TIB about to start a new Open Access service for scholarly journals and conference proceedings
TIB is about to launch a new open access service on which scientific journals and conference publications can be published. In doing so, it is underlining its orientation towards open access and adding a significant new pillar to its activities to support the transition to open access. As a research partner, TIB is committed to professional, optimally accessible, and widely visible publications.
Positioning
At the moment we are working on the initial development of the service and are talking to first interested parties. The desired orientation of the platform is already clear: with such an undertaking, TIB will directly position itself as a place where articles and proceedings are first published. This includes professional publishing workflows – not just the upload of files that have been externally reviewed and created. With such a service, TIB takes on the task of distributing scholarly publications and making them accessible to everyone. All publications will be open access, and TIB will acquire non-exclusive rights to the publications.
We will be guided by relevant and advanced standards. This applies to open access criteria as well as to publication workflows and technical principles. An important parameter for us is the use of professional open source tools. The successful and worldwide used software Open Journal Systems (OJS) of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) serves as a basis. We will actively participate in the further development of the software and in the networking within the community, and we will bring in many years of experience. In a permanent quality and further development process the platform will be tested, adapted to changing requirements, and optimized for its important function in the academic publication process.
The new service will be open for all academic disciplines. However, the focus will be on the central subjects of TIB: natural sciences and engineering. In these academic fields, non-commercial, and sophisticated open access options are often still lacking. All journals and conference publications must comply with the quality criteria set.
Conference Publications
There is still a lack of open access options for conference publications, especially affordable and fair offers. In some disciplines, conference publications are of great importance, but have a lower visibility and lower open access rate than journal articles. It is a major motivation for the new service to remedy this situation. We will strive to publish relevant conference publications. For this purpose, we will partly adapt software, workflows, and quality standards from the journal sector; we will especially adapt OJS to better work with conference publications. We assume that conference publications are very relevant and deserve optimal accessibility.
In doing so, we are linking up with the diverse activities of TIB to support academic conferences in the narrower sense (see, for example, the library’s conference holdings, the ConfIDent project and the conference recording service) and grey literature in the broader sense.
We know that this is in parts a greater challenge than launching another journal service. We are optimistic that we can offer relevant solutions here, and we welcome any interest in the new service. This includes conference organizers looking for a publishing option as well as other potential cooperation partners in this field.
Supporting the transition to open access
TIB is actively and diversely involved in shaping the transition to open access. In doing so, we are following our mission and our strategy (see here in German) of providing the best possible access to scholarly literature. To this end, we provide advice to researchers and carry out information work. TIB already operates open access repositories (and many related services such as the TIB-AV-Portal or the OER-Portal Niedersachsen). We are involved in many other facets of the open science infrastructure, for example in handling research data or supporting ORCID and Datacite, but also by working on and with metadata (including the Open Research Knowledge Graph). We finance open access in various ways – through publication funds, through participation in open access models including SCOAP³ and DEAL and through pilot journal flipping (conversion of journals to open access models).
With the new publication platform, we are creating an important new pillar: we are enabling direct open access publishing of conference publications and journals. This offer, which is created exclusively for open access publications, thus supports the foundation of new publications, but also the flipping of journals: Journals that do not have sufficient open access options in their current situation could switch to our platform and find a supportive, fair environment that aims for optimal access and findability.
In further blog posts in the coming weeks, Xenia van Edig and Dulip Withanage will further present our plans. We welcome all comments, suggestions, and inquiries.
Interested?
If you are interested in our new service, please do not hesitate to get in touch:
Dr. Xenia van Edig (editorial contact): xenia.van.edig@tib.eu
Dulip Withanage (technical contact): dulip.withanage@tib.eu
... leitet den Bereich Publikationsdienste der TIB und koordiniert deren Open-Access-Aktivitäten.
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