PKP International Scholarly Publishing Conferences, PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007

Font Size: 
Lessons learned from a decade of open access publishing: The Resilience Alliances experience
Michelle Lee

Last modified: 2007-07-14

Abstract


The Resilience Alliance publication, Ecology and Society, is a scientific journal that rode the cusp of the electronic, open access publishing wave when it published its inaugural issue in 1997. Initially, the journal used an online peer-review and publishing software developed in house during the early 1990s. In late 2003, a project was initiated to adopt a completely new system rather than continue to build on top of the existing system. OJS version 1.1.5 was selected as the base for this new system. In 2005, the journal migrated to a modified version of OJS that was redesigned to accommodate 1) document conversion (rtf to html, and html to pdf), 2) a complex reminders routine, 3) the logging of all correspondence relating to each manuscript, 4) the creation and organization of special features, 5) the development of a comprehensive set of manuscript and user statistic reports, and 6) an author/special feature invoicing interface. This presentation will focus on the lessons learned from a decade of publishing Ecology and Society and how the journal's growth and continued success is linked to the use of this modified version of OJS's online peer review and publication system. In addition, the presentation will explore the journal's ongoing quest for financial self sustainability though its use of an author-pay economic model and the sale of publishing services to other journals (namely, Avian Conservation and Ecology, http://www.ace-eco.org/) to increase its revenue stream and offset system administration and software programming costs.

Full Text: PPT