{"id":1866,"date":"2013-11-21T10:00:04","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T15:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=1866"},"modified":"2013-12-17T12:57:26","modified_gmt":"2013-12-17T17:57:26","slug":"thoughts-on-founding-open-access-journals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2013\/11\/21\/thoughts-on-founding-open-access-journals\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on founding open-access journals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
\"'reference'<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u2026 altogether too much concern with the contents of the journal\u2019s spine text\u2026<\/span>
\n\u201creference<\/a>\u201d image by flickr user Sara S.<\/a> used by permission<\/a>.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Precipitated by a recent request to review some proposals for new open-access journals, I spent some time gathering my own admittedly idiosyncratic thoughts on some of the issues that should be considered when founding new open-access journals. I make them available here. Good sources for more comprehensive information on launching and operating open-access journals are SPARC\u2019s open-access journal publishing resource index<\/a> and the Open Access Directories guides for OA journal publishers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unlike most of my posts<\/a>, I may augment this post over time, and will do so without explicit marking of the changes. Your thoughts on additions to the topics below\u2014via comments or email<\/a>\u2014are appreciated. A version number (currently version 1.0) will track the changes for reference.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is better to flip a journal than to found one<\/h3>\n

The world has enough journals<\/a>. Adding new open-access journals as alternatives to existing ones may be useful if there are significant numbers of high quality articles being generated in a field for which there is no reasonable open-access venue for publication. Such cases are quite rare, especially given the rise of open-access \u201cmegajournals\u201d<\/a> covering the sciences (PLoS ONE<\/a><\/em>, Scientific Reports<\/a><\/em>, AIP Advances<\/a><\/em>, SpringerPlus<\/a><\/em>, etc.), and the social sciences and humanities (SAGE Open<\/a><\/em>). Where there are already adequate open-access venues (even if no one journal is \u201cperfect\u201d for the field), scarce resources are probably better spent elsewhere, especially on flipping journals from closed to open access<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, the world does not have enough open-access journals (at least high-quality ones). So if it is not possible to flip a journal, founding a new one may be a reasonable fallback position, but it is definitely the inferior alternative.<\/p>\n

Licensing should be by CC-BY<\/h3>\n

As long as you\u2019re founding a new journal, its contents should be as open as possible consistent with appropriate attribution. That exactly characterizes the CC-BY license<\/a>. It\u2019s also a tremendously simple approach. Once the author grants a CC-BY license, no further rights need be granted to the publisher. There\u2019s no need for talk about granting the publisher a nonexclusive license to publish the article, etc., etc. The CC-BY license already allows the publisher to do so. There\u2019s no need to talk about what rights the author retains, since the author retains all rights subject to the nonexclusive CC-BY license. I\u2019ve made the case for a CC-BY license<\/a> at length elsewhere.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about the editorial board<\/h3>\n

The main product that a journal is selling is its reputation. A new journal with no track record needs high quality submissions to bootstrap that reputation, and at the start, nothing is more convincing to authors to submit high quality work to the journal than its editorial board. Getting high-profile names somewhere on the masthead at the time of the official launch is the most important thing for the journal to do. (\u201cWe can add more people later\u201d is a risky proposition. You may not get a second chance to make a first impression<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Getting high-profile names on your board may occur naturally if you use the expedient of flipping an existing closed-access journal, thereby stealing the board, which also has the benefit of acquiring the journal\u2019s previous reputation and eliminating one more subscription journal.<\/p>\n

Another good idea for jumpstarting a journal\u2019s reputation is to prime the article pipeline by inviting leaders in the field to submit their best articles to the journal before its official launch, so that the journal announcement can provide information on forthcoming articles by luminaries.<\/p>\n

Follow ethical standards<\/h3>\n

Adherence to the codes of conduct of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association<\/a> (OASPA) and the Committee on Publication Ethics<\/a> (COPE) should be fundamental. Membership in the organizations is recommended; the fees are extremely reasonable.<\/p>\n

You can outsource the process<\/h3>\n

There is a lot of interest among certain institutions to found new open-access journals, institutions that may have no particular special expertise in operating journals. A good solution is to outsource the operation of the journal to an organization that does have special expertise, namely, a journal publisher. There are several such publishers who have experience running open-access journals effectively and efficiently. Some are exclusively open-access publishers, for example, Co-Action Publishing, Hindawi Publishing, Ubiquity Press. Others handle both open- and closed-access journals: HighWire Press, Oxford University Press, ScholasticaHQ, Springer\/BioMed Central, Wiley. This is not intended as a complete listing (the Open Access Directory has a complementary offering<\/a>), nor in any sense an endorsement of any of these organizations, just a comment that shopping the journal around to a publishing partner may be a good idea. Especially given the economies of scale that exist in journal publishing, an open-access publishing partner may allow the journal to operate much more economically than having to establish a whole organization in-house.<\/p>\n

Certain functionality should be considered a baseline<\/h3>\n

Geoffrey Pullum<\/a>, in his immensely satisfying essays \u201cStalking the Perfect Journal<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSeven Deadly Sins in Journal Publishing<\/a>\u201d, lists his personal criteria in journal design. They are a good starting point, but need updating for the era of online distribution. (There is altogether too much concern with the contents of the journal\u2019s spine text<\/a> for instance.)<\/p>\n