Deficient editorial practices, perceived quality, and expedient scholarly publishing in a developing nation

Background There is increasing concern about the quality, integrity, and accessibility to research published in the developing world. This study explores the editorial practices and editors’ perspectives to gain insight into the standard of scholarly publishing in Libya. Methods Between 21 st January and 12 th February, 2022, the editors-in-chief (EC) of Libyan academic journals were invited to complete a questionnaire on editorial practices, degree of satisfaction with submitted and published manuscripts, review processes, and journal performance, as well as challenges facing the journals. Journal websites were examined for quality, and indexation coverage and citations were assessed. We examined the number of citations in Google Scholar for all 2019 articles published in each journal. Descriptive statistics were used to quantitatively summarize the data and thematic analysis was used for the narrative text. Results 48 EC completed the questionnaire. The EC was affiliated with the institution that owns the journal in 92% of cases. Most EC (83%) were satisfied with the peer-review quality, 69% believed that most of their published papers add new ideas or findings, and 96% were satisfied with their journal’s performance. However, despite the high degree of satisfaction, only one journal was indexed in Web of Science or Scopus and only 17% of the journals were indexed in Google Scholar. A qualitative assessment of journal websites revealed shortcomings in publishing practices in a large proportion of the journals. Conclusions The discordance between the satisfaction of the journal editors and the journal quality indicators points to a break in the quality system of Libyan academic publishing. Similar expedient publishing practices might exist in other countries as well. A comprehensive action plan led by academic institutions to enforce high standards for scholarly publishing is needed to advance research and high-quality scholarly publications in developing countries.


Introduction
Quality scholarly publications are known as the most effective means of disseminating locally produced scientific research findings to the global scientific community.However, there is increasing concern about the quality, integrity, and accessibility to research published locally. 1 Journals may become poor venues for knowledge dissemination if they fail to provide adequate peer review, quality control, and content preservation.Researchers from developing countries face the challenges of generating sufficient high-quality research and sharing their research findings due to academic, technological, socio-political, and economic factors. 2 Libya is an Arab country with an estimated surface area of 1,775,500 km 2 and a population of about 6.7 million.Most of the population live in the main coastal cities.Since the start of oil exportation from Libya in the 1960s, living standards have risen.Undergraduate and postgraduate institutions have been expanded and improved over the years.The first Libyan university was established in 1957 (https://mhesr.gov.ly/?page_id=126).The number of universities has expanded over time, and according to the ministry of education, there are now 26 public universities in Libya with 350,000 university students. 3ny developing countries have increased their rates of contribution to the world's scientific output, measured as the number of publications and the number of citations. 4However, Libya maintained low scholarly publishing rates when compared to other countries in the region, including those with considerably lower economic indices. 5The first initiative to formally promote research in Libya began in the mid-seventies with the establishment of the National Commission of Scientific Research, formally charged with planning and supporting scientific research.Over many years, the Libyan government expanded the scope of MSc degree programs, and recently initiated PhD programs in various fields, including sciences, as well as built research centers.However, overall research performance indicators remain modest.
The first scholarly journal published in Libya, "Al-Majalla Al-Libiyah Lil-'Ulum" (The Libyan Journal of Science), was launched in 1971.It is improbable that it is the currently active journal by the same name because the numbering of the annual volumes goes back only to the late nineties.Jamahiriya Medical Journal was launched in 1976 and continues to be listed in Scopus (without metrics) though it ceased its activity in 2011.A recent bibliometric study 6 based on the Scopus database for Libya's scientific output from 1948 to 2022 revealed a total of 10,475 articles, 10361 of them in English (99%).On the other hand, another study, 7 based on the Directory and Book of Abstracts of Libya's National Centre for Scientific Research for 2001-2004, revealed that 45% of the research output was reported in English, and the rest was in Arabic.
The quality of journals is intimately linked to the quality of editorial practices.Guidelines have been published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) 8 and the Council of Science Editors (CSE). 9Guidelines have also been published for medical journals by the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) 10 and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). 11The regional association Forum for African Medical Editors (FAME) 12 also provides support and resources for best editorial practices.The major abstract-indexing databases of Web of Science 13 and Elsevier's Scopus 14 specify criteria required for indexation.Publishing research papers in journals that do not adhere to editorial best practices is a waste of research funds and findings.Moreover, poor-quality journals could lead to a decrease in the quality of science at both the institutional and national levels, with university staff and research scientists getting recognized without gaining the required research expertise, including in publishing ethics and research integrity.Such a situation could have a negative impact on the academic environment and on researchers' aspirations and practices when conducting research.The effects of all that could filter down to university and graduate students, and beyond.
Gaining an understanding of the status and functioning of local, national, academic journals would shed light not only on their editorial quality, but could also indicate the areas that need improvement in order to raise the country's research quality and performance.This study aimed to explore the editorial practices of editors related to scholarly publishing in Libya and quality indicators of the academic journals.We also sought the editors' perspectives on the standards of academic publishing in Libya and their satisfaction with journal performance.

REVISED Amendments from Version 2
The results section have been updated by deletion of reference to LENS or OpenAlex.Also, the list of studied journals has also been made available in the Zenodo repository in Excel format.

Ethical statement
Ethical approval for the main research project "Publishing practices in scholarly journals in Middle East and North Africa" was obtained from UAEU Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee (ERS_2021_8420).The questionnaire was prefaced with a description of the study aim, declaration of ethics approval, statement of the voluntary nature of participation, and the ability to withdraw.Consent was signaled by the answer to the first question.

