Journal hosting at St Andrews hits 15 years
This April, we are celebrating 15 years of hosting journals at the University of St Andrews. The Journal Hosting Service now hosts 12 current journals, with 6 additional journals having ceased publication over the years.
But, as you might expect, it was not always so active, though plenty of work was done in the beginning to build a strong groundwork for the service.
The early years
A pilot in late 2010 offered the beginnings of the service, exploring whether the Library could offer a suitable platform to bring journals to new audiences. The pilot service hosted pre-existing journals, making their archives open and available in December 2010.
In April 2011, then, the hosting service officially launched with three journals:
- Theology in Scotland, which is still very much active and flourishing
- Journal of Terrorism Research, which was later called CVIR
- St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies, which eventually became the North Street Review and which has now ceased publication.
Some of the most difficult work in the beginning was getting a sense of just what the service would be.
A publishing arm of the University? No.
A catalogue of journals loosely connected to the university? Not quite.
Eventually, it was landed upon as a hosting service, in which journals published by a school or unit of the University could find a home on Open Journal Systems (OJS), a platform that has a robust editorial workflow that enables journals to keep everything in house and organised.
Complex work was handled surrounding copyright and licensing, and to establish that archives of pre-existing journals could in fact be made open access. Author rights were gathered and organised, redacting as necessary and creating some standard guidance for journals. This would act as a key foundation upon which to build our successful journal hosting service, supporting both student and staff-led journals.
Journal hosting: the next generation
Over the last 15 years, 1,585 articles were published or their archives made available. In addition, 3,861,823 abstract and file views were logged.
We also moved to a more explicit Diamond model: beyond the early ambitions to provide long-term online access to journal archives – we now have a requirement that all journals are run with immediate OA and no fees.
As the system expanded to accommodate all this work, we migrated to a shared hosting service run by the University of Edinburgh, working with a developer available to keep the platform up-to-date, while also collaborating with other Scottish institutions to discuss practices and possibilities. For similar reasons, we recently joined the Open Institutional Publishing Association, first as an advisory board member and now as full member, benefiting from a very active group.
We aren’t done, either. This service will continue to grow and flourish, and we look forward to exploring robust and sustainable models of publishing that recognise the inherent difficulties of relying on volunteers and in-kind resources, as well as discovering the strong, quality research these journals—and the many others currently in the pipeline—provide in the coming 15 years.