Corresponding author: Edgar García-Valencia ( edggarcia@uv.mx ) Academic editor: Ksenija Bazdaric © Esteban Giraldo-González, Edgar García-Valencia, Juan Felipe Córdoba-Restrepo, Elea Giménez-Toledo. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Giraldo-González E, García-Valencia E, Córdoba-Restrepo JF, Giménez-Toledo E (2024) Publishers and production of academic books in Mexico: 2013-2019. European Science Editing 50: e123288. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2024.e123288 |
Background: The project Cartografía de la Edición Académica Iberoamericana aims to analyze the production of academic books in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the Americas. Following the path opened by similar studies in Colombia and Brazil, we present the results for Mexico.
Objectives: To analyze academic books published in Mexico between 2013 and 2019 to examine the entities that published the books and their respective shares in the total output.
Methods: A mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches was used to characterize the Mexican publishers of academic books based on data on ISBNs, the International Standard Book Numbers. The data comprised the information provided to the agency that assigns a unique ISBN to each book. We also used the Delphi method and formed discussion groups of experts. The groups were set up on the basis of responses to semi-structured questionnaires that sought to determine the criteria an entity must satisfy to be considered an academic publisher.
Conclusions: Of the 196 533 ISBNs issued in Mexico between 2013 and 2019, 117 929 (60%) were issued for books dealing with academic subjects. Commercial publishers accounted for the largest share of those books (63 044 ISBNs, or 53.4% of all the academic books), followed by university presses (29 628 ISBNs, or 25.1%). The group of experts suggested that among the 1289 publishers that requested ISBNs for academic books, only 151 (11.7%) can be considered truly academic publishers; 678 (52.6%) cannot; and 460 (35.7%) were borderline cases, as they meet some but not all the criteria for them to be considered truly academic.