OJS is Not Enough
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Frantsvåg, Jan Erik
Small journals - published as stand-alone journals or by very small publishers - form a large part of open access publishing today. But small journals/publishers seem to have problems with their publishing competencies. OJS provides tools, but not the competences needed for exploiting the possibilities that lies in OJS. So what is needed, for small journals to become better tools for their authors?
 I work in something that we call the September Academic Publishing, which is a service for editors and journals connected to my university. We have been using OJS since 2003, and I like OJS, just to have that said. I'm also a member of the Spark Europe Board, I'm a member of the advisory board of DOAJ, and none of them have any responsibility for what I'm saying here. It's me who's talking, and not the organizations I belong to. I'm an economist, I came from the administration to Open Access, actually started doing Open Access thinking 23 years ago. This presentation is based on a study that I and a colleague at University of Bergen made after the release of the plan S guidance in November last year. This guidelines have later been revised and softened. We think maybe partly because of our study. Many requirements have become recommendations, but they might become the harsh reality after the plan S reevaluates itself in 2024. That is why this presentation. Let's see if we can make this work. OJS is a very powerful publishing tool. It might not be the perfect one, but it is not in OJS the problems lie. It's designed for electronic publishing. Something wrong? No? Okay. They have good workflow capabilities. It has functionality that supports Open Access publishing. It has plugins for communications with Open Access services and all the infrastructures and wide number of plugins. It's much used by smaller and scholar publishing services. Stand alone, university-based, you name it. I think it said that there's more than 10,000 installations, at least 10,000 journals using OJS. It's the most widespread software. It's free. It's one reason it's also widespread. But how does the Open Access landscape look like? We get a very large number of numbers. You don't have to read them all. The gist of it is that Open Access publishers are many, but they are small, measured in the number of journals they publish. There are some problems with these kind of statistics. I won't go into it. This gives a rough picture of reality. We can summarize the table that there are great many publishers publishing one or a few journals, and then there are a few publishers publishing a large number of journals each, and there's not very much in between. Can such small publishers be competent when it comes to publishing and technology? I have no doubt they are competent when it comes to the content they're publishing. That's quite another matter. It's not up for discussion here. Can they be efficient in an economic sense? Talk about economies of scale. Small publishers often also publish small journals when you measure them by the number of articles they publish each year. My impression after having worked with this for many years is that the answer to both the questions are no, they can't. I could stop there, of course, but let's look at some more things. What are the problems for editors? Well, they're used to the paper world, and they have a lot of thinking that needs to be re-learned. Most editors of small journals still think that they publish a journal issue. They don't understand that what they publish are singular PDFs that need all relevant information embedded in the PDF. There's no cover to where you can put the author bios or things like that. They have a limited understanding of what open access is, and the infrastructure is open access. But I think that open access is about putting content on the internet. No, it isn't. It's about putting content into an infrastructure, making sure it's visible and available where the users look for content. And one thing you can be very sure about is they're not going to your journals looking for content. So all the energy spent on design of journal pages, forget it. Put the work into getting content into the mechanisms that ensure distribution. The home page of the journals are rarely visited by people looking for content. They're not technology-wise. I mean, there are exceptions, but again, exceptions to that. And they have no idea about economics, which is also why they don't have any funding either, most of them. And the understanding of economics is when they came to the university, the finance department for the first time, is that universities don't understand economics really. So what can we observe? Well, one thing that we can observe is that there is a huge number of open access journals not listed in the directory of open access journals. Water Crawford estimates nearly 6,000 of them. A listing in the DOAJ is, for one thing, it's a sign of acceptable scholarly quality and open access quality. And it is also a tools for distribution for metadata, making the content visible and red. So if you're not there, you're doing a disservice to your authors and your content. But those listed in DOAJ are still weak on a number of quality aspects. So a listing is not the end solution, but it's a step on the way. If you look at the original plan S requirements and we look at non-APC publishers and APC publishers, a bit for technical reasons, we see that the small non-APC publishers meet 1.1 of the four technical criteria on average, which is truly bad. The large