Newfound Press: Digital Imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries

PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
13 July 2007
9:40-10:40 SFUHC Sauder Industries Policy Room

Presenter:
Linda L. Phillips, University Libraries, University of Tennessee.
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States of America.


Abstract
Full Text HTML

The University of Tennessee Newfound Press is positioned at the start of a new movement in scholarly publishing. Linda L Phillips, Alumni Distinguished Service Professor and Head of the University's Collection Development & Management provided reasons why the library made the move into digital availability of documents and some of the challenges of this move into the digital imprint.



The homepage of the Newfound Press site illustrates the four components of the library's work in web-based document access. Click on the logo to visit the site.

Developing the Newfound Press started with the familiar, the monograph, and lead to the non-traditional, incorporating video-streaming of conference presentations. In the future, journal articles could contain sound clips, video links, and further context to content in the electronic environment - adding value to textual content.

The wide disciplinary background of the Newfound Press editorial board reflects the interdisciplinary work that is possible and thrives with OA products. As the Press moves forward, building on a growing and positive interest by University of Tennessee faculty in OA and OJS publishing, the board is committed to providing a place for high quality and significant scholarly work as well as specialized work that might not be published in a print environment.

Current and ongoing work at the Newfound Press includes:

• Creating a sustainable labour pool (this includes collection management, learning to use OJS, and transitioning staff)
• Appropriate funding
  
• Documentation
• Marketing (convincing potential authors that Newfound Press benefits them personally as it benefits the scholarly community)

Phillips' closing anecdote related the reason for the the name of the University of Tennessee's press as a reference to the Newfound Gap between North Carolina and Tennessee. The university library, through digital imprints and digital publishing is venturing into this territory where there are unimaginable possibilities in the field of scholarly communication.

Question from the audience:

In Phillip's presentation, she noted the importance of attracting tenured faculty as authors to contribute to OA and OJS. So, is the perception that OJS and similar ventures are not of yet of value to those in established academic positions?

-Fair statement. Phillips explained that as those with tenure do not face the same pressure to establish their reputations via publication, OJS is not the risk that it might be for newer members of academia. Currently, creating and establishing a publishing persona in the print journal world might be the better option for scholars just starting out in their respective fields. As the perceptions of digital publishing change and if senior tenured faculty continue to contribute to OJS, this reputation bias will change as well.

Commentary

As Phillips explained, marketing will be key to expanding contributions to OJS and developing the Digital Imprint at the University of Tennessee. Funding for Newfound Press projects has come thanks to librarians using internal leverage within their institutions and building on past grants that suggest there is an interest in funding OA ventures.

The commitment to publishing high quality and significant scholarly work as Newfound Press moves forward should combat the reputation bias (regarding questions of peer-review and the inherent value of articles that are free to access) that can be associated with OJS. Instead of requiring continued funding to access the same material via subscription on-line publications, OA publishing needs the most investment at the idea stage – making possible the presentation of scholarly knowledge to a wide community, not the long-term management of institutional subscriptions.

Scholarly publishing will always be rooted in an economy. Moving from a monetary for-profit publishing scheme to a for-knowledge circulation scheme is possible. (See Paul David’s chapter for a discussion of “Economic Logic” and Dominique Foray's chapter in The Economics of Knowledge) For this to happen, universities can lead the way by recognizing that an initial investment in OJS start-up and maintenance can allow for a greater return to students, faculty, and staff who can freely access and share ideas with colleagues around the world and outside the academic fields. Continuing to pay increasing subscription fees to for-profit publications not only limits the number of projects libraries can fund, it limits the access to ideas that form the basis of the knowledge economy.

Links:

The Digital Library Center at the University of Tennessee


Gamut - The Newfound Press online journal for the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic
This summer marks the journal's adoption of the OJS format and Newfound Press is working to integrate the homepage with the on-line journal format.

Goodness Gracious, Miss Agnes, Newfound Press' first fully digitized monograph available for on-line viewing. The memoirs of Lera Knox, a Tennessee woman who documented life in the state during the Depression and onward.

Newfound Press adds value to textual contents of digital imprints by designing the images like the one at left, producing page-like pdf documents for easy readability, fully editing the monograph, translating documents, and providing authoritative introductions to the works.

