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The Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA, now known as Florida Virtual Campus or FLVC) began hosting an installation of the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal System (OJS) software in November 2010 (http://journals.fcla.edu). Initially, the only journals published through the FCLA instance of OJS were titles published locally at Florida universities. In July 2011, University of Florida Scholarly Communications Librarian Christine Fruin received an inquiry from University of Florida professor Dr. Edil Torres Rivera about the possibility of OJS hosting an international psychology society’s journal of which he serves as editor in chief. This prompted the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries to develop a service team model, including support from the Scholarly Communications Librarian, a Subject Specialist Librarian, and the Digital Humanities Librarian, for supporting faculty serving in editorial capacities for non-UF journals. The Libraries also drafted a Memorandum of Understanding outlining the responsibilities of the Libraries and the UF affiliated editor. Dr. Torres Rivera migrated the peer-reviewed Interamerican Journal of Psychology, a journal that had been hosted in Brazil with the support of the Federal university Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, to the FCLA instance of OJS in the fall of 2011 and published the first issue through OJS in March 2012 (http://journals.fcla.edu/ijp). Dr. Torres, along with his editorial board, contributing authors, and readers, experienced both transitional growing pains and publication and journal impact successes during the first two years of publication through OJS. The most difficult of this journey has been dealing with four different languages and a number of cultures (47 countries are part of the Interamerican Society of Psychology). However, publication through the OJS system has helped navigate the demands of the cultural differences in relationship to what is “scholarly” and the push for impact factor versus indexation and acceptance rates. Dr. Torres believes moving the journal to the OJS has created a better understanding across cultures and gives the journal a better leverage to deal with the cultural differences and expectations. Thus, during this presentation, the audience will hear not only about the service model implemented at UF but also about the technical, cultural, and publication experiences of an international and multi-lingual scholarly society journal.

Open Journal System; scholarly society; impact; international publishing