Transitioning journals to open access via stakeholder-governed infrastructures | Zenodo
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2020-11-02
Summary:
Antti-Jussi Nygård, Jeroen Sondervan, Jesper Boserup Thestrup, & Sofie Wennström. (2020). Transitioning journals to open access via stakeholder-governed infrastructures (Version 1). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4048785
While many believe that the road to 100% open access (OA) is paved with making deals between publishers and national consortia, alternatively, some believe paying for publishing with APCs is the way forward. However, there is still a category of journals essential to the infrastructure of scholarly communication that is not included in such discussions.
The academic community also needs venues to publish in other languages and to a local, regional or national audience. Journals publishing content closer to that context can also serve the purpose of being meaningful and return knowledge to the general society.
Surveys indicate that national society journals struggle to move not only from print to digital formats but also to find funding to transition to OA as they can no longer rely only on members paying for subscriptions to their journals. Furthermore, there is a gap in access to resources to transition to a digital format that can be compared with the big players in the field. The local or regionally published articles deserve to reach a broader audience through machine-readable formats and structured metadata compatible and interoperable with relevant databases.
Several countries in Europe are also aiming to meet the requirements from, e.g. EOSC, Plan S and other international OA initiatives. Including such structures in national policies means that some venues for scholarly communication risk being left behind if no investment is made to level the standards to fit with the new model.
Platforms currently running in Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands and soon in Sweden are all examples of how resources are being added by stakeholders joining forces on a national level building a trustworthy platform for publishing journals. Such initiatives provide an alternative route towards OA for journals with local, regional or national relevance and in languages other than English.
This poster aims to describe how the platforms will support scholarly communication by encouraging journals to undergo a transition to OA at a lower cost. It will describe how the platforms help the national journals to reach a larger audience by a distribution of structured metadata to essential infrastructures such as DOAJ, CrossRef, Open Citations, Sherpa/Romeo, etc.
Links to platforms and project:
Finland: www.journal.fi
Denmark: www.tidsskrift.dk
The Netherlands: www.openjournals.nl