Digitizing the Journal of the Entomological Society of British Columbia « ESC-SEC Blog

“As the new web editor of the Entomological Society of British Columbia (ESBC), last fall I began a push toward the digitization of all past issues of the Journal of the ESBC and the implementation of an online journal management system. At the time, only a relatively few issues of JESBC were available online, with only the most recent issues available as PDFs. None of these were easily searchable, nor were these issues indexed on our site, Google Scholar, or other search engines.  Over the years, each editor handled submissions in a slightly different way, via email (or post!), and copies of digital files were not retained by the society, but rather by individual editors. Additionally, we used an annual submission deadline, which resulted in annual ‘publication push’ that resulted in a single ‘crunch time’ leading up to year’s end.  It was with these limitations in mind that I spearheaded an effort to simplify the submission, editorial, and publication processes, and to provide truly open access to our entire journal archive in an effort to increase our journal’s profile, readership, and citations.  Over the past several months (and still ongoing), in conjunction with the SFU library and the Public Knowledge Project, the ESBC began our transition to our new online journal management system and the scanning and uploading of all volumes of the JESBC. Our choice of journal management system was based on several important criteria: cost, features, ease-of-use, robustness, ‘future-proofing’, and support.  In the interest of brevity, I won’t go into all of the details here, but from our choices of journal management systems, the clear winner was Open Journal Systems, which provides a low-cost, feature-rich, customizable, easy to use, well established, and open-source journal publishing platform. Moving to this new system allows us to easily publish using a continuous submission model, so that articles appear online as they are accepted for publication, as well as provide a streamlined publication work-flow and centralized database.  Our new journal site is now up and running! Check out http://journal.entsocbc.ca for complete open access to all articles, and stay tuned as more back issues of the society’s journal and quarterly bulletin archive are uploaded (going back to 1906!) and as we add DOI support and cross-referencing.  Our journal digitization effort is a huge project, and although we’ve made great headway, we could use your help (more on this soon)! We are looking for volunteers to assist with moving this content online to the new site. Contact Alex Chubaty (webmaster@entsocbc.ca)  if you are interested in contributing time towards this project."