Title: The Library as a mediator for e-publishing: A case on how a library can become a significant factor in facilitating digital scholarly communication and open access publishing for less web savvy journals.
Mikael K. Elbæk
Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark
Lars Nondal
Copenhagen Business School Library
[last draft version 1. September 2007]
Abstract
Denmark is a small country but with a large and diverse scholarly publishing environment. There are many small journals mostly in English. A majority of these sees the potential in online publishing but do not have the resources and capabilities to do so. Furthermore they havea conservative business model (i.e. finances!) that doesn't encourage an Open Access publishing strategy.CBS Library provides a low risk environment for small journals related to the business school to makea gradual transition to e-publishing/e-archiving at first. Whether they at a later stage take the full step towardsOpen Access publishing remains to be seen. It is our firm belief that this possibility for gradual transition is essential for these smaller journals getting online at all.
Introduction
Scholarly publishing and Open Access in Denmark
Scholarly communication in Denmark is characterised by strong focus on publishing in international,highly cited and prestigious journals. This focus has strongly been instigated by the Danish government’s agenda of making the Danish economy competitive in the Global Economy (The Danish Government, 2006). The debate in the media has mostly been on the proposed merging of Danish universities and other research institutions(sektorforskningsinstitutioner) in order to become “World Top Level universities”. There isa strong and growing focus on the Danish universities’ international impact (ranking), on benchmarking of Danish universities against foreign universities. The focus is also on a more practical levelbenchmarking of the research output (quantity and quality ofpublications), both domestically between Danish universities, and between Danish universities and foreign universities of the same kind.One of the benchmarking techniques that have been put forward has been traditional citation analysis. As always,a topic of big controversy - but nevertheless it seems to become accepted by the Ministry as one way of benchmarking. And then the universities have to follow suit.
In comparison to all this talk about 'world-class universities' and the issues concerning benchmarking of institutions,the question of Open Access publishing has been non-existing. There has been only little debate on the topic of OA, and mostly from university library leaders, much less from publishers and researchers. The library directors are putting forward the well-knownarguments of the explosive rising in the pricing of journals, anduniversities having to buy access to their ownresearch output. At the other end of the spectre are the publishers, who have been very sceptical towards OA -although there recently has been some opening towards OA from for exampleMuseum Tusculanum[i], a publisher closely connected to the University of Copenhagen. Thepolicy makers such as research councils, government bodies etc. has been and are stillabsent in the debate on OA. Therefore there has onlybeen allocated very few public moneydirectly to OA publishing projects in Denmark and, to our knowledge, no journals has so far been encouraged or forced to publish as OA by the government, university management, research societies, funding agencies etc. As of today, only one university in Denmark has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access (Roskilde University, January 2006)[ii]. However there are at least some OA activitieson a pan Nordic level. The Nordic organisations of Nordbib and Nordic Board for Periodicals in the Humanities and the Social Sciences held a workshop in April 2007 in Helsingør, Denmark with participants from universities, libraries and publishers. The two organisations have put money into a programme that will first map OA in the Nordic countries and thereafter develop initiatives that can support OA content and accessibility – but this is only aimed at journals within humanities and social sciences. For the last part Nordbib and NOP-HS has raised DKK 3,1 mil.
Journal publishing in Denmark
Journal publishing in Denmark is recognised by many small publishers and many small journals. According to a recent study there are published some 623 journals, and163 of these are online available in some form, some as OA (Burchardt 2007, p. 32). Many of these journals are published by one of the more then 500 research societies in Denmark. According to Burchardt there are about 7100 people involved in the editorial work either as editors or as reviewers. Most of these are volunteers doing the work as “con amour” to their research domain. Of the 623 journals approx. 70% are published in English and approx. 30% in Danish,and a handful of journals are published inother languages mainly German and French. The 623 journals covers a very broad range of research domains, scope and size. Most of the journals are very small both in size of readers and size of submissions.Many of these journals are in the danger of extinction because of falling numbers of subscribers and rising costs to printing and distribution. At the same time they face the hurdle of getting their content online. They all know it is crucial to be findable on the net and in the databases used by the universities, but they don’t know how.