Partners

Presenters: Astrid van Wesenbeeck (right), Martin van Luijt (left), both of whom are from the University Library Utrecht, Netherlands
PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
Thursday, July 12, 2007
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM in SFUHC Sauder
Vancouver, Canada
Abstract

Astrid van Wesenbeeck is a member of the publishing unit in the University Library at Utrecht, and is responsible for open access projects. Martin van Luijt is the manager of the IT development team in the University Library at Utrecht.

History of Open Access at Utrecht University Library
Utrecht University Library is the biggest university library in the Netherlands, at the largest university in the Netherlands. The library serves 27, 000 students, 8,000 staff members, and 45 university departments, all of whom are potential participants in the PARTNER open access and collaboration program.

Astrid presented a brief history of the library’s involvement in open access journals. In 2000-2001, the library started publishing e-journals, although most were not open access. Recently, the library had come to be publishing 12 open access e-journals, some of them fully open and others having delayed access. They found that their systems for online publishing were inefficient and it was taking a long time to get new journals up and running, and that these did not have an editorial workflow system to manage workflow once the journal was functional. They came across Open Journal Systems (OJS), invited John Willinsky to Ultrecht, researched OJS, and in April 2007 decided to work with this program. The result is a new Open Access journal published through OJS called Relief.

The library wants to do more than publish Open Access journals. As a library, they want to be more supportive to more research communities: to offer an open, solid, clever, smart platform for collaboration. These ideas were put into a five year project called PARTNER. PARTNER found three user groups at the university who wanted to use the library’s proposed collaborative environment and who offered their input in its development stages.

The Goal of the PARTNER Project
Martin then presented, stating that the traditional role of the library is changing, and they as a library want to reinvent themselves by establishing more services and collaborative Knowledge Centers for research groups. Collaboration is hard, so they have begun by focusing on research groups because research groups are small, but not too small. They currently focus on the university community at Utrecht. They want to create this collaborative tool through collaboration with interested research communities.

The idea behind PARTNER is that researchers do not have an environment to host their own work. From consultations with the three research groups, the project has discovered that researchers want tools for developing ideas for research proposals, and the resources to contribute to an ongoing discussion (Virtual Knowledge Centers). The PARTNER project has prototype online services within the university community, such as Wiki collaborative tools and document libraries. The project wants to offer more of these tools to a wider community, and integrate them with other tools.

The trouble the project is currently facing is that they want to integrate their program with other programs, but it is costly to do so because they need to develop each integration by itself. They hope to eventually have 50-100 Virtual Knowledge Centers (VKCs). To do this, they are moving towards an overall architecture that supports the integration of applications. They also wish to obtain different products that can be standardized under similar standards, to develop an architecture based on web services, and to expose functionality openly, so that integration between products can be undertaken easily.

Examples of How it Will Work
Astrid offered concrete examples of this kind of integration in the library at Utrecht.
Their current development are based on wishes from the three user groups (Medicine and Pharmacy research groups). The library hopes to provide a service wherein a researcher can have written a paper, be at the final stage, and easily store their research output in the related Knowledge Center by clicking a button. The idea is to bring various systems together without bothering the researcher. The researcher need only press an archive button, and the library’s repository retrieves the data automatically. The researcher need not leave the research environment, or fill out long, tiresome web forms, or face security warnings when archiving material.

OJS is useful because perhaps you want all the output from one research group combined and/or displayed in a nice way. OJS works well for this kind of thing because OJS can retrieve documents and publish them easily. The new OJS journal at the library, Relief, is not really an example of this, but is a step towards working with OJS more widely.

Other capabilities will be that researchers can submit an article to a suitable journal as easily as they can archive it. They would simply type in the journal name and send it off to be considered for publication by an OJS journal. The researcher can then monitor the status of the submission using the OJS author’s page—a page whose data would be displayed directly at the researcher’s Knowledge Center.

BUT most of this is currently conceptual, based on the sample user groups’ desires. The presenters have no idea if it will go any further.

Questions asked after presentation:
Q: Where I (questioner) work, central services will never cut it, because they work with people at different institutions all over the world. So how will it work if the IT is all based within a single institution?

A: The tools will be provided to international partners as well. There are 3 levels of users: 1.the general public; 2.members of the Knowledge Center (domestic and international partners); 3. groups involved in a specific project (not limited to a single university). The PARTNER project is starting with their own research groups done locally and nationally—international cooperation will come later.

