Study limitations
With 132 journals providing responses the sample size was not large enough for us to make wide-ranging assumptions about journal practice. Also, not all questions in the self-assessment are applicable to all subject areas. A further limitation was the fact that we defined the criteria for our own rating of 1-3 which we then applied consistently across all journals in the study, whereas each journal rated itself independently of any other journal and with no specific criteria against which to judge. We also added ā€˜u’ and ā€˜n/a’ categories for our rating, which were not available to journals for the self-assessment. Journals were also operating independently of each other and not necessarily familiar with common practice and system solutions, whereas we had the benefit of observing what was a common or acceptable standard across multiple journals, or what practices were in place simply because of available system solutions.