Working with a number of thesesmall journals for a couple of years, trying to persuade and help them to migrate from paper to electronic publishing, we have learned that they generally havevery few available resources, both financially and staff-wise. They simply don't havethe capacity to go online. Furthermore, they are often depending on a business model that rules out the possibility to move quickly, in one step, to OA publishing. For an existing paper journal, the transition from a situation where a number of subscribers for several years have provided the journal with the necessary income to cover the costs, it's simply doesn't make sense in their minds to suggest to do away with both all the income (the subscription fees) andmost of the costs (production and distribution of paper-versions) moreover to imagine a future where the economy is based on government funding, research council funding, author charges etc. Thus there has been no demand or desire from the small journals themselves to publish OA. They want to add some e-publishing to their existing business model, not to change their business model to OA.
Open Journal Systems in Denmark
Although the OA movement hasn’t received a lot of attention in Denmark there is a strong focus especially from the university libraries on getting digital access to research published in the many small journals from Danish research societies. The CBS Library sees it as a necessary and important faculty service to be able to offer our researchers, and the journals they edit themselves or at least publish in, a platform for e-publishing (or e-archiving) of journals. Historically we, as probably most other institutions did, started with an Institutional Repository archiving CBS working papers. E-publishing of scientific articles from our “own journals” is a logical next step.
Beside the need for digitize, publishand archive our institutions own research publications libraries may have other reasons for doing this.An often-mentionedconcern isthat small journals without web presence and digital content will not be read at all.The typical bachelor and graduate student as of today – the future PhD’s and researchers – are not valuingarticles and literaturethat are not online available very highly. And even if they shouldvalue them, they seldom come across them, as they don't find them in the search engines they use much more often than library OPAC's.
Since 2005 Copenhagen Business School Library has been providing an e-publishing service of journals based on Open Journal Systems. The service provided by CBS Library has inspired other universities and university libraries to establish similar e-publishing services based on OJS. In the autumn of 2006 the second biggest university in Denmark started a pilot project offering all interested journals at the Aarhus University campus to participate in a pilot project for an e-publishing service based on OJS. The pilot project has helped 22 journals to start publishing or archiving using OJS. The largest university in Denmark, University of Copenhagen, is planning to start up a similar project in the autumn of 2007. They will very likely be able to publisha substantial number of journals electronically.The University Library at the Universityof Copenhagenhas a active blog on OA, especially in Denmark[iii].
Besides these major projects there are also plans for e-publishing services based on OJS at Roskilde University and Aalborg University.
Ejournals@cbs - a faculty service
The service is based on OJS, and the aim is defined as to help journals that are related to CBS,typically the editor is a researcher at one of the CBS departments. Each journal get their own URL, and the librarystaff helpssetting the journal upin OJS. We configure and brandthe journals OJS web page using CSS, in addition we give advice about how to use the editorial workflow in OJS, for example how to upload new articles and issues. Furthermore we of course take care of the server and the necessary software updates, back-up etc.This basic service is free for the journals; the question about economic compensation to the library only arises under special circumstances, like massive retro-digitization or upload of decades of back-files.
This e-publishing service at CBS Library, Ejournals@cbs, was established as a spin-off from a government sponsored project back in 2004. The aim of the Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (Deff) project was to make a survey of e-publishing platforms and to do two pilot studies with two different journals migrating to online publishing. (Fugl and Elbæk, 2005). The overall project was a success and resulted for our part in the establishment of a CBS faculty service for e-publishing. Today Ejournals@cbs hosts four journals and have three more journals planned for publishing.
Working with Ejournals@cbs we have discovered that there are as many different needs as there are journals. We have noticed that some journals and editorial boardsneed our help more than others. We learnedthat the some small journals have a very slow decision making process. Nevertheless we think that our efforts has proven successful.This success has only been possible because we have a very pragmatic approach to OA and electronic publishing. CBS Library encourages journals to publish Open Access, but it is not an indispensable requirement. And we definitely wouldn't have reached these results if we had insistedon complete OA as an indispensable requirement for the journals to use our service.
Case study
Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies
The Copenhagen Journals of Asian Studies (CJAS) is a journal an international peer-reviewed journal that focus on the economic, the political, the managerial and the socio-cultural aspects of contemporary Asia[iv]. CJAS has been published since 1987 with 2 issues a year of about 150 pages. The editor of the journal Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard is professor at CBS and Director of the Asia Research Centre that also publishes CJAS.
