What is research and why do we write it?

To be read. To be assessed.

Dissemination: Quality Control, Validation and Space-Time Compression

• Dissemination of work
• Preservation of record
• Footnotes and scholarly genealogy (vs. science?)
• Labour of reading: reading-avoidance techniques

Assessment

The Symbolic Economy Maps onto the Real Economy

Three Problems

Problem 1: Researcher access

See under "serials crisis".

Problem 2: Public access

• Increasingly educated populace
• Institutional missions to benefit society
• Or what is a university?
• The academy becomes irrelevant
• Especially the humanities

Problem 3: Restrictive Re-Use Rights

• Photocopying licenses
• Even for teaching
• Text mining/derivatives prohibited
• Inclusion in Wikipedia and other resources
• Community translation

A matter of distribution: there are 100 people in a room for a talk

• They have $10 each
• The speaker speaks for free
• The venue needs $50 to cover its staff costs
• There are 40 talks per year

Subscription logic

• Each person pays $0.50 and hears the talk
• No payment, no entry
• Each person can only afford half of the talks
• The general public cannot attend

OA with an Article Processing Charge logic

• The speaker pays the full fee ($50)
• The problem is that the speaker only has $10
• The general public and all others can attend

OA with consortial logic

• 5 people attend each talk and pay $10 each
• They let anyone else attend for free
• Everyone can hear 50% of the talks, including the public

This is how OA looks in a dry funding climate

• Is the "venue" overcharging?
• The distribution of the economics is the most important thing
• APCs do not work well in the humanities and elsewhere

How much does it cost to publish a (digital) book?

• Mellon Ithaka study (2016): $15,140 - $129,909
• (Don't tell the Deans)
• Palgrave: $95 x 200 copies = $19,000
• Palgrave: Book Processing Charge: $17,000
• CUP: Book Processing Charge: $10,000
• Ubiquity Press: Book Processing Charge: £6,020
• [~$7k USD]

Where do these costs go?

Assume fixed costs:

• 3x staff + on and estates costs
• Travel
• CLOCKSS, Crossref, COPE, COUNTER memberships
• Crossref membership
• Around £190k per year

Assume production costs:

• Typesetting: £500
• Copyediting: £500

How many books with 3x staff?

BPCs for monographs scale badly + concentrate costs

• 5,023 monographs in UK in 2013 by largest 4 publishers (source: Crossick)
• At a £5,050 BPC (UP price): £25,366,150
• At a £6,500 BPC (CUP price): £32,649,500
• At an £11,000 BPC (Palgrave price): £55,253,000
• UK spend on all books 2010/2011: ~£60,000,000 (source: SCONUL)

BPCs for monographs scale badly

UK REF costs for monographs

"to publish 75% of anticipated monographic submission output for the next REF would require approximately £96m investment over the census period. This is equivalent to £19.2m per year. Academic library budgets as they are currently apportioned would not support this cost."

Eve, M.P. et al., (2017). Cost estimates of an open access mandate for monographs in the UK’s third Research Excellence Framework. Insights. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.392

Our Solution for Journals

Support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

• $90,000 planning grant
• University of Lincoln, UK, 2014-2015
• $741,000 sustainability grant
• Birkbeck, University of London, UK, 2015-2018

The Subscription Model as it Exists

The OLH Library Partnership Subsidy Model

>240 Libraries Financially Supporting the OLH in First Two Years

23 Journals on or Supported by the Platform (909 articles in first year)

Ongoing Project to "Flip" Subscription Journals

Spreading The Model

End of part 1

Social Prerequisites for Launching a Journal

• Running a journal is not primarily a technical undertaking
• It is about fitting into the social milieu of a discipline
• Advisory board, editorial board, review standards, ethics

Planning since 2013

Advisory Board

• Role is to lend credibility to the title
• ... and to genuinely advise
• Need a policy on when and how they will be consulted
• Give them an indication of commitment level when you approach

Editorial Board

• Role is to discuss editorial matters
• Can help with review
• More hands on than advisory board
• Diversity and credibility

Editorial Team

• Where the work happens
• Editor in Chief
• Editorial manager
• Production manager
• Marketing manager

Process

• Peer review process - avoid Sokal
• Plagiarism check process
• Ethics
• Production process
• Preservation process
• OA policy and licensing terms

Issue 1: How?

• You need to solicit submissions
• People will miss deadlines (what are they and who is following them up with authors?)
• You need formal processes all specified
• You must not compromise on quality and peer review

Starting a journal...

• ...is for life, not just for Christmas
• Commercial publishers say that it takes 8+ years to determine whether a journal has succeeded
• What happens if everyone on the team gets hit by a bus (or just leaves)?
• Is your volunteerism sustainable?

Memberships

Do you want?:

• DOIs?
• COPE?
• CLOCKSS?
• Turnitin/Similarity Check (Crossref)
• Some kind of library support?

Remember: Trust

• Hard to earn
• Easy to lose

End of part 2

Workflows and submission technology

• Dealing with Open Journal Systems

What does a journal workflow look like?

Technical Platform Choices and Providers

• Open Journal Systems
• Janeway
• Scholastica
• Ubiquity Press

Open Journal Systems

• One press, multiple journals
• Free software

OJS Usage Worldwide

OJS Look and Feel

Setup cost and time investment

• Hosting
• PHP, MySQL, Apache
• £120-200/year - Reclaim Hosting
• ... or internal?

Setup cost and time investment

• Information Collection:
• Leave time for meetings!
• ISSN number (free from BL; but takes 30 days+)
• Configuration
• Installation: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/README (30 mins)
• Design: 2-5 days (optional: defaults are fine)

Who does the tech work?

What happens if they disappear?

Security concerns?

GDPR?

Who/what entity owns the tech accounts?

All policy that should be decided before you start.

End of part 3

Three general formats used in scholarly journals

• XML (JATS)
• HTML
• PDF (variety of approaches: InDesign etc.)

Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) XML

• Journal-specific metadata
• Widely-used format
• Tools for automatic production very expensive
• Manual creation tricky
• Automatically converted to HTML by platforms

HTML

• Not semantically rich
• But: works anywhere
• WYSIWYG tools can produce bad markup, though

Effort/Labour Levels:

• JATS: High
• HTML: High/Moderate
• PDF: Minimal (Word export)

File format examples

• JATS: https://www.martineve.com/presentations/2017-HTML/JATS.xml.txt
• HTML: https://www.martineve.com/presentations/2017-HTML/HTML.htm.txt

Creating Basic HTML

• A plain-text editor
• An online editor, such as https://html-online.com/editor/

Creating JATS

• A plain-text editor
• Use the online HTML editor to create a basic framework, then adapt the tags
• Decide whether to used mixed-citation or element-citation mode

End of Part 4

The End

Thank you!