Link to Igitur a department of the Utrecht Library involved in the PARTNER project

Link to Open Journal Systems (OJS)


Commentary (by blogger)
The proposed PARTNER project is concerned with changing the role of the library, in a certain way, and simply maintaining the same role in a new, advancing technological setting. The proposal is that the library will offer easy archiving and collaboration services to researchers. In a sense, it has always been the job of libraries to offer both of these tools, although in a much slower and more cumbersome way. In order to have research archived at a library, the researcher needed in the past to get it published, and then to have the journal or book added to the library’s holdings. These research findings were available to the greater research community, and represented a kind of communication among researchers. However, this communication is not exactly collaboration, and the time lapse between obtaining research findings, acceptance for publication in a journal, and the library acquiring the journal could be years.

The Utrecht University Library is evolving its role as an institution that archives research findings and enables scholarly communication. In the proposed PARTNER project, researchers could archive their materials immediately in Knowledge Centres, which are linked to other researchers who are likely to be interested in the data. This data can be used immediately by other researchers, and can be changed or amended easily by the original author. The time lapse barrier of the past is essentially eliminated. Further, the past ability of researchers to “communicate” through the holdings of libraries (a communication that is largely one-sided, and not at all interactive or fast) is being updated to an advanced forum for immediate, real-time, two-sided (or more) communication which can easily be used for research collaboration. The library aims to both preserving its old role, and update it for a new, digital age.

The Utrecht University Library is not only concerned with maintaining and updating its past role as an archiving and communication-enabling institution. The PARTNER project is also concerned with aspects of research such as incentive, and encouraging innovation among scholars. The incentive to publish is increased when the researcher need only click a button to publish the findings. Further, when the researcher knows that others can use the findings, incentive to publish, and an environment of innovation go hand-in-hand. In the PARTNER project, the library acquires a new concern that goes beyond merely acquiring holdings that might help the academic community—it is concerned with helping the academic community more easily create dynamic archives.

The ideas behind the PARTNER project are certainly inspiring and ambitious, but the problem is that the project is currently only ideas. The actual Knowledge Centers and other collaborative tools are not developed or functioning at the library.

The role of Vietnamese governmental libraries in supporting and developing emerging or alternate forms of scholarly communication

PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
12 July 2007
2:55-3:55 SFUHC Canfor Policy Room

Presenters:
Hoang Kim Dung, NACESTI. Vietnam. (Unable to attend)

Le Thuy Duong, National Library of Vietnam. Vietnam

National Library of Vietnam

Abstract

Le Thuy Duong's presentation offered an overview of Vietnamese libraries and scholarly publishing. Most of Vietnam's libraries are limited to students and researchers working at the sponsoring institution. The major publishers of scholarly material in Vietnam: research institutes, universities, government agencies, professional organizations, and library and information centres produce approximately 15,000 titles annually with an estimated 200 of those titles being scholarly journals.

The move to on-line resources and the OJS means that Vietnamese research is available to individuals outside of the university and around the world. However, unresolved copyright issues mean that the number of full open access articles available are very small. The database of Vietnamese Doctoral Theses, full text of 12,000 digitized theses, are currently available only within the National Library of Vietnam. The National Library intends to ask these doctoral authors for permission to provide full and open access to these documents which will be available through their website: http://www.nlv.gov.vn

Duong himself is a major developer of Open Access in Vietnam with his work on the Vietnamese Journals Online (VJN Online) which is hosted by OJS and supported by INASP (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications). This journal service brings Vietnamese research to the world primarily in Vietnamese. VJN Online currently has 16 journals, 20 table of contents, 216 articles, and of these 188 full text articles available.

Developing the VJN Online is only one aspect of Duong's professional portfolio. He is currently the:

• Vice Head of International Relations Bureau at the National Library of Vietnam
• Secretary-General of the Congress of SE Asian Libraries
• Manager of the Vietnamese Dewey Decimal Classification Office

The future for Duong includes working with INASP to train editors to use the entire OJS system by starting with an introduction, moving to publishing back issues on-line, procuring content, and finally uploading new issues.

Question from audience:
How has printing in English contributed to Vietnamese journals reaching a wider audience?
- The limited English capabilities of earlier Vietnamese researchers, but the current generation of scholars is more confident in reaching and impacting audiences from different countries. In the past several Vietnamese journals were printed in Russian reflecting the scholarly training in the Soviet Union.