Study design
This study was carried out between January 21 st and February 12 th , 2022.Our target consisted of the editors-in-chief (EC) of academic journals affiliated with Libyan academic institutions and professional societies.Online survey links were sent by the primary investigator (AB) via the editors' contact emails identified in the journal websites.Participants received a standard follow-up email reminder two weeks after they received their original invitation to participate.
We designed a questionnaire consisting of 10 parts, following the best practices in designing questionnaire items and organizing the questionnaire. 15,16The questionnaire was administered in English and Arabic and distributed using SurveyMonkey. 17The themes of the questions were guided by the editorial policies published by the CSE 9 and the basic journal selection criteria for indexation of the Web of Science. 13The questionnaire was reviewed independently by three editors of an international journal who were not affiliated with a local or regional institution.They were asked to assess the face validity of the survey items and to provide feedback on the clarity and conciseness of the questions.No ambiguous questions or other issues were identified in the questionnaire and therefore no changes were made.
We then posted the questionnaire using an online survey program, SurveyMonkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/), which allows respondents to answer the questions but does not allow duplicate responses.The link to the online survey and the cover letter were then sent by electronic mail to the EC.A reminder was sent after two weeks to those who had not responded.In total, 51 questionnaires were returned.The responses were downloaded as a Microsoft Excel file (2007).Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis was done in SPSS statistical software (version 26.0, IBM).PSPP (https:// www.gnu.org/software/pspp/) is a freely accessible software application that can run the same analysis used in this study.
The 10 parts of the questionnaire were as follows: 1.The journal's current status; 2. Background questions about the editors' affiliations; To enhance the trustworthiness of the interpretations from the survey quantitative data, a word cloud was generated of all the words in all the respondents' answers to the question about challenges faced by the journals, after translating Arabic text to English.The entire text was analyzed in an online word cloud generator (https://monkeylearn.com/word-cloud).
To integrate the results of desk research with the results from the questionnaire, the websites of the journals the editors of which returned questionnaire responses were visited by one investigator (AB) and information was collected on various journal qualities.These included but were not limited to the presence of an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), the editorial board's geographic diversity, the organization of the archives, and general website functionality.Moreover, data were collected on the listing of the journals in Google Scholar and the number of citations of all articles published in 2019, as well as indexation in the database of the Arab Citation & Impact Factor (ARCIF).

Statistical analysis
The coded data were transferred to SPSS and analyzed by another investigator (OT).The results were analyzed by the percentage of participants selecting the different answers to each question.The 95% confidence intervals are given as ranges inside brackets.The responses to the two open-ended questions about challenges and opportunities were analyzed by thematic analysis.The journal quality assessment and Google citations are reported as frequency and percentage statistics.

Questionnaire results
In total, 51 questionnaires were returned.However, three responses were excluded because the journals did not have the basic content of a published academic journal, such as an official website.Therefore, the study included 48 academic journals published by national institutions (list available at https://zenodo.org/records/10825679).Some EC skipped answering some questions, but their available answers were included in the analysis.
Journal ownership 40 of the 48 journals are owned by academic institutions (83%, 95% CI: 70-93%).The others are owned by a professional society, a professional syndicate, or a research center.

Editorial boards
The EC was affiliated with the institution that owns the journal in 44 out of 48 journals (92%, 95%CI 80-98%).In 29 journals (60%, 45-74%), all the editors other than the editor-in-chief were associated with the owning institution.In nine journals (19%, 9-33%), the editors were associated with various national institutions, and 10 journals (21%, 10-35%) have a mix of nationally and internationally affiliated editors.

Peer review process
A total of 46 of the 48 journals described their peer review process.Reviewers are recruited within two weeks in 31 of 46 journals (67%, 52-80%).Many or all peer reviews are done by individuals who are not members of the editorial board in 85% of the journals (95% CI: 71-94%).However, there was heavy reliance on the journals' reviewer committees.These committees were the main source of reviewers in 38 of the 46 journals that responded to this question (83%, 69-92%) (Figure 1).The EC performs peer review and writes reports with various frequencies in 22 out of 46 journals (48%, 33-63%) (Figure 2).On the other hand, editors other than the EC never undertake peer review or do so rarely in 26 of the 46 journals (57%, 41-71%).
The minimum number of reviewer reports required to make a decision was two or three in 41 of the 46 responding journals (89%, 76-96%).Four journals required only one, and one journal reported no reviewers.

Proof-reading of published manuscripts
Most journals proof-read Arabic and/or English manuscripts.However, one-quarter of them (24%, 13-39%) do not proof-read the articles before publication.

Indexing in abstract and citation databases
In asking about inclusion of the journals in abstract and citation databases, we gave Web of Science and/or Scopus as one choice, and as another, Arabic Citation Index (ARCI), a new index for scholarly publications in Arabic established by collaboration between Clarivate Analytics and the Egyptian Knowledge Bank and funded by the Egyptian government.Four journals did not provide information on indexing in databases.Of the 44 responding journals, 20 (45%, 30-61%) stated that they were not in any such database.One journal was verified to be indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. 10 journals described as indexed in ARCI could not be verified due to the unavailability of a publicly available ARCI journal list.It is possible that the EC confused ARCI with ARCIF.
Of the 32 editors who responded to the question about submission of their journals to an index, 30 (94%) answered that they had submitted.Four journals (13%, 4-29%) had been submitted to Web of Science or Scopus, but the entities to which the other journals had been submitted were not disclosed.Notably, 21 of 23 EC (91.3%, 72-99%) cited lack of funding as an impediment to submission to abstract-indexing databases.

Satisfaction with the journal's performance
We asked the EC about their satisfaction with their journals' 'performance', and 46 of them (96%, 86-99%) were either satisfied (n = 29) or reasonably satisfied (n = 17) (Figure 4).Only two EC were not satisfied.
Of 48 editors, 33 (69%, 54-81%) believed that all or most of the papers they publish add new ideas or new research findings (Figure 5).The other 29% (17-44%) felt that only some papers had novelty, and one EC did not know.Satisfaction with the manuscripts submitted to peer review Most of the EC (n = 33, 69%, 54-81%) were satisfied with the quality, clarity and organization of most or all of the manuscripts submitted to peer review, and 28 of them (58%, 43-72%) were satisfied with the accuracy of the language of all or most peer reviewed manuscripts (Figure -6).
Satisfaction with the quality of peer review reports A total of 46 EC answered the question about satisfaction with reviewer reports.A large majority (38, 83%, 69-92%) were satisfied most of the time or always.42 of them provided the reasons for their satisfaction.Roughly half of them were satisfied with comprehensiveness and thoroughness of the reports, the questions they raise, and/or the suggestions and helpful comments they provide (Table 1).The lowest frequencies of satisfaction were with the punctuality of the reports (24%) and inclusion of comments on the novelty and significance of the research (26%).Four editors gave the reasons for their dissatisfaction with the reviewer reports, two of whom mentioned the absence of all five reasons for satisfaction listed in Table 1.