non-APC publishers meet 3.5 of the four technical criteria, which is good. If you are an APC publisher and small, you're still not good, but you're much better than the non-APC publisher of the same size, which you meet 1.6 of the criteria. And the large APC-based publishers meet 3.8 out of the four technical criteria. There is a world of difference between the small and the large publishers, and there is a definite difference between the APC-based and the not-APC-based publishers. You'll find much more numbers in our article. Go read that afterwards. If you look at the policy side of it, the picture is different. The non-APC publishers, the small ones meet 1.9 out of the three policy criteria, while the larger ones meet fewer criteria, actually, on average. The same APC publishers, the smaller ones meet 2.4 out of four, while the larger ones meet 3 out of four policy criteria. So when it comes to policy, the small publishers are not really this advantage, not at the same scale, at least, as when it comes to technical criteria. So what are the technical problems? There's a lack of doys. Probably because many editors, they don't understand what the doy is and why they should have a doy. The lack of doy reduces dissemination of metadata. OJS helps you with assigning doys and submitting this to Crossref, but you need to understand why and how and you have to have the money. The bill is not big, but many small journals don't have any financial economy at all. Zero income and zero ability to pay bills, even the small, sorry, there's a hole in the floor. Not big enough to escape. Sorry. Then there's a lack of long-term preservation arrangements. That could look very difficult, but the PKP has, as far as I know, offered a very cheap and simple solution integrated with OJS. There's no machine-readable full-text format, and this is a problem I really can understand because XML is not for amateurs. Making XML will be costly in some way or other, and it will need financing. That will be a huge problem for small journals. And last technical criteria, there's a lack of embedded license info in the text files. Nearly 50% of journals lack this, and this is not difficult to do, but you have to know that you should do it and how to do it. So we have a competence problem. Publishing entails a number of important competencies, and scholar-led publishing is, as the world says, led by scholars. They are very competent, but probably not in publishing. And there's a huge cost associated with acquiring the necessary competence, not necessarily in money, but in time. These are often overworked. Thousands don't have the time to invest, and because they have too little competence, they don't even know they should invest time in this. The average open-access journal is APC-free, published alone, and has few articles. And that means that the cost of competence has very few articles to be divided between. That means that the model is very expensive per article. And there is no income to buy competence with, and you should remember that not being competent also has cost. I mean, it will reduce the distribution of the content. That is a cost to authors and to scholarship in general. The future, the plan has relented on this part, and I know they have read the article. The final criteria were less demanding, but there are clear signs that the softened up criteria will be toughened up from 2025. The most of them are already recommendations, which means that very few small scholar-led journals will be compliant six years from now, and six years is very soon on the time scale where we work. It's a geological time scale, I think, sometimes. Plan S might have grown to become more important, because many editors can today say, well, plan S, it doesn't mean anything to us. Our authors don't have plan S funding. Well, that can change. The day your friendly neighborhood research council decides to join plan S. You can have a plan S problem overnight. So we have to plan for it and have some thinking about it. This will be the demise of scholar-led publishing, at least unless something is done. One solution could be that more APC-based scholar-led publishing. I mean, APC is not the same as profitable. It's a way of getting income. That could allow outsourcing of competence-demanding activities. For instance, typesetting. I mean, we have the world's most expensive typesetter. It's a professor of Spanish, very productive one, too. He should be researching and writing more articles. We need more and better tools, especially when it comes to XML. For many of the other problems, we have the tools. We don't have the editors that understand how to use them. I think that one answer is to create larger publishing entities that are more resilient. As standalone journal, we'll have problems the editor dies or the tech support guy changes his job. Larger publishing entities allow the competence cost to be spread over more articles. That is part of the economies of scale. You also get more experience. You do think more efficiently. What scale is needed? Well, my guess is that you won't really have a future unless you publish at least 50 journals. You need some institutional willingness to provide better funding and to enter into inter-institutional publishing agreements to create large entities. That is my solution, actually. More money, larger entities. I think that's the solution. Questions that we'll save for later? Don't forget to look at the Munion conference. This year's conference is next week, but there will probably be one coming up next year, too. We'll be in there. More should come. Thanks for listening to me.