Commentary

While OA allows for a greater circulation and communication of knowledge, Duong’s presentation touched on two of the major challenges with moving to a totally OA format: copyright and language barriers. Despite these obstacles, the ability of one individual to make a marked difference in the circulation of information is shown to be possible with the work Duong does with INASP.

Vietnam possesses the capability to provide free user access to scholarly information as the journal published by the Communist Party of Vietnam, “Journal of Communism”, is provided by the government agency. Asking permission to publish doctoral theses opens up past and emerging scholarship to the world and illustrates Vietnam’s established scholarly tradition. As the OA movement continues to grow in Vietnam, building on this history of academic study and communication expresses a continuity with a rich social, cultural, lingual, and scholarly past.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

When the ability to access knowledge is limited due to government control or institutional affiliation, individuals are deprived the right to know information that they, their families, and their communities can benefit from.The use of OJS journals and software in Vietnam suggests that global technological advances can be employed to make a difference through locally developed and locally relevant solutions to the problem of access. Universities and institutions can move and are moving from a position of restricting access to documents and information to opening the circulation of knowledge across scholarly interests and geographical divides.

Links to:
The National Library of Vietnam

NACESTI (National Center for Scientific and Technological Information)
The depository library of government sponsored reports dating from the 1970s



ASEAN Infonet
Congress of the SE Asian Libraries: Open Access to ebooks on SE Asian culture. The goal of ASEAN is to digitize collections of member institutions with nearly 500 Vietnamese monographs completed. However, the copy and print functions from this site are disabled.

Vietnamese Medical Journals
Published by CIMSI
Delayed open access to full text publications between 2002 and 2005.

Science and Technology Journals
Published by VAST
Delayed open access, currently being loaded onto VJN Online

Ho Chi Minh University of National Sciences
Full access to conference proceedings and open journals.

A content management strategy – implementing OJS and OCS at Swinburne University library

Teula Morgan, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia

Presented on: July 12, 2007, at 1:45pm in SFUHC Fletcher Challenge Theatre

~Click for Abstract~

~Blogger’s Commentary~

From theory to practice there can often be big gaps, when we suddenly find ourselves face to face with unexpected obstacles and unforeseen delays. It is therefore very comforting when others can share their experience and insights to provide inspiration for the rest of the world. In this case, the experience of Swinburne University in their implementation of OJS and OCS may be one in many, but in terms of the bigger picture, once again, we are presented with the immense potential and endless possibilities of open access. Once again we find ourselves wondering, “If this university is doing it and doing well, why is the rest of the world not doing it too?”

Swinburne’s approach of having a practical, visible, adaptable and usable content management strategy can easily be adopted by any university library wishing to join the Open Access movement. The strategy is practical in the sense that instead of wasting time trying to define things or hoping to solve every single problem, Swinburne simply jumps into action by identifying what is missing in the current system and then deciding how these issues can be resolved given presently available resources. In both examples that Teula Morgan discussed about the implementation of OJS and OCS, the motivation stemmed from the fact that something was wrong with the current picture: researchers had legitimate needs but appropriate publication venues or conference management was unavailable. From Teula Morgan’s presentation, it is apparent that Swinburne realizes the importance of making trade-offs – not only in terms of balancing user needs with feasibility, but also being able to make choices in favour of maximizing benefits for as many people as possible. Swinburne clearly sees the advantages of Open Access, and not solely for the university’s own reputation. By being one of the numerous universities now using OJS, Swinburne is making a great contribution to increasing the openness and quality of knowledge in today’s information-driven society by successfully exploiting new technologies (such as open-source software like the OJS). Moreover, Swinburne’s project strengthens global and academic connectivity – not only are scholars of similar interests more connected, but knowledge is also linked more closely from one place of the world to another.

Swinburne University’s participation in the Open Access movement is undoubtedly a source of inspiration for the rest of us. Certainly, educational institutions have a moral responsibility to assert, on behalf of individuals, the right to knowledge. Swinburne’s project is a declaration against privatization of knowledge, and with all things considered, Swinburne has adopted a very optimistic approach towards seeking a balance between the commons and the anti-commons.