The journal is a subscription and print-based journal that has digitized back-issues from 2002 to present. There is open access to back-issues after one year embargo. Only subscribers have online access to the latest issues. The editor of the journal has been very concerned about losing subscribers after giving open access to the back-issues even with one year embargo. The model has now been working some two years without losing subscribers because of the new access model.
All editorial work at CJAS is very dependent on the work of the editor and the editorial manager. The editor is mainly reading submissions and deciding if they are going to be accepted for review or be right-out rejected. While the editorial manager who is also working as a secretary for the Asia Research Centre does most of the editorial work. Most of the editorial work flow are still dependent on manual procedures and “home-made” systems using a mail client and Excel spreadsheet. During the project the editorial manager of CJAS did try out a system specifically designed for peer-review management and OJS for submission management but none of them resulted in any benefits for the journal. This was probably a result of the relatively few submissions that CJAS receives per issue and the barrier of using an editorial managing system that has a relatively steep learning curve. Especially for people that is not IT-savvy. In general none of the people involved with CJAS are IT-savvy and the journal has no resources to finance servers and web applications to publish the journal themselves.
For the editor-in-chief of the CJAS the printed version is the essence of the journal. There has gone a lot of effort into the design and layout of the journal. It is a showcase of Asia Research Centres work and copies of the journal are given away at conferences and such. At the same time the largest post on the budget producing the journal is the layout-work and printing of the journal. Indirectly the university finances the work of the editorial manager and the editor-in-chief as their work mainly is done as a part of the normal work and research at the university. The journal – editor-in-chief - sees the need of having an online presence but Open Access as such is not an issue of concern to the editor. As he is not ready to leave the print journal all together the main concern of the editor-of-chief is to keep subscribers who help financing the printing of the journal. Therefore OA publishing has not been an issue for the journal at all.
Even though CJAS isn’t ready for OA publishing CBS Library and Ejournals@cbs has seen an advantage in helping CJAS to migrate to an online publishing platform using OJS. CBS Library sees it as win-win situation where CJAS gets its journal online and more visible and the library gets online access to very useful content. Although CJAS isn’t using all of the potential features of OJS, OJS offers a platform that makes it easy for the editorial manager to archive articles of the newest issues and controlling embargo and access to the latest issues. OJS isn’t only useful for OA-journals, but also have the functionalities to be a publishing platform for journals that need to handle embargos, ip-adresses and -control.
Foucault Studies
Foucault Studies has been published since 2004. The aim of the journal is to provide a forum for the discussion of Foucault[v]. The journal is published twice a year. From the start Foucault Studies has been born as an online only journal and is published as Open Access.
The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has hosted Foucault Studies from the beginning but since the beginning of 2007 the CBS professor Sverre Raffnsøe has overtaken the editorship of the journal. Since the platform used at QUT was an own development and highly dependent on the person that developed the system, the new editor-in-chief has opted for Ejournals@cbs as the provider of an online publishing platform based on OJS.
The editorial board of the journal is international and geographical distributed. Thus the web based editorial management system in OJS provides a useful platform for the editorial work. The introduction of OJS to the editorial board has nevertheless caused some concern as the editorial workflow in OJS is much more automated than the editors has been used to using their former publishing platform. In the old platform more of the communication with reviewers and authors was based on direct communication by email. Using OJS' many email templates the editorial board are afraid of losing the personal contact with contributing participants to the journal. Even though the editorial board has been told that the email templates used in OJS can be customised and made more personal they feel sceptical about utilizing the submission management completely. Nonetheless the editor-in-chief will try to utilize the facilities in OJS as much as possible.
The new editor-in-chief also brings new resources to the journal through financing from the Danish government and some secretary assistance. The staffing of the journal is not IT-savvy in the sense that they can run web servers and so forth themselves. So they need a platform like Ejournals@cbs. Being born online they do not need help with digitizing back-issues. Open Access has been an issue for the journal from the beginning, as one of the aims of the journal is to make Foucault Studies research available for anyone who wishes to use it.
Two kinds of journals
Although there are many different needs for online publishing we present two typical journals. We found that our case study reveals two general types of journals that are interesting for a library based epublishing service. Both types are small and with limited ressources. But each are distinct in their needs and matureness.