University of St Andrews Library

Journal Hosting Service26 October 2012

Janet Aucock

Jackie Proven

Gillian Duncan

• Library strategy and service provision which

provides the environment where journals can

be hosted

• Conversations and engagement while setting

up and planning journals

• Short case study from one of our journal

editors

http://ojs.st-

andrews.ac.uk/

http://www.st-

andrews.ac.uk/library/

services/other/journal

hosting/

How did we get here? Why do it? Why not?• Real demand and user needs to communicate research

• Developing a set of services to support research and opportunities for open access

and understanding it

• Services already in place: Electronic theses, Research@StAndrews:Full Text, close

relationship with the University RIS

• The service might also support teaching especially if undergraduate journals

developed

• Library staff expertise and enthusiasm. Contacts in the open access community

• Software .Confidence in OJS. Open source software, widely used, good

documentation and strong user community

• Scoping up a new Repository support post in 2009. Opportunity

• Resourcing. Small initial outlay for hardware. Commitment from ITS for support

• Other exemplars

Pilot service moving into full service

Service level• Flexible

• Decisions on how to pitch the level of library support. Limits. Scale. Partnership

with defined areas of high and low level support from the hosting service. Timed

support too. Lay out this partnership commitment on our web pages

• Partnership approach. Hosting approach. Library itself is not a publisher.

Library acting as electronic distributor – publishing and management devolved to

School / Department / editorial board

• Broad spectrum of users / audience. Can be staff, postgraduates or

undergraduates. Could be service units.

• Flexible about content: types of transitions. New journals. Transfer of print to

online with continuation of print. So can support different models and histories.

• We do ask for a connection with the institution. So the journals and the service are

grounded in the University

• Library help service and user training for OJS

http://www.st-

andrews.ac.uk/library/services/other/journalhosting/planning/

.Opportunities- Library service perspective• Responding to user needs

• Providing electronic access to information and research – a key skill

• Library staff development and upskilling. Enthusiasm of library staff. Learning

for all library staff

• Gets us closer to our users, improves our services and responsiveness

• Complements existing services

• Opportunity to provide a permanent record of institutional research

• Archiving role and potential preservation role

• Centralised and sustainable service to host and archive content

• Role in supporting users - advice for metadata, harvesting, indexing, reading

tools etc.

• Library skills help with exposure and discovery of content

Opportunities and even efficiencies• Centralising expertise and advice and offering it to all our journal editors

• Resolving common issues and problems

• Get the editors communicating with each other. Something we have done

informally and probably should do formally eg working lunch to exchange

experience

• Develop synergies, learn by working together

• Electronic legal deposit. New legislation. May be able to coordinate and

streamline this. For example in conjunction with the National Library of

Scotland

Embedding the service. Sustainability and looking forward• Positive feedback. Better work if we present it online. Raise our game.

• New projects develop by word of mouth. New journals now in set up phase

• Develop a reputation for a trusted, stable, sustainable service

• Archiving role and preservation role

• Grey literature, hidden research literature. Otherwise difficult to track down ? Seminar

series, reports, projects. Something to consider for the future.

• Niche subjects? Or serving a wider disciplinary area? Service seems to offer the potential

for a variety of approaches

• Potential for added value and extra services in the future. Use of DOI’s and permanent

identifiers. Publicising use statistics

Real wins• Genuine satisfaction of making this content available and seeing the finished product

• Supporting authors and editors – understanding of open access issues, of business

models for publishing journals

• Closer relationships with users of the service and learning together

• Opportunities for engagement and conversations

• Roles and responsibilities

• Concentrating on what OJS software is designed to do

• Understanding what is important for each journal

• The planning and setup conversations

Planning a hosted journal

• Open access models– Fully open access / Delayed open access

– Complementing print version

• Copyright agreements and statements

– Creative Commons licences supports full OA

– Making author rights explicit in any licence or policy statement

– Dealing with previous content and retrospective permissions

• Relevance of open access to underlying mission, e.g.

– Knowledge sharing / impact / educational aims / visibility for contributors

• Policy statements

– Making peer review process explicit

• Experience of scholarly communication

– New skills, particularly for student-led journals

Learning experience with hosted journals

Social Anthropology undergraduate journal

Launched March 2012

1865 article downloads for first issue

over 500 downloads for latest issue (in 1 month)