What made you consider open access for the journal?
I think open access opens the door to scientific publications. It allows authors to share ideas without boundaries. It also provides a platform for undergraduate students and researchers to read academic works from great scientists easily. With its global visibility of each piece of research, I think open access is a great opportunity to introduce our journal, Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, to readers around the world. That’s why we chose open access for our journal.
How did open access help you to promote the journal?
There are a lot of journals in all subject areas available in the academic industry. However, not every university can subscribe to every journal. Therefore, the number of researchers looking for publications through other models increases. With the introduction of open access, it helps to increase visibility of each scientific work and so as citation. I hope HCIS can reach these objectives with the open access model.
How do you think open access has impacted academic publishing across Asia?
In my opinion, awareness of open access is relatively low in Asian countries. Plus, not many universities and research institutes have much funding to support their researchers and they are not willing to publish their works from their own pocket. So many academics as well as their publications cannot benefit from this model. If open access can be promoted intensively and funding is granted to universities and institutes, Asian journals could be widely read, downloaded, or even cited across the world.
What are the challenges faced in publishing open access in this region? What are the difficulties encountered in handling/promoting a open access journal, especially in Asia?
Based on my observations and assumptions, I can see there are massive numbers of manuscripts submitted from one to two countries. This may due to these countries have more funding to do publications when compare to other countries. It may not be a good sign if this imbalanced situation goes on.
