OA Technology Options | Ann Michael

"Although many societies and associations offer hybrid options within their journals, launching a fully open access journal, or “flipping” an existing journal to fully open access, presents an organization with questions, challenges, and opportunities. The breadth of the decisions to be made cover a wide range of activities from editorial selectiveness to pricing models to process and technology choices, and more.

Focusing in on the technology choices to be made, the technology landscape that supports publishing overall has seen a lot of change over recent years and now includes increasing variety, as well as solutions specifically designed for open access. As is the case with most partner and technology choices, it comes down to determining the best fit. Does the tool or technology meet our functional needs? Will the solution work within our organizational constraints? Can we afford it? Will our organizational culture mesh with that of the tool or service provider?

Dynamics. When considering the full spectrum of services, support, and technology required to launch an OA journal, the first question to ask is what type of support do you require. That level of support will be determined by your culture, author community, available staffing, experience, funding, risk tolerance, and other factors.

If your organization demands a full service model and does not have the resources to enlist service providers to support that need, you may want to consider a commercial or not for profit partner (e.g., university press or society). Publishing partners take much of the responsibility for production, delivery, and supporting services, leaving you to focus on editorial functions. In exchange, you enter into a revenue sharing agreement and you work within the processes and framework of that publisher. Most publishers offer a range of technology choices to support your new journal. Many also work with established industry manuscript tracking and hosting platforms.

If your objective is to self-publish, your technology options are numerous. You can build, buy, or do a little of both. This is where options have evolved considerably over the past several years.

Technology choices have become more modular, meaning that it is possible to build or assemble a solution without starting from ground zero

Many established technology providers have evolved to offer OA solutions

Lower cost service and technology providers have emerged that are “OA native.” They cater only to OA and do not carry the technical overhead of subscription requirements

Open source and solutions based on open source is on the rise. In some cases this is driving down cost, while increasing the pool of resources in the environment that can adapt and extend what has been done by others

The following table represents a sample of the solutions in the market and the technology needs they address. Although this table is not exhaustive, it appears that after significant activity in the late 1990’s, there was a lull in new entrants until the 2010’s, and then increased momentum in the last 5-7 years...."