Attempts to influence editorial decisions
Attempts by superiors or the institutions to influence editorial decisions were described as rare by 96% of the EC and as 'sometimes' by the others.

Challenges and opportunities
At the end of the questionnaire, the participants were asked to express their views on the challenges they face in the quality of journal publishing.36 EC provided responses.Thematic analysis of the answers revealed two themes.One is the lack of financial and institutional support, exemplified by what one participant wrote: "The most prominent limitation is the lack of support, even from the university, which the Journal is supposed to represent, not to mention the difficulties of the publishing process."(#28) Another participant was more specific about the financial impact on the publishing process: "[the challenges we face include] unavailability of financial support from the parent institution.… .. Failure to provide basic programs such as the scientific theft detection program.Failure to release members of the editorial board to perform their duties to the fullest.The prevailing custom now is [this is] a voluntary work and they give you 300 Libyan Dinars every six months, which is not even enough to cover internet expenses.Non-disbursement or awards to reviewers."(#36) The second theme identified concerns the reviewing process and a clear dissatisfaction of the editors with the quality and quantity of manuscripts submitted.One participant wrote the following: "[the main challenge in my opinion is] the reviewing process, [lack of] scientific quality and language quality of the submitted manuscripts."(#24) These two themes were again identified when the participants were asked to express their opinions on the opportunities available to overcome the challenges facing the journal publishing quality.They overwhelmingly suggested that financial and institutional (governmental or otherwise) is needed to overcome several challenges.In addition, there was a trend in the participant responses pointing to the technical and academic training and know-how of the publishing process of the editorial staff and the institution.One participant discussed in his response the need for education within the institutions to raise awareness of the importance of scientific publishing: "the state institutions, researchers, universities and research centers are required to understand the importance of scientific publishing to upgrade these institutions and to develop a national strategy that focuses on a specific number of the field, providing them with the necessary technical and financial support, and finding a clear mechanism for communication with international institutions interested in publishing and finding a clear mechanism to facilitate the payment of the required subscriptions."(#2) A word cloud (Figure 7) of the answers to the question about the challenges faced by the journals shows that the EC view inadequate support and particularly financial support as the main challenge to raising the quality of the journals.

Website-based journal assessment
Assessment of journals was made difficult by the inaccessibility of some journals' websites or their content.Seemingly, this was caused by technical problems or updates or changes to the websites.One journal website was not accessible for review and the content of three other journals was not available for review.Thus, only 44 out of the 48 journals was accessible for this assessment.

Scope, publication types, and language
Overall, the journals cover a wide range of basic and applied sciences, social sciences and liberal arts, and some of them publish in a combination of different fields of science simultaneously, such as chemistry, medicine, botany, and information technology.Some journals publish articles in a wider variety of disciplines, including a combination of applied sciences and humanities.
According to the website information, in addition to publishing research articles and reviews, some journals publish conference proceedings and summaries of books, theses, dissertations, and reports on seminars.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and editorial board
Examination of the journals' websites showed only 30 journals displaying ISSN clearly on the website (75%, 59-87%) and in six journals (15%, 6-30%) it was embedded inside pdf files of entire issues consisting of up to hundreds of pages.
We examined whether the names of the editorial board members and their affiliations are mentioned.A total of 41 journals mentioned their editorial board members whether on the website as such or inside combined files containing entire issue or volumes.However only 17 journals mentioned details of their editors' affiliations.

Website organization and navigation
A general qualitative assessment was made of the structure and functionality of the journal websites.The findings were extremely varied.Whereas some journal websites were professionally structured, organized and fully functional, including but not limited to the very few journals with professional publishers, the websites of a large number of journals had various types of defects, including broken links, disordered archives, missing essential information, and/or language mistakes.We also noticed that the secure socket layer certificate (SSL) was recently expired on a journal website, generating a security warning from the browser.Some journals were difficult to navigate or required several clicks to reach the desired information.In one journal, three clicks are needed to arrive at the table of content of a selected issue, and then two more to download the article file.Random cases of a journal website going offline for a while were encountered.Some of these seem to have been during website update or maintenance, but no 'maintenance' page was used to temporarily substitute for the home page.We were unable to access the several journals of the second largest university over several months, and we received no response from the webmaster to our inquiry.Consequently, these journals are not included in this study.
Notably, a few journals advertised on their websites impact factors that are known as or suspected of being fake.
Advertising a questionable impact factor can be detrimental to a journal, and any claim to having an impact factor should specify its source.When the source of a published impact factor is not specified, a deceiving intent to provide false impression about journal status is suspected.

Journal archives
Almost all the journals provide the articles only as pdf files.In some journals, some issues are missing or are not in proper chronological order, or the issues/volumes are numbered but do not mention the year.
13 journals (30%) publish their articles only as pdf files of entire issues containing many articles and reaching several hundred pages, most of which include journal information in the first several pages of the pdf files.Journal information of varied quality is in the first several pages of each pdf file in nine journals and on the website in two.The other two journals provide no information about the journal.Notably, four journals have repositories of separate pdf files for the articles, two of which do not provide any journal information anywhere, one gives it in a separate pdf file dedicated to journal information, and one has it on a website page.

Peer review policy
We considered that a clear statement about the peer review policy is adequate even if it is brief, providing that it mentions whether peer review is blinded and mentions the type of blinding.Of the reviewed journals, 15% specify double blind review, 17% describe the review only as being confidential, 48% simply state that the manuscripts are reviewed by experts, and 20% provide no information on peer review.One journal publishes the names of the members of the reviewer committee; there were only nine reviewers to cover multiple fields.