 I work in something that we call the September Academic Publishing, which is a service for  editors and journals connected to my university.  We have been using OJS since 2003, and I like OJS, just to have that said.  I'm also a member of the Spark Europe Board, I'm a member of the advisory board of DOAJ,  and none of them have any responsibility for what I'm saying here.  It's me who's talking, and not the organizations I belong to.  I'm an economist, I came from the administration to Open Access, actually started doing Open  Access thinking 23 years ago.  This presentation is based on a study that I and a colleague at University of Bergen  made after the release of the plan S guidance in November last year.  This guidelines have later been revised and softened.  We think maybe partly because of our study.  Many requirements have become recommendations, but they might become the harsh reality after  the plan S reevaluates itself in 2024.  That is why this presentation.  Let's see if we can make this work.  OJS is a very powerful publishing tool.  It might not be the perfect one, but it is not in OJS the problems lie.  It's designed for electronic publishing.  Something wrong?  No?  Okay.  They have good workflow capabilities.  It has functionality that supports Open Access publishing.  It has plugins for communications with Open Access services and all the infrastructures  and wide number of plugins.  It's much used by smaller and scholar publishing services.  Stand alone, university-based, you name it.  I think it said that there's more than 10,000 installations, at least 10,000 journals using  OJS.  It's the most widespread software.  It's free.  It's one reason it's also widespread.  But how does the Open Access landscape look like?  We get a very large number of numbers.  You don't have to read them all.  The gist of it is that Open Access publishers are many, but they are small, measured in  the number of journals they publish.  There are some problems with these kind of statistics.  I won't go into it.  This gives a rough picture of reality.  We can summarize the table that there are great many publishers publishing one or a  few journals, and then there are a few publishers publishing a large number of journals each,  and there's not very much in between.  Can such small publishers be competent when it comes to publishing and technology?  I have no doubt they are competent when it comes to the content they're publishing.  That's quite another matter.  It's not up for discussion here.  Can they be efficient in an economic sense?  Talk about economies of scale.  Small publishers often also publish small journals when you measure them by the number  of articles they publish each year.  My impression after having worked with this for many years is that the answer to both  the questions are no, they can't.  I could stop there, of course, but let's look at some more things.  What are the problems for editors?  Well, they're used to the paper world, and they have a lot of thinking that needs to  be re-learned.  Most editors of small journals still think that they publish a journal issue.  They don't understand that what they publish are singular PDFs that need all relevant information  embedded in the PDF.  There's no cover to where you can put the author bios or things like that.  They have a limited understanding of what open access is, and the infrastructure is  open access.  But I think that open access is about putting content on the internet.  No, it isn't.  It's about putting content into an infrastructure, making sure it's visible and available where  the users look for content.  And one thing you can be very sure about is they're not going to your journals looking  for content.  So all the energy spent on design of journal pages, forget it.  Put the work into getting content into the mechanisms that ensure distribution.  The home page of the journals are rarely visited by people looking for content.  They're not technology-wise.  I mean, there are exceptions, but again, exceptions to that.  And they have no idea about economics, which is also why they don't have any funding either,  most of them.  And the understanding of economics is when they came to the university, the finance department  for the first time, is that universities don't understand economics really.  So what can we observe?  Well, one thing that we can observe is that there is a huge number of open access journals  not listed in the directory of open access journals.  Water Crawford estimates nearly 6,000 of them.  A listing in the DOAJ is, for one thing, it's a sign of acceptable scholarly quality  and open access quality.  And it is also a tools for distribution for metadata, making the content visible and  red.  So if you're not there, you're doing a disservice to your authors and your content.  But those listed in DOAJ are still weak on a number of quality aspects.  So a listing is not the end solution, but it's a step on the way.  If you look at the original plan S requirements and we look at non-APC publishers and APC  publishers, a bit for technical reasons, we see that the small non-APC publishers meet  1.1 of the four technical criteria on average, which is truly bad.  The large non-APC publishers meet 3.5 of the four technical criteria, which is good.  If you are an APC publisher and small, you're still not good, but you're much better than  the non-APC publisher of the same size, which you meet 1.6 of the criteria.  