It Takes a Village to Flip a Journal: Reflections from the 2024 CRKN Virtual Conference
Cet article est aussi disponible en français ici.
By Jessica Dallaire-Clark (Érudit), Katie Cuyler (University of Alberta Libraries), Jeanette Hatherill (Coalition Publica), and Wanda Wuttunee (University of Manitoba).
This spring, we had the privilege of presenting about the amazing transformation of the Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development (JAED) at the 2024 Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) Virtual Conference.
In the past year or so, JAED has flipped from being subscription-based to diamond open access, has gone from being an exclusively print publication to fully digital, and became part of Coalition Publica by adopting Open Journal Systems (OJS) at the University of Alberta Library (UAL) and joining the Érudit platform. All these changes required a lot of work and support from multiple sources, hence the theme of our talk: It Takes a Village to Flip a Journal - Diamond Open Access as Community Effort.
At the CRKN conference, we gave the 200+ attendees at our session an overview of everything that went into making JAED’s flip possible, from the perspective of the journal’s editor (Wanda Wuttunee), its library publisher (Katie Cuyler), and the folks at Coalition Publica (Jessica Dallaire-Clark and Jeanette Hatherill).
Wanda Wuttunee - Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development
25 years ago, the Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development (JAED) was established with the support of the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers (CANDO) as the first journal to focus on indigenous economic development in Canada. With a broad look at economic development from health to community to education, the journal’s Lessons from Experience and Lessons from Research sections bring together insights from communities, policy makers and academics that are relevant to folks on the ground.
We have editorial team representatives from sea to sea to sea. The Editorial Board had talked about transition to open access (OA) for many years, and with my retirement and taking on the role of editor in chief, I was ready to undertake the work of this big transformation! The CANDO Board accepted the JAED Board’s recommendation in December 2022 and with that we were off. I took a deep dive into OA, reaching out to some cool journals doing cool things and connected with the Engaged Scholar Journal:
From our first meeting at the beginning of January 2023, the editorial team was just so open and encouraging, and with an experience online since 2015, they recommended the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) as a possible host and told me about Coalition Publica.
I got in touch with PKP, and it was them who suggested UAL and chatting with Jessica [Clark] at Coalition Publica.
What struck me was that everyone was so open, I didn’t get the sense from folks that “we’re the only ones doing this and we're the best”, it was very open and collaborative.
From there things moved quickly, we connected with UAL and applied to Coalition Publica in May 2023, had contracts signed by July, the managing editor for ESJ came on board in mid August, and by the end of September we had a website, so it was this incredibly compressed timeframe.
It was a lot of work, but we had so much support along the way. One thing I would say to other journals undertaking this, is the importance of having a champion, someone to dedicate the time to help in the process. I would encourage any journal to do this, while recognizing the importance of bringing people on side. It’s a lot of work to set up in OJS, but once it’s done, it's a very user friendly and intuitive system. It’s such a welcoming community and it’s great to plug in to people with the same values and to explore topics we've never looked at before. We’re asking for plain language submissions, looking at accessibility, maybe even a podcast.
The opportunities that we have now as a journal moving forward are so exciting, and we appreciate this opportunity to reflect on our story. We’re so proud we made this move and I want to say thank you to everyone involved!
Katie Cuyler - Open Publishing, University of Alberta Library
We take a values based approach to open publishing. We see supporting open publishing as consistent with our values as a library - providing access to high quality content that is of value to the research community and to the broader community as well.
The high quality of the content and the impact of JAED matched these values, so we were thrilled when Wanda reached out to discuss our program. Building on these values, we were also really excited at the prospect that we could help make back issues, which were previously only available through subscription, available openly.
One of the things UAL began working on with JAED in the first year, beyond getting JAED setup on OJS, was ingesting, preserving, and making openly available all the back issues of JAED, which was from 1999 through 2023. It was also really nice that Wanda came to this conversation really understanding the value of OA publishing, particularly in terms of reach and impact, so we were excited to work with JAED, and to do whatever we could to support them and to try to increase the reach and impact of the journal.
Institutional support has been essential to allowing library publishers to provide the services that we do, in our case, for free, to editorial teams. You can learn more about UAL’s open publishing program for journals here: https://library.ualberta.ca/publishing
We’re always happy to chat, so feel free to reach out with any questions.
Jessica Dallaire-Clark - Senior Coordinator, Open Access Development, Érudit
I first met Wanda as part of my previous role at Érudit coordinating Coalition Publica and services for English-language journals. I was impressed by her ambitious plans and obvious passion for JAED. I realized pretty quickly that JAED was fortunate to have in Wanda an editor who could devote a significant amount of time to the journal, as well as financial support from CANDO. I was eager to help Wanda succeed.
Like a lot of journals, JAED wanted to increase readership while reducing costs and keeping volunteer editorial labour reasonable. OA and dissemination on erudit.org provided opportunities to expand the journal’s reach, while adopting OJS would help the journal publish independently online and manage its editorial workflow. With encouragement from various sources, Wanda went searching for an OJS hosting provider and applied for the journal to be disseminated on Érudit.
I was also really proud to tell Wanda about the Partnership for Open Access (POA) and how it provides financial support to the scholarly journals on Érudit, including the ones in immediate OA. Most of this support comes from CRKN member libraries, who contribute annually and help make diamond OA feasible for Canadian journals. However, though the POA is a unique and important collective funding program, it currently allows us to redistribute only about $3,500 annually to the 160+ diamond OA journals on Érudit. For most journals, this covers only a small portion of their financial outlays in a year. JAED is fortunate to have the financial backing of an organization like CANDO to help fill in their budget.
Thinking about the future of JAED and the POA, there is a tremendous amount of potential to support the value of diamond OA for Canadian journals. CRKN members are an essential part of this vision, through their support of the POA and their own library publishing programs.
Jeanette Hatherill - Senior Coordinator, Coalition Publica
Something that struck me, and always does when I hear from journals and library publishers, is the dedication of everyone involved to put in the effort that goes into getting open scholarship into the hands of the public.
UAL publishing is a great example of the institutional support that is offered across the country via the approximately forty university libraries involved in journal publishing and hosting programs, and the support from CANDO for JAED’s efforts is an great example of institutional support via societies and associations for journal publishing; however not every journal is lucky enough to have this amount of institutional support for its endeavours. Unfortunately, lack of institutional support for journal editors is common. We have heard time and again from editors of journals that participate in Coalition Publica, real institutional support is a key factor to the “happiness” of a journal. This is backed up by researchers at Érudit. In-kind contributions or course releases provide concrete support to researchers by freeing up their time for editorial tasks, while also symbolically recognizing the importance given to these tasks by the institution.
Beyond satisfaction, the survival of these journals may be at stake if institutional support is not sustained or increased. As research on editorial labour and compensation by colleagues at McGill and UAL notes, an increasingly precarious labour force at Canadian universities risks upending a system that relies heavily on the labour of tenured faculty.
Surfacing the work of editors like Wanda is key to helping all stakeholders in the system see themselves as an important part of the “village”, so it was a real pleasure to present this panel at CRKN which is a key convener of these groups in Canada.
We hope that this blog post gives you a good idea of all the hands that contributed to JAED’s big transformation over the past year. It’s an inspiring story that holds some important lessons for open access journal publishing in Canada.
For more information about us, and to access the slides from our presentation, you can visit the CRKN conference website here for English, and here for French. A recording of the panel is also available.