Speakers: Nancy John (UI Chicago), Edward Valauskas (First Monday)
The full title for this talk was "Trying the Gold Road on a Shoestring Budget: Open Access Publishing with PKP's Open Journal System." Needless to say, I was drawn to this session not only because I am quite familiar with PKP/OJS from attending Access in Canada, but because we in K-State Libraries have discussed moving into the role of publisher, and this desire recently found expression in our strategic plan. While Cornell and other partners (including the U of Utah as I learned at dinner last night) are busy at work on DPubs, it has yet to become a full-fledged publishing platform, as opposed to OJS, which can handle the full lifecycle of journal publishing, from submission to archiving.
UIC's goal was to highlight the work of UIC faculty, support the emergence of OA journals, educate the campus about intellectual property, and demonstrate the library's leadership role in this arena. In addition to journal publishing, they also have a DSpace-backed repository administered by the library.
All of this came about after a 2005 program on scholarly communication, where faculty were able to discuss the various issues related to journal publishing: quality, quantity, academic freedom, promotion/tenure concerns, need for campus support to do editing, archiving, etc. Faculty engaged in the work were "going under," i.e.- being overwhelmed by the work, so the library went on a search to manage the process. They found a faculty member who edited a journal (Behavior and Social Issues). The journal hadn't actually published an issue in some time, since they were woefully behind in their work. The library offered to 'rescue' the journal and opted to use the PKP/OJS. She said the install time was 15 minutes and that the software requires little customization. The documentation taught the editor how to use it in under an hour (as promised by the name of the document: OJS in Under an Hour).
Their second partner was First Monday, previously published by Munksgaard online only. Started in 1995, first issue in May 1996. Munksgaard did it for three years as an open journal, then decided to charge, so the editors pulled it out and moved it to UIC (Jan 1999). The journal is very successful: 795 papers, 132 issues, 951 authors, 30-40 countries represented, 6.4 million downloads in 2006. Check out the Web page for this journal; right there on the bottom of the page is the name University of Illinois Chicago Library!
Valauskas, the editor, noted that OJS will greatly reduce the chaos involved in publishing the journal. He mentioned that while FM is not yet on OJS, he's enthusiastic. They used PKP's conference management software (Open Conference Systems/OCS) for the 10th anniversary event in 2006 and were very pleased with its performance. The migration will be somewhat challenging, since the markup of the previous years was done by various designers and is quite diverse, but the work is progressing well.
John noted that other partners have come forward, including journals published at other universities. She finds this very encouraging, and is pleased to be able to offer a platform that works. Other UIC journals are interested but have yet to commit, although she suspects that in time they will move to OJS.
A question concerned how much staff commitment was necessary. John is the Digital Publishing Librarian and has a .5 appointment. She does not do the technical support piece; that occurs in the campus central IT unit, which means that OJS uses central authentication and can be used by the entire campus. She noted that when her assignment ends in August (it's a post-retirement gig), she will be replaced by a 1.0 position.
When asked if there was anything missing from the software, she noted that it has no capacity to create the HTML and PDF versions of the papers, so they are looking at commercial options, which are rather expensive. At present, the editors or their designees must create the publishable versions of the papers. They are using eXtyles for FM, but it is not cheap (~$20,000, plus $1500/journal for customization).
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