And the large APC-based publishers meet 3.8 out of the four technical criteria.  There is a world of difference between the small and the large publishers, and there  is a definite difference between the APC-based and the not-APC-based publishers.  You'll find much more numbers in our article.  Go read that afterwards.  If you look at the policy side of it, the picture is different.  The non-APC publishers, the small ones meet 1.9 out of the three policy criteria, while  the larger ones meet fewer criteria, actually, on average.  The same APC publishers, the smaller ones meet 2.4 out of four, while the larger ones  meet 3 out of four policy criteria.  So when it comes to policy, the small publishers are not really this advantage, not at the  same scale, at least, as when it comes to technical criteria.  So what are the technical problems?  There's a lack of doys.  Probably because many editors, they don't understand what the doy is and why they should  have a doy.  The lack of doy reduces dissemination of metadata.  OJS helps you with assigning doys and submitting this to Crossref, but you need to understand  why and how and you have to have the money.  The bill is not big, but many small journals don't have any financial economy at all.  Zero income and zero ability to pay bills, even the small, sorry, there's a hole in the  floor.  Not big enough to escape.  Sorry.  Then there's a lack of long-term preservation arrangements.  That could look very difficult, but the PKP has, as far as I know, offered a very cheap  and simple solution integrated with OJS.  There's no machine-readable full-text format, and this is a problem I really can understand  because XML is not for amateurs.  Making XML will be costly in some way or other, and it will need financing.  That will be a huge problem for small journals.  And last technical criteria, there's a lack of embedded license info in the text files.  Nearly 50% of journals lack this, and this is not difficult to do, but you have to know  that you should do it and how to do it.  So we have a competence problem.  Publishing entails a number of important competencies, and scholar-led publishing is, as the world  says, led by scholars.  They are very competent, but probably not in publishing.  And there's a huge cost associated with acquiring the necessary competence, not necessarily  in money, but in time.  These are often overworked.  Thousands don't have the time to invest, and because they have too little competence,  they don't even know they should invest time in this.  The average open-access journal is APC-free, published alone, and has few articles.  And that means that the cost of competence has very few articles to be divided between.  That means that the model is very expensive per article.  And there is no income to buy competence with, and you should remember that not being competent  also has cost.  I mean, it will reduce the distribution of the content.  That is a cost to authors and to scholarship in general.  The future, the plan has relented on this part, and I know they have read the article.  The final criteria were less demanding, but there are clear signs that the softened up  criteria will be toughened up from 2025.  The most of them are already recommendations, which means that very few small scholar-led  journals will be compliant six years from now, and six years is very soon on the time  scale where we work.  It's a geological time scale, I think, sometimes.  Plan S might have grown to become more important, because many editors can today say, well,  plan S, it doesn't mean anything to us.  Our authors don't have plan S funding.  Well, that can change.  The day your friendly neighborhood research council decides to join plan S. You can have  a plan S problem overnight.  So we have to plan for it and have some thinking about it.  This will be the demise of scholar-led publishing, at least unless something is done.  One solution could be that more APC-based scholar-led publishing.  I mean, APC is not the same as profitable.  It's a way of getting income.  That could allow outsourcing of competence-demanding activities.  For instance, typesetting.  I mean, we have the world's most expensive typesetter.  It's a professor of Spanish, very productive one, too.  He should be researching and writing more articles.  We need more and better tools, especially when it comes to XML.  For many of the other problems, we have the tools.  We don't have the editors that understand how to use them.  I think that one answer is to create larger publishing entities that are more resilient.  As standalone journal, we'll have problems the editor dies or the tech support guy changes  his job.  Larger publishing entities allow the competence cost to be spread over more articles.  That is part of the economies of scale.  You also get more experience.  You do think more efficiently.  What scale is needed?  Well, my guess is that you won't really have a future unless you publish at least 50 journals.  You need some institutional willingness to provide better funding and to enter into inter-institutional  publishing agreements to create large entities.  That is my solution, actually.  More money, larger entities.  I think that's the solution.  Questions that we'll save for later?  Don't forget to look at the Munion conference.  This year's conference is next week, but there will probably be one coming up next year,  too.  We'll be in there.  More should come.  Thanks for listening to me.
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