Challenges Confronting NoFee Open Access Journals

"The authors drew from the literature to establish the following types of potential challenges confronting nofee OA journal editors: accessibility remediation; archiving; communication, marketing, publicity; copyediting; finance; indexing or dissemination; journal editorship; plagiarism screening; platform administration; platform migration; policy development; production services; reviewer management; succession planning; and website design or maintenance. Participants were prompted to select from this list to indicate previous, current, and future challenges. The figures to follow show the percentages of study participants who identified each of the areas as either challenging or significantly challenging. Previous challenges were defined as those encountered prior to the current publication year. As shown in Figure 1, the leading challenge in this category was indexing or dissemination (59%). That was followed by succession planning (58%), finances (52%), journal editorship (49%) and reviewer management (48%). Participants were profuse in their supporting commentary. The following are representative of their comments: • “Our biggest issue [was] indexing…the lead time and the significant barriers for small independent publications make it nearly impossible to gain traction.” • “Getting reviewers has been a significant challenge…Review times can be lengthy as many review requests go unanswered.” • “Unpaid labor: Me! I do everything because there is no funding.” Participants were then prompted to indicate their current challenges, defined as those encountered during the present publication year...."