directory of Free Arab Journals (DFAJ) • Arab Impact Factor (AIF) • A general search on Google for any scholarly journals published in the UAE The data was extracted from all these sources between the months of February and April 2019. After extraction, a couple of non-journal records were removed from the Scimago
1715 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 data (139 journals). The full data on UAE journals was exported from Ulrichsweb (560 journals). 196 titles of these have ceased publication, are duplicated records, have unclear status or on CD-ROM. The remaining 364 active print and online journals were added to the final collated list. An additional 84 titles were added from ROAD. SherpaRomeo was then browsed for publisher policies revealing a list of 9 OA journals. The list of journals manually collected from DOAJ was 18 journals. Data on another 91 titles was manually collected from HEIs and publishers’ websites, ARCIF, DFAJ and AIF. Three titles in print were isolated leaving us with a total of 88 online journals. All data was then collated into one worksheet (696 journals). This list was deduplicated leaving a total of 534 unique journal titles. Metadata collected from all sources, and manually from the journals’ websites, when not available, includes ISSN, title, publisher, start year, language, frequency, URL, print versus online status, OA status, APC, and subject area. Figure1 shows the contribution of each source to the initial dataset as well as title overlaps. “Other sources” includes all the other sources used in this study but not explicitly listed in the Venn diagram. The final collated list was then filtered to study aspects such as the share of OA journals in the UAE, language distribution, type of publisher (HEI, commercial or governmental publishers), and discipline. In the instances where explicit metadata on these aspects is absent in the source from which data was extracted, a manual verification on the journal website was performed. For discipline analysis, journals were assigned a subject based on the title, metadata from the indexing service or based on the scope of the journal. Results Overview ofUAE journals Data collected from the different sources used in this study identified a total of 534 unique titles published in the UAE. Nearly 71% (377) of these were available online. Fig. 1 Journal titles sources overlap and contribution to the dataset. Created with http://bioin forma tics.psb. ugent .be/webto ols/Venn/
1722 Scientometrics (2020) 122:1707–1725 1 3 Finally, this study looked at journals’ distribution by discipline. This reveals a predominance of medical sciences and highlights that humanities and social sciences occupy a marginal place. Regardless of discipline, the level of openness is lower among journals owned by the big commercial publishers. This work is only a first step to draw a comprehensive picture of the UAE scholarly publishing in general and OA in particular. Forthcoming studies will look at UAE affiliated authors’ article output, funding and support for OA, institutional attitudes to OA, and OA policies and mandates. Acknowledgements This study was completed as part of a PhD program in Information Studies and Interactive Media at Tampere University, Finland. I gratefully acknowledge the guidance and invaluable advice of my supervisors Associate Prof. J. Tuomas Harviainen of Tampere University, and Associate Prof. Mikael Laakso of Hanken School of Economics. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. References Abd Al-Mukhtar, A. M. A. (2019). Arab Universities’ scientific periodicals in global citation databases: An analytical study (Arabic) (Unpublished master’s dissertation). Minia University, Egypt. Al-Aufi, A. S. (2012). Domination of English and its impact on the Arabic System of Scholarly Communication. Journal of Arts and Social Sciences [JASS], 3(1), 5–28. https ://doi.org/10.24200 /jass.vol3i ss1pp 5-28. Alpen Capital. (2018). GCC education industry. Alpen capital report. Retrieved from https ://argaa mplus .s3. amazo naws.com/9e55a d53-477f-48f0-b202-2c2f0 3d6a0 3d.pdf. Altbach, P. G. (2013). Advancing the national and global knowledge economy: The role of research universities in developing countries. Studies in Higher Education. https ://doi.org/10.1080/03075 079.2013.77322 2. Arab Impact Factor. Retrieved from http://www.arabi mpact facto r.com/. Archambault, E., Amyot, D., Deschamps, P., Nicol, A., Rebout, L., & Roberge, G. (2013). Proportion of Open Access peer-reviewed papers at the European and world levels 2004–2011. Montreal: ScienceMetrix. Retrieved from http://www.scien ce-metri x.com/pdf/SM_EC_OA_Avail abili ty_2004-2011.pdf. Archambault, É., Amyot, D., Deschamps, P., Nicol, A. F., Provencher, F., Rebout, L., & Roberge, G. (2014). Proportion of open access papers published in peer-reviewed journals at the European and world levels–1996–2013. Montreal: Science-Metrix. Retrieved from http://scien ce-metri x.com/sites /defau lt/files /scien ce-metri x/publi catio ns/d_1.8_sm_ec_dg-rtd_propo rtion _oa_1996-2013_v11p.pdf. Archambault, É., Vignola-Gagne, É., Côtè, G., Larivière, V., & Gingras, Y. (2006). Benchmarking scientific output in the social sciences and humanities: The limits of existing databases. Scientometrics, 68(3), 329–342. Austin, A. E., Chapman, D. W., Farah, S., Wilson, E., & Ridge, N. (2014). Expatriate academic staff in the United Arab Emirates: The nature of their work experiences in higher education institutions. Higher Education, 68(4), 541–557. https ://doi.org/10.1007/s1073 4-014-9727-z. Badran, A. H. (2014). Al Muqtataf journal: A history and scientific role (1867–1952) [Arabic]. Dirāsāt, 36, 131–148. https ://doi.org/10.12816 /00085 02. Banks, D. (2018). Thoughts on publishing the research article over the centuries. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 6(1), 10. https ://doi.org/10.3390/publi catio ns601 0010. Beasley, G. (2016). Article processing charges: A new route to open access? Information Services & Use, 36(3/4), 163–170. https ://doi.org/10.3233/ISU-16081 5.
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