Abstract
Scholarly communication and library publishing services are becoming more widespread, giving academic libraries new opportunities to become more active participants in the creation and distribution of resources. These new ventures can help librarians to broaden their understanding of scholarly publishing. Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) Library partnered with WLU Press in an e-journal initiative, launching the digital counterpart of a long-running print publication, Canadian Military History. This article presents a summary of that project.
A study by Angus Phillips in 2010 estimated that 23,700 peer reviewed journals were producing 1.59 million articles annually.Footnote 1 Given this competitive market, when a journal does not have an electronic counterpart, its future may be tenuous. This was the challenge facing Canadian Military History (CMH), a journal that has been in print for over twenty years.
The development of a digital edition of CMH was a project undertaken by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, Wilfrid Laurier University's institutional repository. Unlike many institutional repositories that are the sole purview of libraries, Scholars Commons is a joint initiative of the Laurier Library and WLU Press. Despite a shared interest in and commitment to scholarly communication, collaborations between university libraries and presses are not a common occurrence. Different aims, objectives, and skill sets often lead these two units to see themselves as working at cross-purposes rather than together in the scholarly communication cycle.
According to Boismenu and Beaudry “… publication is created by a whole process of selection, processing, formatting, distribution, institutionalization of forums, recognition and archiving of papers submitted. That is the territory of journals.”Footnote 2 Distribution is only a small component of the publication process and that has been the limited domain of libraries. However, a survey among libraries in late 2010 found that 55% were either already offering or were interested in offering publishing services, although offering publishing services does not necessarily imply collaboration with the university press.Footnote 3 Librarians involved in this project wanted their values and their concerns about the unsustainability of “Big Deals” reflected in publishing practices. They were skilled in the organization of information, the creation of metadata, and provided technical knowledge. Viewed this way, the partnership had the potential to broaden the perspectives of both Library and Press.
CMH is a quarterly journal published by the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, a research centre affiliated with the university, and distributed by WLU Press. Founded in 1992, the journal has had some of the foremost military historians in Canada as contributors and editorial board members. Despite its well-established reputation, CMH only had 480 subscribers in 2011. Although the Centre was eager to embark on this venture, there were concerns about the potential consequences of such a decision. Many academic historians are somewhat resistant to journal articles, and especially to electronic publications. While peer-reviewed journal articles are the “gold standard” in other fields, tenure and promotion committees in academic history departments favor book publication. Authors have cited a perceived lack of prestige as a deterrent to writing journal articles.Footnote 4 Electronic publication, and particularly open access, could contribute to a lower quality of scholarship published in journals with high acceptance rates and little or no rigorous peer review processes.Footnote 5 The primary challenge for CMH was to strike a balance between maintaining its prestige and broadening the readership.
Working with an established journal, with an existing readership and a steady stream of submissions, was regarded as more straightforward and simpler than starting a new journal. It allowed Scholars Commons and CMH to focus attention on the production of the journal itself. Digitizing the large back catalogue was viewed as an important step in broadening the readership as well, since many users arrive to read a single article and stay on the website to browse the rest of the content.
At the same time, the Centre was considering applying for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), which offers aid to scholarly journals for up to $30,000 per annum. Requirements included “diversity and relevance of the journal's proposed strategies for reaching the appropriate readership,” “nature and extent of the journal's readership, and of the journal's efforts to increase or broaden that readership,” and “impact of the journal's articles,” as measured either by citation indices or usage reports.Footnote 6 The SSHRC program had awarded 138 of the 208 applicants in 2011.Footnote 7 The SSHRC evaluation criteria served as a kind of checklist for the development of policies. At the outset of the project, the Managing Editor of CMH, the Director of the Press, and the Acquisitions Editors completed a questionnaire designed to help determine their expectations and objectives, as well as to ascertain what policies were already in place. Many journals—particularly niche publications—operate without formalized policies or agreements. Because these journals typically operate with fewer staff members and smaller circulations, formalization can seem unnecessary and a journal's policies are conceived of almost as tacit knowledge. This can be an ill-advised assumption to make as confusion or miscommunication may result, with potentially serious ramifications, especially where issues of copyright or finances are concerned.