Open access policy
All the journals are full open access, of which only nine journals (20%) have a clear policy of either requiring no APC or stating the amount.Notably, some journals that have APC do not specify the amount but refer to it in vague ways that do not inspire confidence.

Human and animal study ethics
Based on the Helsinki Agreement, 18 the protocol for any study on animals or humans should be reviewed by an independent ethics committee (institutional review board), and in the case of humans, informed consent should be obtained from the participants in advance.An ethics statement was frequently absent in many journals.In some journals, none of the articles surveyed contained such a statement, while in other journals, it was included only in some articles.When ethics approval was obtained, it was not always from an ethics committee but from an administrative official.Moreover, when an ethics declaration was present, it did not always include both approval and consent.When consent was obtained, it was not stated whether it was oral or written.

Indexation and citation analysis
As the results of the questionnaire showed that only one journal was indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, we searched for the journals in Google Scholar by using their names as 'source'.Only eight journals (17%, 8-31%) were listed and the remaining 40 journals were not listed in Google Scholar.In the eight Google-indexed journals, half of the journals had international editorial boards, but in the unindexed journals only six (15%, 6-31%) had international editorial boards (RR 3.7, CI:1.12-12.25,p = 0.03).The difference is significant at p < 0.03.
As seven of the eight Google-indexed journals publish in fields of science, we compared their editorial board compositions with unindexed journals also publishing in sciences.Four of the seven indexed science journals (57%, 18-90%) had international editorial boards, whereas only three out of 13 unindexed journals (23%, 5-53%) had international boards (RR 2.5, CI: 0.76-8.07,p = 0.14).
We looked up the number of citations in Google Scholar for all articles published in 2019 in the eight journals indexed by Google Scholar.Three journals had no citations, and in all of them, all the editors were from the institution that owns the journal.In contrast, the editorial boards of four of the five cited journals (80%) were affiliated with a mixture of international and national institutions.
Among the cited journals, one had an article-citation rate of 90%, with an average of 5.8 citations per cited article, one had a rate of 40% with 1.2 citations per cited article, and three had rates in the range of 18-22%, with an average of 0.

