Open access e-journal hosting at the UO Libraries

Humanist Studies & the Digital Age	Konturen	Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal
UO journals at journals.oregondigital.org

The UO Libraries provides free publishing support for UO departmentally-sponsored or UO-faculty-edited open access e-journals.  The service is a collaboration of the UO Libraries with the Oregon State University Libraries to support broader dissemination of scholarship and promote the advancement of both universities’ research.

If you are developing a new open access e-journal, the UO Libraries would love to partner with you to provide e-journal hosting and related services.  If you are interested in moving an existing journal to online open access, we can provide the hosting service and also assist in the transfer of existing content.  Contact SCIS to discuss the possibilities in greater depth.

Open access journals represent an emerging academic publishing model that makes the results of scholarly research freely available online to all readers who have access to the Internet.  Other benefits of open access journals include increased visibility and distribution of research results to a global audience; improved access to articles by readers outside a given discipline or without access to traditional research channels; fewer publication delays, fewer access restrictions associated with journals run by commercial publishers; and more secure stewardship and archiving of research results.

OJS Publishing Service

OJS editorial workflow

We can provide journal hosting using the Open Journal System software package. OJS is an excellent choice for online open access scholarly journals that follow a traditional model for editing and peer review. It has a large user community, offers an excellent editorial workflow, good support for archiving, and ease of connection to related publishing services (ISSNs, DOIs, publication stats, citation management plugins, a variety of metadata exchange options, etc.). OJS support coordinated through SCIS includes:

• providing hosting at http://journals.oregondigital.org, a collaboration of the UO Libraries and OSU Libraries
• training for editors in the use of the OJS system, plus ongoing technical support
• assistance in the setup of the journal including advice on editorial workflow, user management, copyright issues, and inclusion of rich media as part of an e-journal article
• graphic design assistance for the journal site through CMET:IM, plus advice on standard article formats
• acquisition of an ISSN for the journal, and registration in the Directory of Open Access Journals
• provision of DOIs (digital object identifiers) for individual journal articles
• content archiving (for long-term preservation) of the journal in OJS or ScholarsBank
• consulting on copyright, indexing, and database options

We expect to expand the set of publishing services in the future.

Note that our partner organizations and/or journal editors are expected to be responsible for

• Journal marketing and advertising
• Editorial management (e.g. identifying reviewers, corresponding with authors)
• Peer reviewing
• Article production (e.g. copyediting, layout, proofreading)
• Journal issue production
• Subscription management (if journal offers subscriptions in addition to open access)
• Accounts payable or receivable (including billing authors if journal charges author fee)

Journals need to have an expected long-term affiliation with a UO department, and must be available as "libre" open access.  We recommend that all articles be made available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND or more permissive) license.

Getting started

Interested in having the UO Libraries host your e-journal? Contact John Russell to discuss the possibilities.

A great way to get started is to take a look at examples of journals.  Check out our publishing site at journals.uoregondigital.org, or visit the Directory of Open Access Journals to see thousands of examples of similar journals from around the world.

We also are putting together resources for journal editors: see our web page for new journal editors.

More about OJS

The Open Journal System is an open source software package developed by the Public Knowledge Project. at Simon Frazer University in British Columbia.  As noted on the OJS web site,

OJS assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing. Through its management systems, its finely grained indexing of research, and the context it provides for research, OJS seeks to improve both the scholarly and public quality of refereed research.

OJS is open source software made freely available to journals worldwide for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal's readership as well as its contribution to the public good.

OJS is currently being used to host over 6600 open access journals throughout the world.  We estimate that about 1/3 of the journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals are published using OJS.

Other Publishing Services

Image from Hannay, T. (2007).  Foo and beyond, Nascent, http://blogs.nature.com  /wp/nascent/2007/06/post.html.  Visited 8/13/2010.

The Libraries are also experimenting with new models and tools for scholarly publishing. During 2010 the Libraries are participating in a number of projects exploring

• other tools for journal publishing, including WordPress and Drupal
• alternative models for dissemination of research results, including preprints, working papers,  ePortfolios, and social web software
• alternative models for peer review and certification, including dual-track review that combines a traditional editorial review with peer review implemented through blog posting and commentary.

Some of these projects may become services in the future. For example, we hope to be able to support UO open access publications using Drupal in cases where OJS is not the appropriate software tool.  Our initial analyses (fall 2010) suggest that OJS is ideal for refereed journals that mirror in electronic form the traditional peer reviewed journal, but less appropriate for other sorts of website; we see Drupal as being appealing for online magazines and for journal-like websites that explore social media as alternatives to traditional peer review.

We are also evaluating new services to add to our support for journals using OJS.  One likely service is assistance in converting existing journals to OJS, including digitizaton and injest of back issues.

Additional Information

• Benefits of open access
• Examples of high quality open access journals
• Open Access publishing at the UO
• SCIS services supporting scholarly communications
• Research and Publishing Support at the UO Libraries
• Resources for new journal editors
• OJS Users Guide documentation
• Directory of Open Access Journals