Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide

Citation

Oppenheim, C. (2009), "Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 8, pp. 620-620. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910987127

A book giving clear and comprehensive advice on launching and running open access (OA) journals is undoubtedly needed, and the title of this paperback certainly raises one's hopes. Unfortunately, this book is so limited in its approach, that at best it can be considered a short introduction to the topic. The chapter headings promise a lot – after an introductory history, they are: “Examples of successful Open Access journals”, “Journal planning issues”, “Hosting and data systems”, “By‐laws”, “Policies and other documentation”, “Resources and financing”, “Disseminating the content”, “Launching the journal” and “Maintaining and sustaining an OA journal”.

Unfortunately, many of these chapters are superficial and the author is writing for just one type of reader – someone in a Higher Education Institution thinking of launching a new journal. The author ignores established publishers thinking either of launching a new OA journal, converting a toll access (subscription) journal to OAS, or anyone thinking of launching a hybrid journal where some of the articles are OA and some are toll access. In short, the majority of would‐be OA journal publishers are ignored.

Even for the minority of people who are the intended readers, the book lacks detail in some places. I was particularly surprised to see little about business planning, long term financing and exit strategy (what if the person launching the journal plans to sell it at some stage?).

In the discussion of the author‐publisher licence to publish, it was surprising that the book does not recommend specific model examples, such as those developed by SPARC or JISC/SURF. There were some dubious statements, such as recommending the use of unpaid interns to do copy editing for the journal, and that Word is universally used for written documents (not for Maths).

The book starts from the premise that OA journals are a good thing – something that established commercial publishers and many in the OA community would challenge; it is a pity that the author does not set OA journals more in context of the controversies surrounding them. The book has a few supporting references, but some of these are very dated. The index, in common with all Chandos books I have read, is very basic.

Having said all that, the book is well typeset, readable and personal in style with many anecdotes from the author's experiences of setting up and running a small OA journal. So, if you are thinking of starting a new OA journal from scratch and are based in a University, this book is a good starting point, tough you’d need to take further advice on many of the issues involved. But for an established publisher thinking about launching such a journal, it's not worth buying.