Discussion
The gatekeeping role of high standard editorial practices is believed to be necessary to maintain the integrity of the scientific literature and minimize the risks of bad or low-quality science entering the scholarly record.Evidence-based publishing practices do benefit from scholarly communication, while journals with subpar standards may unprofessionally publish quantity rather than quality.Understanding what influences the quality of scholarly publications should be of the highest priority to academic institutions and policy-makers, especially given the consequences on the nation's science advancement.
Many researchers who lack an appropriate funding system are unable to pay the large author publication fees charged by publishers, and the number of journals with good standing but without publication fees has been diminishing rapidly. 19This pushes these researchers to publish in local journals.However, local journals should not be undervalued.
Researchers might prefer to publish in international journals, but local journals have distinct, useful functions.Whereas international journals provide a platform for researchers to share their research globally, local journals provide a platform for issues and developments relevant to the local community that might not be considered relevant to international journals.Local journals also foster cooperation between local researchers and provide a platform for publishing in their native language.Nevertheless, there is a need for establishing robust criteria for publishing practices and policies of local journals, particularly university-based journals.This study provides an overview of the publishing practices in Libya and identifies several shortcomings.This study's findings would be useful for establishing robust criteria to enhance trust in publishing practices and policies of journals affiliated with local institutions, particularly those that are not included in the major abstract-indexing databases.
The ISSN is an essential, unique identifier assigned by multiple centers around the world for a fee of only 25-50 euros (https://portal.issn.org/sites/default/files/guidelinespublishers_merged-eng-final.pdf).Yet 15% of the journals did not have an ISSN and 18% of them did not display it on the website.Website display of a valid ISSN is a basic requirement of inclusion in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) 20 and other indexes.
The affiliations of the editorial boards are also not shown on many journal websites.This omission could have been due to lack of awareness, a suggestion that is supported by the other side of the coin, where two journals provided multi-page curricula vitae of the editors.
Proper functionality is important for any type of website.Awkward navigation, broken links, repeated downtime and language mistakes reflect negatively on the journal.Many of the journal websites we surveyed had such issues.
One notable though not surprising finding is the association between international composition of the editorial board and indexing in Google Scholar, and possibly with citation of journal articles in Google Scholar as well.The importance of an international editorial board is highlighted by Elsevier's basic criteria for acceptance in Scopus, which includes geographic diversity of the editors. 14However, geographic diversity should not be interpreted in a narrow sense, particularly in countries with small populations and tight social relations.More commonly, geographic diversity is understood to mean international diversity.An international editorial board can provide wider and more varied expertise, as well as greater editorial independence.Unfortunately, the criteria set by the committee appointed by the Libyan government for accreditation of Libyan scientific journals run counter to these precepts by dictating that the members of the editorial boards should be affiliated with the institution that owns the journal.A more effective approach for promoting the quality of the journals is to require or at least encourage international diversity of editorial boards.
A limited number of journals post the logos of indexes and impact factors that are bogus or at least have a bad reputation, and even display an 'impact factor' when they are not even indexed in Google Scholar.This is detrimental to the prospect of receiving submissions from serious scientists.In this study, the Google Scholar-cited journals do not do this.When an official body exists to oversee the quality of journals, this should be banned.The official committee mentioned in this report does not address this issue in its criteria.
In a study of acceptance rates, the overall acceptance rate in 'ordinary' open access publishers, including universities and societies, was about 50%. 21According to the estimates of the EC in our study, the acceptance rate of all submitted manuscripts was more than 50% in half of the journals, and we speculate that some of them have much higher acceptance rates.Notably, of the 14 journals that rejected none or a few manuscripts without peer review, seven of them had an overall acceptance rate of > 50% and four had a rate of 40-50%.
The EC expressed a high degree of satisfaction with the performance of their journals, but this is not reflected in the indexation and citation records of the journals.There is growing concern in the scientific community over the quality of research and with its visibility and citation metrics in international indexation databases.However, the editors-in-chief of Libyan journals do not seem to take journal metrics into account in their perception of their journals' performance.
Most of the journals do not receive financial support to improve the environment and tools for managing scholarly journals, such as a journal management system and similarity check software.Indeed, lack of sufficient support was the most frequently cited challenge to journal quality improvement.But its impact can go deeper.A study on Australian journals reported that funding issues represented a major cause of journal discontinuation. 22More important is that paying reviewers, combined with the widespread and relatively heavy reliance on specific reviewer committees, could affect the quality of peer review.Moreover, as the reviewer committees are associated with the journals, they are members of the journal, and it can be argued that they are internal and not external reviewers.Internal reviewers initially screen the manuscripts to check their suitability for peer review by external reviewers who are experts in the relevant fields.
Besides the inadequacy of financial resources, there is apparent inadequacy of knowledge and technical knowhow, which was alluded to by one of the responses to the question about challenges and opportunities.Browsing many journals makes this deficiency evident.A special case in point is that html versions of the articles are absent in almost all the journals.However, we stress that recruiting competent technical expertise requires adequate support from the journal owner.
The indexing in platforms such as Web of Science and Scopus for assessment of the quality of locally and regionally focused journals is not without obvious bias.While there is agreement that Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science and Elsevier's Scopus databases generally contain rigorously assessed, high quality journals, journals from developing countries may get rejected because their research is said to be 'not internationally significant' or only of 'local interest' to developing countries.A recent study on over 25,000 journals that use PKP's Open Journal Systems platform found only 1.2% indexed in the Web of Science and 7.2% in Scopus. 23A recent review of Pakistani journals revealed that 97% of the journals are in the lowest category and 97% do not have an impact factor. 24In many developing countries, the majority of the journals are university-based. 25ly one journal in our study is included in these indexes.But we should mention that we have not included two international Libyan journals because they are not published by a Libyan institution.Both are indexed in Web of Science and one has an impact factor and a CiteScore.In general, institutional academic journals are more likely to be affected by academic in-group bias and to be motivated to lower their standards for articles sharing the journal's institutional affiliation. 26any Libyan journals are published in Arabic or both Arabic and English.Therefore, we felt it important to assess the indexation and citation of the journals in Clarivate's ARCI index.However, there is no publicly available journal list for ARCI and information on the selection criteria is sparse.The ARCI selection criteria have been described as a "subset of the Web of Science Core Collection selection process" and are based on "traditional scientific publishing standards and the scholarly research norms of the Arab region". 27 did not search for the journals in the Arab Impact Factor (AIF) (https://www.arabimpactfactor.com/),produced by the Association of Arab Universities, because the content is not accessible, there are no links to the journals, and there is no description of where or how citations are counted.
Indexation of Libyan journals in Google Scholar was inconsistent and incomplete, whether one is searching for individual articles or for journals as 'source'.Technical defects in the journals are suspected.Moreover, some Libyan journals do not publish individual files of the articles but only complete issues, which prevents their indexation In summary, we discovered defects and deficiencies that affect the performance of the journals in a large fraction of the journals, including affiliations of editors, sources of reviewers, journal management system, medium of communication with authors and reviewers, similarity check of submitted manuscripts, proof-reading of accepted manuscripts, and website organization and functionality.Moreover, the performance of the journals in terms of indexation and citation metrics was at a very low level.
Notably, there was a clear discrepancy between the high level of the editors-in-chief's satisfaction with journal performance and the journals' quality indicators.We do understand that lack of funding can cause deficiencies such as unavailability of similarity check software.However, it has not escaped our notice that reasons related to the desire to maintain the status quo can be hypothesized.A viewpoint article in Nature 28 lamented that the purpose of research publication has shifted from disseminating knowledge to "getting a publication" for the sake of promotion.Most of the journals in Libya are published by the universities, and a large portion of their academic publications are used for local faculty promotion.Thus, these journals are more likely to be motivated to lower their standards for articles written by authors who share the journal's institutional affiliation.
Low quality publishing practices will continue to thrive as long as criteria for career advancement of university faculty members are not aligned with robust internationally accepted research performance metrics such as journal rank, citation frequencies, and H-index.We believe that raising the standard of the editorial practices and implementing more versatility and transparency in the peer review and publication process will enhance trust in the scholarly contributions of the developing world.Putting less emphasis on publications in the home journals and assigning more weight to publications in international journals may minimize the impact of academic in-group bias on the quality of the country's scholarly publications.Yet, it is important to note that the lack of research skills, experience, and research funding is an important factor in the low-quality research in developing countries.Furthermore, in Libya as well as other developing nations, quantitative bibliometric criteria are used to assess research production for promotion decisions, regardless of the quality of publications.This could be strengthening the expedient editorial practices in many university-based journals.
One limitation in our study is that we missed several journals from a major university because all the journal websites were down for an extended period of time and the university did not respond to our inquiries.It turned out that the websites were being updated, and the information was still missing after several months during which the data were being analyzed and the manuscript was being written.

Conclusions
The discordance between journal quality indicators and the journal editors' satisfaction with the performance of their journals points to a broken quality system in scholarly publishing of home academic institutions.A comprehensive plan for immediate attention and subsequent action to raise the standard of academic publications, coupled with technical and training support, are needed to enhance the scientific impact in developing nations.

Reporting guidelines
Zenodo: SRQR checklist for 'Scholarly publishing in a developing nation'.https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8048249. 17My review is based on the qualitative aspects of the article, namely the description of methods, presentation of qualitative findings and access to source data.