In addition to the policies, the partnership examined the CMH bylaws. The bylaws documented how the journal operated within itself—who was responsible for what and how it should be done—and the policies stated how the journal interacted with other parties, whether they be authors, publishers, or readers.Footnote 8
One helpful strategy for understanding the bylaws and policies was to map the creation of a single issue or even article from both the journal and the author's perspective. The partnership needed to know what steps were involved, who was responsible, when steps should be completed, what the typical problems were, and how these problems could be avoided. Understanding these processes in advance lessened the likelihood of unexpected situations. CMH staff also found that examining the policies helped them apply consistency of standards and treatment and enhanced the professionalism of the operation.
At Laurier, Scholars Commons has established service level agreements with its software developer and journal platform, Digital Commons from the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress), as well as a Memorandum of Understanding with the Centre itself, outlining the responsibilities of all three parties. All agreements were reviewed by legal counsel. While the extent of formalization seemed at first excessive, the discussion and documentation helped to clarify roles, manage expectations, and ensure accountability.
The largest policy-related issue was that of copyright. At the outset of the project, the journal did not have written agreements with any of the approximately 250 authors who had previously contributed pieces for publication. Using an index of the articles published between 1992 and 2003, searches were conducted to gather all available contact information. Over the course of approximately three months, 113 authors were contacted. Rather than asking them to transfer copyright retroactively, the journal sought non-exclusive permission to distribute. The feasibility of seeking copyright transfer agreements had been discussed, but it was ultimately decided that securing copyright ownership for previously published items was beyond the scope of this project.
Through this process, permission was obtained to make nearly half of all previously published materials electronically available, and attempts to contact authors are ongoing. After a series of discussions, it was ultimately decided to make CMH open access with a two year moving wall, meaning that the contents were restricted to subscribers only for the first two years, at which point they would become open access. As one of the primary objectives for creating the electronic counterpart was to increase the visibility of the journal, the Centre chose to take a calculated risk in providing freely available, high quality scholarly materials. An electronic submission system has since been implemented that requires the authors to declare their agreement with the submission guidelines. Once works have been reviewed and approved for publication, the authors will also be required to sign and return the same agreement.
The initial phase of the CMH project was completed in April 2012 and the website counted over 3,600 full-text downloads as of July 1. The transition gave the Centre a chance to streamline workflows, create comprehensive policies and bylaws, and develop marketing and promotion strategies.
With the successful launch of CMH, Laurier Library and WLU Press are eager to continue their collaboration in future e-journal initiatives. The partnership between the Library, the Press, and the Centre combined the expertise of all to create a more comprehensive and effective program, to encourage open access and to share a richer understanding of scholarly communication.
Notes
1. Angus Phillips, “Blog to the Future? Journal Publishing in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40, no. 4 (2010): 17.
2. Gerard Boismenu and Guylaine Beaudry, Scholarly Journals in the New Digital World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 9.
3. Raym Crow et al., Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success (Washington, DC: SPARC, 2012), 6.
4. Mary Steig Dalton, “The Publishing Experiences of Historians,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39, no. 3 (2008): 206.
5. David Nicholas, Paul Huntington, and Ian Rowlands, “Open Access Journal Publishing: The Views of Some of the World's Senior Authors,” Journal of Documentation, 61, no. 4 (2005): 513–514.
6. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, “Aid to Scholarly Journals,” last modified November 11, 2011, http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/scholarly_journals-revues_savantes-eng.aspx (accessed November 19, 2012).
7. Rowland Lorimer et al., “Toward Operationalising and Sustaining Open Access in a Canadian Context,” Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Wilfrid Laurier University. Waterloo, ON, June 1, 2012.
8. David Solomon, Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide (Oxford: Chandos, 2008), 91.