scholarly journals Library Publishing Programs at Capacity: Addressing Issues of Sustainability and Scalability

Author(s):  
Johanna Meetz ◽  
Jason Boczar

This article discusses the changes to overall goals, direction, and services that were made to two library publishing programs at University A and University B when they were no longer able to grow their programs due to an inability to hire additional staff and COVID-19-instigated staff reassignments. Description of Programs University A's publishing program grew out of its institutional repository, and, at its peak, published 7 open access journals. In addition, University A's Libraries founded a University Press in 2016, which has published 6 books as of 2021. University B's publishing program began publishing open access journals in 2008, and it has grown to include over 20 journals. Lessons Learned Both University A and University B's publishing programs have faced scalability and sustainability issues, which were further exacerbated by COVID-19. The focus of our library publishing programs, as well as many others, has been on continual growth, which is not sustainable without the ability to hire additional staff or allocate staff time differently. We argue that standardizing services as well as creating a business plan can help ensure publishing programs are sustainable and scalable. Next Steps We hope to begin a conversation among library publishers about acknowledging limits and creating achievable definitions of success outside of continual growth.

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 196
Author(s):  
A.L. Carson ◽  
Carol Ou

Implemented as a way to host open-access journals, the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries institutional repository (IR) expanded into collecting other researcher-created materials, a process that did not always include clear metadata and descriptive guidelines. Series-specific settings, unclear field definitions, and other varying practices created an inconsistent bibliographic database, however, and the unclear field definitions and lack of thorough internal documentation pointed to issues that would need to be addressed if the Libraries wanted to reliably share its IR metadata with its discovery layer and external harvesters and aggregators. To resolve this problem, UNLV undertook a metadata review intended to reconcile the fields used and provide recommendations on vocabularies and standards for capturing metadata. Through a collaborative, iterative process, the Metadata Review Team suggested and implemented changes to the IR’s metadata structures, in consultation with vendor support, resulting in improved descriptive policies for IR resources.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mina Farmanbar ◽  
Per Kolstrup

Increasing the role of libraries in academic journal publishing activities and journal hosting has become an important subject in the library world in the past few years. The purpose of this study is to present the role of the libraries at University of Stavanger (UiS) in the context of library-as-publisher. Within this category, open access (OA) journal publishing has been a popular service offered by libraries, rapidly attracting researchers' attention. The University Libraries at University of Stavanger (UiS) have a long history of promoting and supporting open access initiatives. The Libraries have established and continue to build, host and maintain an operative open access institutional repository (UiS Brage) for scientific works in full text. From 2018, UiS libraries started using a journal management system to facilitate the open access scholarly publishing and therefore support transferring and updating of established the existing journals and the lunching of new ones. The Open Journal Systems (OJS) from Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is used which is the most common journal management system being discussed frequently in literature. Currently, the UiS Libraries repository host four active open access journals, with some others under development. All these journals reside within the same OJS implementation with the same design and layout on top, however, at the individual journal level there are also options for some customization.  UiS libraries initially support all the steps of the journal creation and development process but train the editors and the subsequent users to engage in some part of the process. The library IT-Engineer and Information Technology Department (IT) manage OJS server, maintain the OJS database and software, and performs the layout and design customization and development and initial technical configuration for the new journals. From the viewpoint of IT, there is a need for several technical skills such as web design skills to customize the style sheets and web layout, graphic design skills to produce banners, logos and cover pages whereas the editorial workflow process may require skills on copy-editing and proofreading of articles. OJS is a template-based platform but when it comes to front-end design, it has its limitation. There are certain limitations which make it difficult to get to the details of the article. For instance, when an article comes with a long abstract or number of references, the web-page becomes unfriendly. Another challenge is when PKP launches a new OJS update. Some features cannot be migrated, and you may lose them. Furthermore, users may find it hard to adapt to the new version. The biggest challenge to the OJS is the learning curve. There are some faculty members who have had some frustrations with the software. While it is a free and open source platform, the time, technical skills and programming abilities are still associated with the costs. In this poster we provide you with the challenges and lessons learned so far by the libraries at Stavanger University.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matheus Pereira Lobo

A huge collaborative open science model is proposed. Many authors collaborating in a paper leads to a substantial reduction for the Article Processing Charges (APCs) in the Open Access Journals. This can significantly stimulate research within a healthier citizen and open science culture.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Гульдар Фанисовна Ибрагимова ◽  
Ольга Алексеевна Ковалевич ◽  
Раиса Николаевна Афонина ◽  
Елена Алексеевна Лесных ◽  
Яна Игоревна Ряполова ◽  
...  

