Author Archives: rebecca

The story behind the journal: Medicine Anthropology Theory

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The DOAJ has recently been celebrating 20 years of service. As part of their celebrations they have been interviewing editors from some of the journals they index.

We are thrilled that Medicine Anthropology Theory (MAT) was selected for a chat about all things Open Access. MAT is a Diamond Open Access journal hosted by Edinburgh Diamond at the University of Edinburgh, and run by the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology. DOAJ spoke with Professor Ian Harper, Coordinating Editor and member of the MAT Editorial Collective, and Rebecca Wojturska, the Open Access Publishing Officer at the University of Edinburgh.

Read the full blog!

Blog: The story behind the journal: Medicine Anthropology Theory

Launch of a New Open Access Journals Toolkit

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by Rebecca Wojturska, Open Access Publishing Officer, The University of Edinburgh

On Tuesday 27th June, the OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) announced the release of a new Open Access Journals Toolkit. I was fortunate enough to be asked to join the editorial board in my capacity as Open Access Publishing Officer within Edinburgh University Library, and would love to share my experience of helping to write the guide!

The aim of the toolkit was to “promote transparency, accessibility, and inclusivity in scholarly publishing.” As these values align with Edinburgh Diamond (the library’s journal and book hosting service), I very quickly said yes at the opportunity to get involved.

Firstly, I was very pleased to see the board was extensive and included a range of subject experts in Open Access and journal publishing. Having so many board members helped split the workload and meant there were many eyes on each section. The fact that board members are from all around the world ensured that the toolkit wasn’t just from a Global North point of view, and would be useful for anyone, no matter where they are based. It was also great to meet so many of my peers!

The journal toolkit has many topics and provides an overview of the subject, as well as references and further reading for more detailed information. Each board member was each assigned three topics to lead, involving conducting research in this area and writing a section containing everything a reader might need to know about the topic. We were under instruction not to bulk it out too much as the guide was meant to be easy to digest and not too overwhelming for a beginner. The sections then went into peer review, where another board member would look over your contributions and provide as much feedback as they could, giving you scope to revise and strengthen them. Then, a third member would give it a final look-over to catch any last minute errors or omissions. Finally, Research Consulting, who were the consultants pulling it all together, tidied up everything and ensured the toolkit read consistently throughout. Overall, the toolkit was really well-crafted and extensively peer-reviewed.

Library publishing is a growing area, and most if not all of the services and presses within libraries focus on Open Access. However, there isn’t as much guidance or resources available that are tailored specifically to Open Access, especially for under-resourced journals and initiatives, who are the core target users for the toolkit. This is extra important when you consider most teams in this area are new to it and consist of a very small amount of staff. Knowing how to even get started is incredibly daunting, and the toolkit means all those starting steps are laid out for users to follow, making the process more manageable and smooth. Also, having an easy-to-access toolkit means that everyone with an internet connection can find out all the basics they need to consider, and at no cost to them. Even better, most of the content in the toolkit is openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License!

Our Edinburgh Diamond service will be using the toolkit for when we have a new editor looking to launch a journal or flip to Open Access. I’ll also be recommending it to our shared service partners, many of whom run their own Open Access initiatives, as the toolkit is a great way to ensure journals hit the ground running, are of a high standard, and are an attractive option for authors. For us, it helps strengthen the reputation and prestige of our service, helping cement the sustainability and viability of Diamond Open Access in the library.

The toolkit has a very sleek and user-friendly interface, so why not check it out and find out how it could be useful for you too?

The Open Access Journals Toolkit

Introducing Edinburgh Diamond: Library-supported Open Access Books and Journals

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Library and University Collections currently offer a journal hosting service, free of charge to staff and students, which you may already be familiar with.

Open Access Week is the perfect time to share that that we have rebranded as Edinburgh Diamond and added a book hosting service to our offering!

The book hosting service will offer much of what the journal hosting service offers: ISBN and DOI allocation, a hosting platform for textbooks, monographs and edited collections, metadata deposits, indexing arrangements, annual reporting, ongoing technical support, guidance on publishing best practice… and more!

Bringing our journal and book services under one umbrella allows us to promote our services as a whole. Edinburgh Diamond does what it says on the tin: promotes diamond open access, transparency, and high-quality research. If you know someone who may benefit from using our service, please put them in touch with Rebecca Wojturska: rebecca.wojturska@ed.ac.uk.

Find out more about Edinburgh Diamond: https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/edinburgh-diamond

Take a look at our new book hosting site:
https://books.ed.ac.uk/

Attending LIBER and REDUX 2020 Conferences Online

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In our continuous shift towards digital culture, and of course during the pandemic, conferences have been adapting their programmes to online formats. This is no mean feat, particularly as even the best laid plans can have technical issues. But at least online you can fix yourself a cup of tea or stretch your legs while the hosts sort issues out, rather than sitting awkwardly in the audience. 

I attended two big conferences online that I usually would have attended in person: LIBER (Europe’s largest association of research libraries) 2020 and the 2020 University Press Redux Conference. The former took place over one week while the latter had five webinars spread out over four months. Both conferences had plenty of sessions that revolved around open access and, as open access is very much my area (I run the open access journals hosting service), I was excited to dive in and attend as many as I could. I’ve popped a few of my highlights below and hope you find them useful! 

LIBER 

With an excellent keynote on marketing (by Christine Koontz) two panels, ten sessions, six workshops, and paper presentations, LIBER 2020 was a packed week.