~Summary of Presentation~

Teula Morgan discusses the Why’s and How’s in the implementation of Swinburne Online Journals and Swinburne Online Conferences.

Why? – Supporting open access (OA)
-partners in ARROW project to support digital repositories
-promoting OA publishing & OA research repositories

Why? – Promoting Swinburne research
-increase recognition and prestige of Swinburne
-enhance exposure and discoverability of content
-making content more visible through OA
-RQF (Research Quality Framework) impact factor

Why? – Supporting content management
-library playing a role

How? – Content Management Strategy
-distinguish between data management and content management
-distinguish between storage and publishing
-adopt a ‘use’ perspective rather than management or compliance perspective

Swinburne’s approach – ensuring that the strategy is:
1) practical
-no definition discussions
-acknowledge that resources are limited
-not tackling the impossible
-developing a Swinburne university-wide content management strategy by starting to do it (the library being a leader in managing information content, as it always has been)

2) visible
-to consider: why this content? who will be interested?
-supporting the creation and dissemination of quality Swinburne content, improving the impact and profile of Swinburne outputs

3) adaptable
-not attempting to solve everything at once & not waiting for the ultimate solution
-be prepared to respond to the community & change if necessary

4) usable
-adopting a multi-software approach to managing content
-emphasizing what is practical

Project identification
-go for projects that will give maximum benefits
-examples for implementing OJS & OCS:

Example: Journals
-Research groups interested in dissemination of their work identified gaps in current publication avenues or a gap in audience. OJS was seen as an appropriate and accessible place to publish.
-OJS was beneficial for promoting Swinburne research, contributing to the institutional repository and providing effective research tools.
-The first journal title went live in 2005. The journal is still going, and this sustainability means minimal continuing work. This enables researchers to manage their own content.

Example: Conference papers
-Conference papers were hard to be found. Copyright & peer reviewing status were unclear. Researchers were wasting time and no support was provided to manage conferences.
-OCS provided benefits for promoting & disseminating Swinburne research, supporting real needs of the community, enabling researchers to manage their own information, and dealing with OA material with clear copyright & self-archiving instructions.
-Swinburne is currently doing community consultations to identify needs.
-OCS was selected and implementation is in process.
-Swinburne is also planning the roll out of the 1^st conference with a pilot group.
*sustainability: OCS ties in with OJS work, and minimal additional work is expected once service is established.

Lessons learned
-important to engage with users: why are we doing this?
-be adaptable: priorities and activities change as we find out and understand more
-be flexible: prepared to understand differences and work in different ways
-maximise content visibility

Q&A Period
-There is a need for automatic extraction of metadata.
-Discussions about the Swinburne library’s search interfaces are currently going on. There probably will not be one place to search for everything, as there are different subject areas for different users.

~About the Presenter: ~
Teula Morgan is the Manager of Online Services Projects at Swinburne University library.

~Related Links~
Swinburne University of Technology, library website
Swinburne Online Journals
ARROW at Swinburne
ARROW – Australian Research Repositories Online to the World

Rethinking Collections: Libraries and Librarians in an Open Age

PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
12 July 2007
9:40-10:40 SFUHC Sauder Industries Policy Room

Presenter:
Heather Morrison, BC Electronic Library Network, Simon Fraser University Library.

British Columbia, Canada
Personal blog

Abstract

Powerpoint Presentation via E-LIS

The key theme for Morrison's presentation was the transition and evolution of libraries in response to the Open Access (OA) movement. The current and future trends towards scholarly communication in an electronic format presents a challenge for libraries. With scholars like Peter Suber and Morrison herself using blogs to make their research public, members of the academic and library communities are no longer reliant on peer-reviewed print published journals -- in fact, waiting for publication of these journals slows down the effective circulation of information to a wide audience that is possible with web-based communication.

Moving towards full open access (corresponding to the Budapest Open Access Initiative), the ability to freely read, make copies, store, and print research means that the peer-review article of the near future can exist in multiple places at once: institutional repository, the author's own site, and the on-line journal allowing for, what Morrison termed "a series of overlapping collections, with links".

Libraries are then challenged by how they will collect and preserve these electronic texts. Will one copy, hosted by one institutional server be enough? Can there be a safe repository for all of the world's electronic knowledge?

