Latest trends in innovative global scholarly journal publication and distribution platforms

This review article presents the latest trends in innovative global scholarly journal publication and distribution platforms, with implications for local journals. Changes have taken place in distribution policies, as pre-publication distribution has become a viable option, and for post-publication distribution, public access or mandatory open access policies have been introduced for articles supported by public or governmental funds. New formats of articles include graphical abstracts, interactive PDFs, the application of semantic enhancements, and the utilization of research data, social networking sites, such as Mendeley and ResearchGate, have become common sites for information exchange. Altmetrics have been adopted to complement traditional journal metrics. PubMed Central, F1000Research, KoreaMed Synapse, and ScienceCentral have been introduced as innovative full-text scholarly journal distribution systems. To publish web-based scholarly journals, it is necessary to adopt an open platform and to explore options such as an author profile database, an online collaborative editing module, and Crossref text and data mining services. To maximize the influence of local journals, it is necessary to integrate various external tools, such as researcher ID, research data, social media, and altmetrics services.