Open Access Insights

Denis Bourguet (UMR CBGP, INRAE, Montpellier) made the case for preprints and argued they are important as a tool of accessibility, as they are free for authors and readers and offer immediate access for researchers. However, as there is no peer review all types of research will be hosted, including the “not so good stuff”.  Denis works on the Peer Community In (PCI) project (Winner of the LIBER Award for Library Innovation!) which aims to add peer review into the mix. Meanwhile, in Finland, Malin Sofia Fredriksson (The Donner Institute for Research in Religion and Culture) reported that one of the major funders in Finland requires open access publishing now and that humanities have the smallest proportion of peer-reviewed journals but has the largest share of monographs and edited works. Their biggest hurdle is challenging the idea that open access means lower quality and less visibility. Leo Waaijers (QOAM, The Netherlands) introduced Quality Open Access Market (QUAM) which is an online instrument that helps authors share their publishing experience with colleagues by completing a four-question scorecard about the peer review, editorial board, the value and ‘recommendability’ of the journal they were publishing in. The journal is then given a Quality of Service indicator, alongside information about publication fees. Sounds handy! 

Libraries as Open Innovators and Leaders

The next session, and one I was really looking forward to given my role. Dr. Markku Roinila, Kimmo Koskinen and Kati Syvälahti (Helsinki University Library, Finland) spoke about their use of the Open Journals System (OJS) to host academic–led journals, at no cost to the editors and with maintenance and technical support provided by the library (exactly like us at Edinburgh!). Helsinki University Library empowered the journal managers to become “teachers”, so they could teach the use of OJS and of academic workflows to students. They gathered great feedback about the pilot, realised the importance of technical support from the library and are now looking into launching some student-led journals. Next, Shane Collins and Siobhán Dunne (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) spoke of open scholarship (instead of open science, so that they are inclusive of AHSS) and how they created a taskforce of staff who look at Plan S and Trinity’s strategic open access targets. They ran events and podcasts with inclusivity at the forefront and found high levels of collaboration between departments. They also said that “bringing the melting pot of people together for culture change requires this type of grass-roots approach”. Finally, Dr. Coen Wilders and Martine Pronk (Utrecht University Library, The Netherlands) see the library as experts on making scientific information fair in a world that is increasingly more open and digital. They spoke of how libraries support the entire research process and said they choose to focus on metadata and repositories (instead of catalogues) as this is in line with their internal target audience. 

Tools for Transparency and Open Access

First up, Sarah Ames (National Library of Scotland, Scotland) spoke about NLS’s Digital Scholarship Service, which encourages, enables and supports use of computational research methods with their collections, among other aspects. They focused on internal and external engagement and worked hard to communicate transparency, including utilising social media, which was highly engaged with. Next, Maurits van der Graaf (Pleiade Management & Consultancy, The Netherlands) looked at a library toolkit for open access and pointed out that institutional repositories are a vital form of green open access. There are currently 5,367 repositories and 82% of publishers allow self-archiving. Maurits concluded by stating the importance of green and gold routes in the move to open access and highlighted the need for more Read and Publish deals as well as more library support for APC-free publishing. Finally, Nicole Krüger and Dr. Tamara Pianos (ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany) spoke of the importance of considering open educational resources (OER) before designing learning materials. They used H5P as it was mobile-friendly and allowed for interactive content. Although content hosted via this route isn’t indexed by search engines, it can be downloaded and adapted for other sites, such as WordPress. Overall, they found H5P very user-friendly.  

REDUX 

Monographs, open access and public policy: UKRI OA consultation 2020

Helen Snaith (the Senior Policy Adviser at Research England) said that monographs should not try to replicate journal open access models and that they need to ensure that policy doesn’t create accessibility issues. Richard Fisher (Vice Chair of Yale University Press) said that removing the financial barrier is only one aspect of open access, and that money needs to be spent on marketing in order to make the book successful. Overall, it was agreed that publishing open access shouldn’t affect the quality of the content. 

Open Access: Sales – Open Access business models for books and journals

Martin Paul Eve (Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London) pointed out that books are much more expensive to produce than journals, and this can be an issue for the humanities and social sciences in particular as there is generally less funding. He said that it isn’t as simple as a library switching the book purchasing budget to the book processing charge (BPC) budget, as the former wouldn’t sufficiently cover the latter, and that COVID19 has shown the inaccessibility of books online compared to journals. Similarly to Richard Fisher, Martin said that gold open access may not be the way to go for books. Emily Farrell (Library Sales Executive, The MIT Press) said they rely on a hybrid approach to funding their open access activities, including article processing charges (APCs) and crowdfunding approaches for books, such as Knowledge Unlatched. She acknowledged that they see a lot more usage when books are open and they aim to roll out a library–centred collective model by 2021. Lastly, Vivian Berghahn (Manging Director, Berghahn Books) spoke about the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model, where subscribers get discounted access to the content and, if enough subscribers participate, the content is made open access.  Vivian said they have 305 participants to date and the model is working particularly well for their anthropology journal. 

Conclusion 

Having the conferences online, in my opinion, worked well. More people could attend due to the lack of a financial barrier (no travel, no accommodation, no delegate fee). And the less air travel the better, of course. Without these barriers, knowledge can be shared more widely too. The main downside is the lack of organised networking and ability to have in-depth discussions with your colleagues and peers. Perhaps a solution is on the horizon for conference organisers. 

It was brilliant to see so much conversation about open access, including accessibility, be given through open and accessible platforms with no financial restrictions. Open access policy is still developing, and it’s important that conferences continue to highlight and discuss the impact of this.  

A final positive of hosting an online conference is the ability to record and share online for those who can’t make it or to have the information to hand. Speaking of which, you can access all the LIBER sessions here and the REDUX ones here. I thoroughly recommend checking out both. Happy watching!