Presentation by Angela Laurins and Theo Andrew, given on Thursday 1st August 2013 at Repository Fringe 2013.
The presentation reflects on the OJS Forum which took place at the University of Edinburgh on the Workshop day of #rfringe13, Wednesday 1st August 2013
6. In context
According to the Finch Report we can expect an average
of £1,750
Subsequent reports also suggest that the costs for open access
journals average between £1.5k and £2k, which is broadly in line
with the average level of APCs paid by the Wellcome Trust in 2010,
at just under £1.5k. (Finch, p61)
University of Edinburgh regularly receives invoices from
Elsevier for $5,000 (£3,287 at today’s rates)
At this price, 8 articles would come to £26,296…
It is clear to see that OJS represents a value-for-money
solution which gives control over publishing back to
academic.
9. Quality control
• Editorial boards
• Peer review process
• Content
http://s126147674.websitehome.co.uk/2009/0
4/11/28/
10. Key themes: a few more…
• Licensing - NC too restrictive - CC-BY
recommended
• Avoid heavy customisation
• One installation vs multiple installations
• Positive student engagement
• Repositories simplify preservation
11. Thank you for your time
& thanks to all our speakers
yesterday
angela.laurins@ed.ac.uk
Hinweis der Redaktion
Hi, good morning everyone.. Don’t panic you’re not at the wrong event… and today is 1 st August My name is Angela Laurins I’m Library Learning Services Manager and service manager of the Journal Hosting Service the library provides using OJS (Open Journal Systems) and together with my colleague, Theo Andrew of the Scholarly Communcations Team here and all round OA expert we’re going to present a brief round up of yesterday’s OJS event
This map shows the OJS geographical distribution (at Jan 2012) There are about 15,000 journals worldwide using OJS IT’s open sources and maintained and developed by PKP – the Public Knowledge Partnership - a group of north American univerisities There is extensive online support and documentation and an active user community.
A current overview of OJS at UOE We are currently working with 10 journals who are at different stages. We have 5 journals publishing on the platform We have 3 due to publish later this year and a further 2 with whom we’re in discussion and who have a test site up and running . There’s a mix of graduate and academic led journals. All are peer reviewed. Some began life as print journals are interested in digitising their back issues. And we are working with Res Medica, the Royal Medical Society Journal, to digitise their back issues and make them available online to coincide with the launch of their 1 st issue in Sept. 1 is born digital and looking to migrate to a more manageable platform
We had the event because we know that OJS is extremely widely used elsewhere in the world but not so much in the UK. Edinburgh and St Andrews University have journal hosting services and have been using OJS since 2009 and 2010 respectively. Since the Finch report and the prominence of OA , there’s been a growing interest in alternative and affordable ways to publish quality academic peer reviewed journals. At Edinburgh we’ve not promoted the service but, in the last 12 months, we have attracted a lot of interest from potential journal publishers and other institutions. So we were aware that other people are interested in OJS, but were perhaps unsure about what was involved in setting up a service, how much IT support would be needed, how much would it cost? We are also keen to find out if there was an appetite for starting a user community to share experience and hoped that this would be the first of many community events. We were very pleased that the event was so popular- we sold out and yesterday welcomed 50 delegates from around the UK to th Main Library. Our speakers included, Keynote Vanessa Gabler from Pittsburgh University, Jackie Proven & Gillian Duncan from St Andrews Univeristy, Brian Hole form Ubiquity Press, Franziska Moser, Universität Zürich, Adam Rusbridge from Edina and Kevin Ashely from the DCC as well as staff from EUL>
Unsurprisingly , This was most people’s concern ….. OJS is free, the time and effort required to set up and support a service are difficult to quantify… Pittsburgh calculate 3.05 FTE At Edinburgh we’d worked it out to be 0.5 FTE (although it’s probably more) Whatever ……we all agreed that it was a valuable service for the library to provide to students and academics who want an affordable alternative to traditional commerical publishing.
Dominic Tate Scholarly Communications Manager at Edinburgh put the cost of providing a journal service in context
Everyone who uses OJS spoke about the steep learning curve for staff and students in learning how to use OJS. And how it’s just as much a learning curve for library staff who learn as the encounter new challenges and requests form students However, the common experience was that, although there was a large commitment to training and support at the start of the process, after a short while journal publishers become self sufficient and require minimum ongoing support.
For all institutions with journal services managing expectations was CRUCIAL It’s essential at the start of the process to make it clear what the service will provide and what it WILL not… If a service provided FREE of charge what does that include? Exclude? Is it merely system support? Will there be trianing, ongoing support, help with design, layout? Copyright? Licensing? What conditions will the service impose- use of standards, licenses, policies ? Are students and academics prepared to manage submissions, authors, peer review process themselves? The institutions providing a service have a range of processes and documentation in place– not only does this help manage customer expectations but it standardise the services and makes it far easier to manage. Pittsburgh have a particularly comprehensive and impressive range of processes and documentation which I aspire to !! The service offered was a publishing service from Pittsburgh but a hosting service form St Andrews and Edinburg a subtle distinction but one which helps manage journal expectations.
To what level does the service provider become involved in the quality of the journal? At Pittsburgh a publishing advisory board accepts new journals for publication and the service assesses the peer review process of each journal. Quality shouldn’t be compromised – because
Restricts licencing content to EBSCO and ProQuest and other aggregators Also DOAJ seal of approval and other OA orgs requires a CC-BY Changes to underlying code and heavy customisation are to be avoided – out the box OJS is not pretty but it can be improved using css and good design. Take a look at Ubiquity Press to see what can be done .. Their OJS-based service is unrecognisably OJS…. Gillian Duncan, from St Andrews University and Editor of the Journal of Terrorism Research spoke about having students as guest-editors We all talked about the process being a positive way to engage with young career academics and make them aware of copyright and OA at the early stages of their career… Kevin Ashley form the DCC spoke about preservation and made the point – which I think you’ll like- that repostitories simplify preservation and that more people are concerned about preserving repositories at the moment than OJS journals- so I think there’s a relationship to explore between the two.