Oriented towards modern standards – our new open-access platform

This year, the TIB is launching a new open-access platform. The aim is to publish high-quality journals and conference proceedings. The platform will support the publications with sophisticated workflows and will be based on professional standards.

Planned activities

We offer hosting for journals and conference publications with the world’s most widely used journal management software, Open Journal Systems (OJS). We constantly keep OJS and the underlying software infrastructure up-to-date to provide state-of-the-art hosting. On this basis we cooperate with editors and journal owners. When selecting journals and conferences, we are guided by a set of standards that they must meet together with us.

The service is aimed at the editors of scientific journals and conference publications who want a library-supported, non-commercial, but at the same time sophisticated, sustainable, and completely open access publication option. We are open to all scientific disciplines.

To this end, the TIB concludes contracts with the editors of journals and conference publications. These may be scientific institutions, such as universities or non-university research institutions, but also groups of individuals, or learned societies.

The scientists who act as editors and reviewers of the individual publications are responsible for the quality assurance of the content of the published articles. On the part of the platform, however, we ensure that formal quality standards are met by the hosted publications. There must be compatibility with the funding criteria („Plan S“) of the research funding agencies that are members of the cOAlition S. Our quality standards are therefore based on the technical implementation guidelines of Plan S, but also on the DOAJ Seal, the OASPA membership criteria, and the COPE guidelines.

All content is open access, distributed under CC BY, and the authors retain the copyright. As a service within the TIB, long-term archiving is of course particularly important to us – all publications are digitally archived for the long term and thus permanently preserved. Persistent identifiers such as DOI and ORCID play an important role in ensuring sustainable retrieval and unique identification and are supported in all publications.

Even beyond the open-access criteria, we rely on high standards and transparent science: processes and other basic information (e.g. orientation of the publication, review procedures, guidelines for authors, editors, and reviewers, costs, handling of misconduct, and other ethical guidelines) must be documented transparently and comprehensibly on the website. For the sake of traceability, authors must provide information on the availability of their data and are required to store data, code, and other materials on which their article is based in suitable repositories and link them to the article via a persistent identifier. We support journals in their inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and in other databases and indices.

Current status and outlook

In addition to the technical implementation, we are currently developing templates for website content and conducting initial discussions with potential users. We are interested in further contacts of this kind and would be happy to discuss our model in more detail.

We will also take the needs of our users into account for the further development of the offer. A need that has already been brought to our attention and which we would like to implement is a transparent assessment in the sense of an open peer review. Furthermore, we aim to make the publications that are published via the platform as visible as possible. We also want to make it possible that articles can be enriched with supplementary videos or video abstracts hosted on the AV-Portal. We advise editors on issues of visibility, on other open-access requirements (e.g. „fair open access“), on questions of financing, and on questions concerning simple and error-free publication workflows.

We would be very pleased to receive further suggestions.

Our service is aimed at existing conference publications and journals as well as at new launches. We are happy to help with the transfer of publications from the subscription model to open access.

Interested?

If you are interested in our services, please feel free to contact us:

Dr. Xenia van Edig (editorial contact): xenia.van.edig@tib.eu

Dulip Withanage (technical contact): dulip.withanage@tib.eu

Xenia van Edig

... arbeitet im Bereich Publikationsdienste und betreut dort die Open-Access-Publikationsplattform TIB Open Publishing.