Centres' Websites of Scientific Publishing in Saudi Universities on the Internet: An Evaluative Study

Abstract

Scientific publishing in universities occupies a distinctive field of publishing, a field closely related to the wealth of universities, and to preserve this wealth from extinction and to enhance the university's role in knowledge dissemination, universities were keen to establish scientific publishing centres to undertake the task of publishing research and scientific contributions in universities to build bridges between universities and the external community and introducing university researchers and their scientific production, and the university ranking as a whole. The current study aimed to monitor the status of the websites of scientific publishing centres in Saudi public universities on the Internet. And the services, information, programs and initiatives available to support open access. The study relied on the survey methodology and the content analysis approach to achieve its objectives. It used the checklist as a systematic tool to collect data from the study community, which consisted of twelve websites of scientific publishing centres in Saudi public universities. The study revealed that the most important of which is that both the website of King Saud University Press and the Naif University Press website are among the best sites of the scientific publishing centres in the study according to their information and services and guidelines for authors and translators. And that all the websites of the scientific publishing centres in the study did not provide any information indicating their application of open-access models for their publications, except for Naif University Press House