Presenting in the same session as the University of Alberta's Pam Ryan and Denise Koufogiannkis, Morrison suggested that the U of A could provide a model for using OA resources. Staff transitions to further OA in the library setting means finding local solutions for new technologies. As there will be less need for hard copies of research material with OA systems, personnel responsible for interlibrary loans and reference liaison can move to support the field of scholarly communication that relies on web-based resources.

Morrison predicted the question asked of librarians will no longer be "where can I find information?" but "how do I know I am not missing something essential?". In turn the questions she urges librarians to ask of their academic institutions is not "why are we focusing on OA when we must pay for so many journal subscribtions?" by "why are we not putting OA at the forefront when it is the future of scholarly publishing?".

Commentary

For established members of the academic and scholarly community the options available for disseminating ideas through wikis, blogs, e-portfolios, preprints, and the author’s own homepage mean that the peer-reviewed journal is not the first, last, or only word on the scholarly subject in question.

However, keeping track of all of these options presenting one’s work means that librarians are pressed to imagine what the future might be like and take steps to ensure that current priorities reflect where scholarly communication is headed (OA, on-line journals and other web-based resources) and not rely entirely on where it has come from (peer reviewed print publications).

Morrison’s comments on transition are valid, but if we are to consider scholarly communication the transfer of information and the circulation of knowledge between individuals the transition required by web-based resources is not then a total revolution. The ability to transmit ideas through media so that they might reach a wider audience has been a key aspect of journal publication since the seventeenth-century and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

The immediacy of web-based resources means that the audience and the author are brought closer together in real-time – commenting on a blog is far faster than waiting for the next quarterly edition. Enhancing, supporting, and facilitating this closer relationship will be important tasks for librarians to consider.

Links to:
BC Electronic Library Network Page

Morrison's publications in the SFU Institutional Repository

Librarians as campus OA leaders: the University of Alberta experience

PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
12 July 2007
9:40-10:40 SFUHC Sauder Industries Policy Room

Presenters:
Pam Ryan, University of Alberta Libraries.
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
CV and Personal Website

Denise Koufogiannakis, University of Alberta Libraries.
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
CV

Denise Koufogiannakis

Abstract

Denise Koufogiannkis and Pam Ryan provided an overview of their experience with Open Access (OA) at the University of Alberta (U of A). Making the transition from OA in theory to OA in practice in the university and public settings were key issues discussed in this presentation. Koufogiannkis noted that the U of A library is working to raise awareness of OA not only on campus, but to library users in other settings including the public education and public library system. To this end, Koufogiannkis developed a OA mandate for the U of A library that stresses the importance of including OA products in the library collection and providing support for the U of A community who have an interest in OA formats.

Building on discussions that began in 2006 and working with faculty via liaison librarians to explain the benefits of OA has seen the U of A librarians take a proactive approach. As editors of Evidence Based Library Information Practice Koufogiannkis and Ryan can provide insight into the practice of managing and using an OA journal. With regular meetings between faculty and librarians and promoting high profile events on campus (including the March 2007 lecture by Dr. John Willinsky on OA Principles) keeping OA in the campus and public eye has been an important part of moving OA forward.

Looking to the future, the recent hiring of a digital repository librarian and the commitment to further developing the presentation options of OA resources is further solidifying the importance of OA to the campus community and the academic library at the U of A. To continue to meet the needs of OA users, Ryan noted that librarians can be leaders by working with faculty to determine their needs by developing locally based solutions.

While neither Koufogiannkis or Ryan have "OA facilitator" in their job descriptions, both librarians look at OA as the future of libraries and have committed to serving the U of A community; students, faculty, staff, and members of public who have an interest in OA products, research, and information.

Connecting to and communicating with other librarians as OA becomes more popular has also lead to the creation of the Facebook group: Librarians who support open access.

Question from audience:
Could the presenters comment on the relationship between librarians and faculty?
-Faculty and librarians come from different perspectives, but value each other in research and knowledge. Librarians can inform and assist faculty with the advances of the OA process, but Ryan noted that having a high profile member of the academic community -- like John Willinsky -- talk about OA and its advantages to U of A faculty was of great benefit.

Commentary

Pam Ryan noted that discussing OA products is like being on a “carousel of progress”. Librarians find themselves explaining all aspects of OA to interested parties and informing faculty members of the public benefit – going around the same issues over and again until there is an understanding amongst the campus community. With the U of A’s enthusiasm for OA and OJS, the possibilities appear great. However, Ryan also explained that while librarians are excited to work with journals in the start-up phase and can offer support through the initial set-up, the software support is not available locally.