Methods
In the methods section under 'study design' the article would benefit from a clear statement of what the study comprises, such as 'This is an empirical study, consisting of a survey collecting qualitative and quantitative data, analysis of information drawn from numerous journal websites, and an amalgamation of background information from salient journal indexing and ranking systems.'You could add subheadings (if permitted) for the descriptions of the three different approaches/methods to make this easier for the reader.You don't mention the qualitative data and analysis until the section entitled 'statistical analysis'.I don't think it belongs here.The qualitative data strand needs its own section, perhaps at the end of the paragraph beginning ' We designed a questionnaire…' here you could state that you have included two optional questions to capture qualitative data and why you added these questions.I think this would be helpful at this point in the article.Having introduced this qualitative strand, you could then follow this on in the rest of the article, so after the 'statistical analysis' section, have a 'qualitative analysis' section.
When describing your analysis, it is not clear what you mean by 'thematic analysis' as this can be interpreted in many ways.It would be useful to say what the procedure was and what you mean by 'thematic analysis' in this instance, and give a supporting citation.
Data availability I cannot find the underlying qualitative data, as the link to the anonymised survey responses doesn't work.

Qualitative findings
It would be useful to state that participants were asked two questions, namely, to state the challenges they face regarding the quality of journal publishing and how these challenges can be overcome.Then it would be beneficial to say a bit about the themes you created, and refer to your methods e.g.' based on our analysis (as described in x section) we created two themes.The first theme centred on the lack of financial and institutional support provided to journal editors such as….and then describe what the main ideas are before you give the illustrative quotations.Also, the presentation becomes a bit repetitive as you have split it into challenges and solutions, i.e. lack of support is a challenge, so we need support.I think this section could be reworked to synthesise the ideas a bit more.

Word cloud
In the methods, if you add a section introducing the qualitative data collection, you could incorporate into it the paragraph beginning ' to enhance the trustworthiness…' and describe what you did, how the word cloud was generated and why you decided to do this.You also need to say what it shows, for example prevalence of terms and how this links to the themes you found.

Other comments
Two minor points on signposting.
In the abstract 'conclusions' section you say 'similar expedient publishing practices might exist in other countries as well' it would be good to say why your results lead you to this conclusion, or just take this sentence out.
In the 'website based journal assessment' section you could state what you present after the first paragraph and before launching into the list.This is at the top of page 10, you could add 'in this section we list xyz'

Are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others? No
If applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate?

Not applicable
Are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility?Partly

Are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results?
Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher 1 Diplomatic Academy Vienna, Vienna, Vienna, Austria 2 Bibliothek, Technische Universitat Wien, Vienna, Vienna, Austria 3 Department of Legal and Constitutional History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Vienna, Austria Thanks for inviting me to review the paper on Libyan journals performances and the perceptions of their editors regarding the journals' quality.It offers an interesting read, with some fascinating insights that complement the conventional knowledge about the scientific publication system.Conventionally, meta-scientific analyses tend to focus on journals that are indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, and that are published in English language and that conform to the so-called 'Global North' standards; this manuscript, in contrast, investigated an aspect of the scholarly publication system within a rather local setting in Libya.
A key insight is that there is a discrepancy between the editors' own assessment of their journals' performances on the one hand, and more or less 'objective' indicators on the other hand.What is also of interest are some of the "anomalies" (when compared to the usual convention), such as the fact that one journal pursues the editorial processing only via personal contact (rather than an online submission system or via e-mail), or that some of the journals lack a professional online presentation (e.g., websites with bogus "Impact Factors", or journal websites that only offer PDF versions rather than HTML versions of the texts, with too-many clicks necessary to access the scientific content).It is also remarkable that 80% of the journals seem to be open access and operate free of charge (i.e., Diamond Open Access, albeit not necessarily part of DOAJ).
The introduction is well written, and the manuscript structure conforms to the usual IMRaDstructure.However, I believe the paper would gain in strength with some additional information.
First, given that readers (like me) may not be an expert in the methodical approach used here, it would be great if the authors at least partly referenced the general standards of such expert surveys and quantitative interviews, and to show how their own approach conforms to these standards.
Second, is it possible to offer at least the list of journals that are covered by this study?The authors do not have to identify the responses (available at Zenodo) with the journals, but just having a catalogue of the journal sample would be interesting.
Third, I think the focus on Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar merits a complementary view with similar (but 'emerging') databases, such as Dimensions, or, more importantly, the "open data"-based CrossRef, LENS, and OpenAlex.The journal coverages differ from each other, and from my knowledge, the latter three or four databases are likewise widely used.And if readers had knowledge about the journals being members of, say, CrossRef, then more data could be fetched via CrossRef metadata.
Fourth, did the authors further delve into some of the concerning matters, such as the fact that bogus impact factors were displayed?Is there anything to say with regards to "predatory" publication structures that may be at play behind some journals?Why does a website present such questionable metrics --is it an innocent lack of knowledge, or is there a deceiving intent behind it?Would an expert survey even be able to unearth a "predatory" practice, given that respondents may not be honest in their responses?Another issue worthwhile to be addressed would be whether the journals use PIDs (especially DOIs), and if so, what kind of metadata are deposited behind the DOIs.
Fifth, the whole manuscript revolves around analyzing Libyan journals against a global standard -in the Discussion section, could anything be stated, at least briefly, about this "imposition" of common norms upon the Libyan system?Is there some kind of incompatibility between the global norms and the local practice?The wording of "colonialism" may be an overstretch here, but at least I got the impression that some readers may be interested in hearing more about this concept in this context.
Finally, there are some minor inconsistencies or errors, such as "DOAJ" being abbreviated as "DOJA", or that the abbreviation of "EC" was introduced for editors-in-chief, but then "EIC" is used later, etc.These are just minor matters.
As a further, very general remark, it seemed to me that the paper could better integrate current research on similar topics, at least briefly, so as to embed their own investigation into the relevant literature.Having just 10 references to peer-reviewed works does not really do justice to the fact that a lot is being researched on similar meta-scientific issues regarding the scientific journal landscape (e.g., on AJOL ["African Journals Online] 1 , on journals that publish in LOTE [languages other than English] 2 , on possibly "predatory" practices 3 , or, to cite merely one of our own examples 4 , whether a journal really attains the status of "open access" if the website poses even minor technical barriers in accessing the content (e.g., no HTML but only PDF versions).
Despite these few remarks on how the manuscript could possibly enhance its quality, the paper already offers a novel study with interesting insights for science at large.
It was ensured that the logic of the online questionnaire functioned correctly, and any ambiguous or misunderstood questions were re-worded.