Conference paper Covered by Leading Indexing DatabasesOpen European Academy of Public Sciences aims to have all of its journals covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus and Web of Science indexing systems. Several journals have already been covered by SCIE for several years and have received official Impact Factors. Some life sciencerelated journals are also covered by PubMed/MEDLINE and archived through PubMed Central (PMC). All of our journals are archived with the Spanish and Germany National Library.All Content is Open Access and Free for Readers Journals published by Open European Academy of Public Sciences are fully open access: research articles, reviews or any other content on this platform is available to everyone free of charge. To be able to provide open access journals, we finance publication through article processing charges (APC); these are usually covered by the authors’ institutes or research funding bodies. We offer access to science and the latest research to readers for free. All of our content is published in open access and distributed under a Creative Commons License, which means published articles can be freely shared and the content reused, upon proper attribution.Open European Academy of Public Sciences Publication Ethics StatementOpen European Academy of Public Sciences is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peerreview together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications.Mission and ValuesAs a pioneer of academic open access publishing, we serve the scientific community since 2009. Our aim is to foster scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. In addition to being at the root of Open European Academy of Public Sciences and a key theme in our journals, we support sustainability by ensuring the longterm preservation of published papers, and the future of science through partnerships, sponsorships and awards.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elke Maurer ◽  
Nike Walter ◽  
Tina Histing ◽  
Lydia Anastasopoulou ◽  
Thaqif El Khassawna ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Along with emerging open access journals (OAJ) predatory journals increasingly appear. As they harm accurate and good scientific research, we aimed to examine the awareness of predatory journals and open access publishing among orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Methods In an online survey between August and December 2019 the knowledge on predatory journals and OAJ was tested with a hyperlink made available to the participants via the German Society for Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery (DGOU) email distributor. Results Three hundred fifty orthopaedic and trauma surgeons participated, of which 291 complete responses (231 males (79.4%), 54 females (18.6%) and 5 N/A (2.0%)) were obtained. 39.9% were aware of predatory journals. However, 21.0% knew about the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ) as a register for non-predatory open access journals. The level of profession (e.g. clinic director, consultant) (p = 0.018) influenced the awareness of predatory journals. Interestingly, participants aware of predatory journals had more often been listed as corresponding authors (p < 0.001) and were well published as first or last author (p < 0.001). Awareness of OAJ was masked when journal selection options did not to provide any information on the editorial board, the peer review process or the publication costs. Conclusion The impending hazard of predatory journals is unknown to many orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Early stage clinical researchers must be trained to differentiate between predatory and scientifically accurate journals.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. e047107
Author(s):  
Mallory K. Ellingson ◽  
Xiaoting Shi ◽  
Joshua J. Skydel ◽  
Kate Nyhan ◽  
Richard Lehman ◽  
...  

ObjectiveTo estimate the financial costs paid by individual medical researchers from meeting the article processing charges (APCs) levied by open access journals in 2019.DesignCross-sectional analysis.Data sourcesScopus was used to generate two random samples of researchers, the first with a senior author article indexed in the ‘Medicine’ subject area (general researchers) and the second with an article published in the ten highest-impact factor general clinical medicine journals (high-impact researchers) in 2019. For each researcher, Scopus was used to identify all first and senior author original research or review articles published in 2019. Data were obtained from Scopus, institutional profiles, Journal Citation Reports, publisher databases, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and individual journal websites.Main outcome measuresMedian APCs paid by general and high-impact researchers for all first and senior author research and review articles published in 2019.ResultsThere were 241 general and 246 high-impact researchers identified as eligible for our study. In 2019, the general and high-impact researchers published a total of 914 (median 2, IQR 1–5) and 1471 (4, 2–8) first or senior author research or review articles, respectively. 42% (384/914) of the articles from the general researchers and 29% (428/1471) of the articles from the high-impact medical researchers were published in fully open access journals. The median total APCs paid by general researchers in 2019 was US$191 (US$0–US$2500) and the median total paid by high-impact researchers was US$2900 (US$0–US$5465); the maximum paid by a single researcher in total APCs was US$30115 and US$34676, respectively.ConclusionsMedical researchers in 2019 were found to have paid between US$0 and US$34676 in total APCs. As journals with APCs become more common, it is important to continue to evaluate the potential cost to researchers, especially on individuals who may not have the funding or institutional resources to cover these costs.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Pölönen ◽  
Sami Syrjämäki ◽  
Antti‐Jussi Nygård ◽  
Björn Hammarfelt

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