Will on-line journals develop faster and require more elements than the current software allows? As OJS develops new reading tools and seeks to provide the most effective access to information, improvements in the system are bound to occur. However, in his keynote address at the PKP Conference, John Willinsky reported that of 1000 journals using OJS since 2002, 46% are still using the original system. The software itself is clearly not holding back the transmission of ideas to an ever increasing audience.

Once enough members of an academic community support OA products there can be a movement from a “carousel of progress” where a network of people focuses on the journal service to the transmission of scholarly ideas across that group that includes scientists, doctors, social scientists, and researchers in the humanities.

Links to:

University of Alberta Library Homepage

Open Access Publishing Information for the U of A

The Library as a mediator for e-publishing.

*** preliminary notes ***

"A case on how a library can become a significant factor in facilitating digital scholarly communication and open access publishing for less web savvy journals"

Presenters: Mikael K. Elbæk - Copenhagen Business School Library
Time: July 12 2007 at 11:00 – 12:00pm
Location: SFU Harbour Centre Earl and Jennie Lohn Floor Policy Room - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Abstract

Mikael K. Elbæk, initially part of the Copenhagen Business School Library, now works with the Danish National Research Database and with the Technical Knowledge Centre of Denmark, at the Technical University of Denmark.

During the Public Knowledge Project conference 2007, Mikael presented the current situation of journal publishing in Denmark as well as two case studies: a traditional paper-based journal moving towards OA online and one that is already published online.

To understand the journal publishing in Denmark, the following facts were given:

- of 623 journals, 162 of them are available online in some form.
- 70% are published in English, 30% in Danish and other languages (namely French)
- There are more than 500 research societies
- Approximately 7100 people are involved in editorial work, as either editors or reviewers, and almost all based on volunteer work.

Online journal systems (OJS) in Denmark, began in 2004-2005 when the government agency Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (DEFF), similar to our Synergies, funded an electronic journal project. From that, the ejournals@cbs was founded. Since then, several university libraries throughout the country have started to adopt their own forms of online journals.

The ejournals@cbs offers their faculty the following services:

- Assistance in publishing and/or archiving their journal online
- Initial set-up in OJS, each having their own URL, style and design
- Training to make them self-sustainable
- Encouragement to publish OA, though it is not a requirement as the importance lies in having access to journals that were previously unavailable
- Hotline and support service
- Administration help, and daily back ups and updates relating to OJS.

Some of the successes noted was the increase in downloads of available journals. In May and June 2007, there were 19938 and 22919 respectively. Interesting to note is that most of the articles downloaded were Danish. It is possible that this is due to a large interest in available material in the language. Some of the motivation behind this venture is that it is a win-win situation for libraries as they now have access to materials previously unavailable, and that no one else is doing this in Denmark at this time.

Case study 1: Copenhagen journal of Asian Studies

This journal has been paper based since 1987, publishing 2 volumes per year of approximately 150 pages in English with international readers and authors. As it has very limited resources, it is heavily dependent on volunteer work. Breakthroughs with this journal occurred with electronic archiving, with a 1 year embargo. Persuading the editor of the journal was very difficult as there was attachment to the traditional method of publishing. Fears of losing subscribers, for economic reasons, held the journal back from becoming open access. However, they did see the benefits for e-publishing but lacked the means to transform their journal. With the aid of OJS and Mikael, issues from about 1997-2006 are now available online.

Case study 2: Foucault Studies

This journal has been online and has open access since 2004, publishing 2 volumes per year in English with international authors, editorial board, and readers. This initiative is funded by a government research fund and hosted at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia on their own developed html platform by one person. Now, with the new editor-in-chief Dr. Sverre Raffnsoe from CBS, they are moving towards ejournals@cbs. The only difficulty encountered was the changing of platform.

Conclusions from these two studies show that smaller older journals (traditionally in print) were very reluctant to OA, but still open to the idea of going online. The troubles lie in the process of making it OA, as well as maintaining the tradition of the print, all the while not losing subscribers. Ejournals@cbs offered a solution to the methods of transferring their materials online; however, they were only responsive when OA publishing is an option, but not a requirement.