Review comment:
Second, is it possible to offer at least the list of journals that are covered by this study?The authors do not have to identify the responses (available at Zenodo) with the journals, but just having a catalogue of the journal sample would be interesting.

Authors Reply:
We uploaded a list of the journals included in the study to a repository: Therefore, the study included 48 academic journals published by national institutions (list available at https:// 10.5281/zenodo.10155318).

Review comment:
Third, I think the focus on Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar merits a complementary view with similar (but 'emerging') databases, such as Dimensions, or, more importantly, the "open data"-based CrossRef, LENS, and OpenAlex.The journal coverages differ from each other, and from my knowledge, the latter three or four databases are likewise widely used.And if readers had knowledge about the journals being members of, say, CrossRef, then more data could be fetched via CrossRef metadata.

Authors Reply:
We have now checked for indexation of the journals in the Arab abstract-indexing database, eMarefa, and added the following: "On the other hand, Marefa (e-Marefa.net) is an abstract-indexing database established in 2008 for peer-reviewed literature from Arab countries published in Arabic, English or French.It indexes over 4000 journals and is the basis of the Arab Citation & Impact Factor (ARCIF, https://emarefa.net/ARCIF/).Of the 48 journals included in this study, 13 (27%) are listed in e-Marefa.com,with ARCIF factors ranging from zero to 1.3." "We did not search for the journals in the Arab Impact Factor (AIF) (https://www.arabimpactfactor.com/),produced by the Association of Arab Universities, because the content is not accessible, there are no links to the journals, and there is no description of where or how citations are counted."

Review comment:
Fourth, did the authors further delve into some of the concerning matters, such as the fact that bogus impact factors were displayed?Is there anything to say with regards to "predatory" publication structures that may be at play behind some journals?Why does a website present such questionable metrics --is it an innocent lack of knowledge, or is there a deceiving intent behind it?Would an expert survey even be able to unearth a "predatory" practice, given that respondents may not be honest in their responses?Another issue worthwhile to be addressed would be whether the journals use PIDs (especially DOIs), and if so, what kind of metadata are deposited behind the DOIs.

Authors Reply:
The relevant text now reads as follows: Notably, a few journals advertised on their websites impact factors that are known as or suspected of being fake.Advertising a questionable impact factor can be detrimental to a journal, and any claim to having an impact factor should specify its source.When the source of a published impact factor is not specified, a deceiving intent to provide false impression about journal status is suspected.

Review comment:
Fifth, the whole manuscript revolves around analyzing Libyan journals against a global standard --in the Discussion section, could anything be stated, at least briefly, about this "imposition" of common norms upon the Libyan system?Is there some kind of incompatibility between the global norms and the local practice?The wording of "colonialism" may be an overstretch here, but at least I got the impression that some readers may be interested in hearing more about this concept in this context.

Authors Reply:
We added the following in the discussion: Yet, it is important to note that the lack of research skills, experience, and research funding is an important factor in the low-quality research in developing countries.Furthermore, in Libya as well as other developing nations, quantitative bibliometric criteria are used to assess research production for promotion decisions, regardless of the quality of publications.This could be strengthening the expedient editorial practices in many university-based journals

Review comment:
Finally, there are some minor inconsistencies or errors, such as "DOAJ" being abbreviated as "DOJA", or that the abbreviation of "EC" was introduced for editors-in-chief, but then "EIC" is used later, etc.These are just minor matters.
Authors Reply: Done.Thank you.

Review comment:
As a further, very general remark, it seemed to me that the paper could better integrate current research on similar topics, at least briefly, so as to embed their own investigation into the relevant literature.Having just 10 references to peer-reviewed works does not really do justice to the fact that a lot is being researched on similar meta-scientific issues regarding the scientific journal landscape (e.g., on AJOL ["African Journals Online]1, on journals that publish in LOTE [languages other than English]2, on possibly "predatory" practices3, or, to cite merely one of our own examples4, whether a journal really attains the status of "open access" if the website poses even minor technical barriers in accessing the content (e.g., no HTML but only PDF versions).

Authors response
We have provided more information from nine more references.
Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.

Hamid Jamali
Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia The article illustrates a picture of scholarly journal publishing in Libya by presenting the results of a survey of journal editors and some analysis of data collected through desk research from journals' websites.The results are mainly related to 48 journals and their editors who responded to the questionnaire.
It is helpful to know about the status quo of journal publishing in a developing country and the challenges faced by those journals and in this regard, the paper is useful.However, I found the analysis a bit too descriptive and there is some room for improvement.
To start with, I think the paper needs to provide some background about journal publishing in Libya as the context.When did journal publishing start, how many journals exist, in what language are they published and so on?Some information about the country would also be useful as context (population, number of universities, number of papers published by Libyan researchers in Scopus in one year as an example etc).This information should be available somewhere or at least collectable via some desk research.The authors have relied on the questionnaire to find some facts about journals while I believe that type of information could be more accurately collected via desk research (e.g.indexation, language and so on).The initial analysis should not be limited only to those journals that completed the questionnaire, it should cover all Libyan journals if possible.
The survey results are presented appropriately (simple frequency and percentage) but I expected a bit more at least from free-text questions.The word cloud doesn't reveal much really as it only includes a few general terms such as journal, institution etc.So the authors might see if they can improve the analysis to add more depth and insight.

Review comment:
The authors have relied on the questionnaire to find some facts about journals while I believe that type of information could be more accurately collected via desk research (e.g.indexation, language and so on).The initial analysis should not be limited only to those journals that completed the questionnaire, it should cover all Libyan journals if possible.

