Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.
By Jennifer Beamer, Ph.D., writing about her experiences at The Claremont Colleges Library
In 2012, The Claremont Colleges launched an Open Access journal publishing program. Through its institutional repository, Scholarship@Claremont, we now have nine active journals that the library hosts and supports. The journals must be edited or sponsored by a faculty member of one of the seven Claremont Colleges campuses. The Library helps onboard and set up the journal, onboard the editors, and offers some minor services like ISSN registration, assigning DOIs, and training on peer review.
Our strongest journals, the ones that have had the most longevity have been CODEE, the Community of Ordinary Differential Equations Educators, and the Mime Journal. Recently, our newer journals like Envirolab Asia have been very interdisciplinary, and focus not only on articles, but also on events that coincide with the papers.
Over the past year of working with the Library Publishing Workflows partners and Educopia, I have realized three things: 1) our workflows are really simple! 2) this means we have a lot of room for growth, 3) we don’t want to grow too much!
Some simple things that we have planned to do this year to make our workflows more sustainable—that I have humbly and am so grateful to have learned from the other partners—are that is necessary to set up a journal proposal form for faculty to apply to, to have some selection criteria, and to form a Publications Advisory Board. In the past, we have been a “boutique publishing model,” and we have standardized our service offerings and some journal policies to those that support our mission across journals, which will promote efficiencies for our staff (as there are only 2 of us). As well, the most important is we need to partner only with faculty that have journals that are aligned with our mission to have an impact on the Open Access movement.
In the coming year, I would also like to keep having discussions about the library as a publisher and its role as a gatekeeper in the publishing process. If we are to be “different than traditional” publishers, we need to understand the role we play, and offer services that are better and distinct from those of the closed journals and that will make faculty WANT to publish with us!