Authors' Reply:
We collected data about editorial journal qualities from the websites only of the journals the editors of which participated in the study.The aim was to integrate the data from the questionnaire with those from desk searches for the journal editorial qualities.This yielded perhaps the most notable finding of the discrepancy between the editors-in-chiefs' perception of journal performance and objective criteria of journal editorial performance.Furthermore, most of the other journals either did not have publishing websites or were not active at the time of the search.The relevant section of the methods has been modified slightly and augmented as follows: To integrate results of desk research with the results from the questionnaire, the websites of the journals the editors of which returned questionnaire responses were visited by one investigator (AB) and information was collected on various journal qualities.These included but were not limited to the presence of an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), the editorial board's geographic diversity, the organization of the archives, and general website functionality.Moreover, data were collected on the listing of the journals in Google Scholar and the number of citations of all articles published in 2019, as well as indexation in the database of the Arab Citation & Impact Factor (Arcif).

Review comment:
The survey results are presented appropriately (simple frequency and percentage) but I expected a bit more at least from free-text questions.The word cloud doesn't reveal much really as it only includes a few general terms such as journal, institution etc.So the authors might see if they can improve the analysis to add more depth and insight.

Authors Reply:
"Financial support" is one the three most prominent terms in the word cloud.Nevertheless, we replaced the figure with a new figure that includes more words and thus gives a clearer picture.

Review comment:
The paper can benefit from better coverage of the relevant literature.I have provided a few references here1-[ref-6.Some are examples of papers that discuss journal publishing in individual developing countries (Pakistan and Nigeria), and some are discussions particularly about journal publishing in the Arab world (which Libya is part of).One is generally about journal publishing in the world (Khanna et al) which has good points and information about local journals and non-English journals.And finally, Jamali et al (disclaimer: my own paper on local journals in Australia) has information about challenges faced by local journals that occasionally result in their discontinuation.

Authors Reply:
We thank the reviewer for suggesting the references.We have added the following in the discussion: "A recent study on over 25,000 journals that use PKP's Open Journal Systems platform found only 1.2% indexed in the Web of Science and 7.2% in Scopus.A recent review of Pakistani journals revealed that 97% of the journals are in the lowest category and 97% do not have an impact factor. 26In many developing countries, the majority of the journals are university-based." We also added the following at an appropriate place in the discussion: But its impact can go deeper.A study on Australian journals reported that funding issues represented a major cause of journal discontinuation. 28

Review comment:
The discussion has good points, but you can also consider the value of local/national journals in your discussion.Local/national journals have functions that can be distinct from international journals.

Authors Reply:
We have added the following text in the discussion: However, local journals should not be undervalued.Researchers might prefer to publish in international journals, but local journals have distinct, useful functions.Whereas international journals provide a platform for researchers to share their research globally, local journals provide a platform for issues and developments relevant to the local community that might not be considered relevant to international journals.Local journals also foster cooperation between local researchers and provide a platform for publishing in their native language.Nevertheless, there is a need for establishing robust criteria for publishing practices and policies of local journals, particularly state-sponsored journals.
Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
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Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Percent distribution of sources of reviewers.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Frequency of editors-in-chief who perform peer review of submitted manuscripts and write reports.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Distribution of the journals by frequency of manuscripts rejected without peer review (A) and by overall percent acceptance rate of submitted manuscripts (B).

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Percentage distribution of the degree of satisfaction of the editors-in-chief with the performance of their journals.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Distribution of the journals by the fraction of published articles perceived by the editors-in-chief as adding new findings or ideas.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Frequency of manuscripts sent to peer review that satisfy the editors-in-chiefs in terms of writing quality and language accuracy.

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Word cloud of all the words in all the answers to the question "What are your opinions on the challenges facing the journal publishing quality?" Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0).The article reports on the results of a survey and desk research exploring editorial practices in Libyan academic journals.It is an interesting article in that it presents the perspectives of editors in chief and compares them with common academic publishing quality indicators such as whether a journal is indexed in Web of Science or other bibliographic databases.

Table 1 .
Reasons for satisfaction of the editors-in-chief with the reviewers' reports.
n = 46; Two journals no response.Multiple answers were allowed.
2-0.3 citations per article.One of the five journals is with a professional publisher, three use OJS, and the fifth uses a free open source content management system.
Only five journals' DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) and their metadata are deposited in Crossref database (https://www.crossref.org/),andtwo other journals' metadata are deposited in the Zenodo open repository (https://zenodo.org/).On the other hand, Marefa (https://e-Marefa.net) is an abstract-indexing database established in 2008 for peer-reviewed literature from Arab countries published in Arabic, English or French.It indexes over 4000 journals and is the basis of the Arab Citation & Impact Factor (ARCIF, https://emarefa.net/ARCIF/).Of the 48 journals included in this study, 13 (27%) are listed in e-Marefa.com,with ARCIF factors ranging from zero to 1.3.

confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. been
22panded and improved over the years.The first Libyan university was established in 1957 (https://mhesr.gov.ly/?page_id=126).The number of universities has expanded over time, and according to the ministry of education, there are now 26 public universities in Libya with 350,000 university students.20Thefirstinitiativetoformallypromoteresearch in Libya began in the mid-seventies with the establishment of the National Commission of Scientific Research, formally charged with planning and supporting scientific research.Over many years, the Libyan government, expanded the scope of MSc degree programs, and recently initiated PhD programs in various fields, including sciences, as well as built research centers.However, overall research performance indicators remain modest.The Libyan Journal of Science, the first scholarly journal published in Libya, was launched in 1971.It is improbable that it is the currently active journal by the same name because the numbering of the annual volumes goes back only to the late nineties.Jamahiriya Medical Journal was launched in 1976 and continues to be listed in Scopus (without metrics) though it ceased its activity in 2011.A recent bibliometric study (Jaradat)21based on the Scopus database for Libya's scientific output from 1948 to 2022 revealed a total number of 10,475 articles in the Scopus database, 10361 of them in English (99%).On the other hand, another study (Mahmood)22, based on the Directory and Book of Abstracts of Libya's National Centre for Scientific Research for 2001-2004, revealed that 45% of the research output was reported in English, and the rest was in Arabic.
The paper can benefit from better coverage of the relevant literature.I have provided a few Reviewer Expertise: Scholarly communication I