A new toolkit for publishing open access journals

Are you thinking about setting up a journal but aren’t sure how to go about it? Or have you already established a journal but wish to change it in some way, maybe by flipping it to open access? A new resource created by OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) has been designed to answer these sorts of questions- and it’s free to use!

The Open Access Journals Toolkit was launched in June this year to support new and established open access journals to navigate the world of scholarly publishing. Anyone involved in journal publishing can use the toolkit and the organisers hope that it will help under-resourced journals anywhere in the world to make sound publishing decisions.

The University of Wolverhampton has pledged to support the initiative in order to improve the infrastructure for open access not only at the institution but more widely for the benefit of everyone.

The toolkit addresses various aspects of journal development and day-to-day practices through six sections: getting started, running a journal, indexing, staffing, policies, and infrastructure. Each section includes a number of articles which provide practical guidance in line with scholarly publishing best practice. The aim is that backed by this knowledge, new editors and publishers will be able to establish and maintain high-quality open access journals.

An Editorial Board of diverse experts representing a range of languages, territories, roles and organisations has overseen the content of the toolkit. They’re hoping to make the toolkit available in multiple languages and it is currently available in both English and French.

All the content is easy to navigate, download and share having been made available under a CC-BY licence. A downloadable version of the toolkit has also been made available here.

A similar resource relating to books (which is also free to use) is the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit. The toolkit contains a lot of useful information on the open access book publishing and the research lifecycle which is useful to authors, including how to choose a publisher for your open access book, contracts and licences, and self-publishing.

Sarah Dar, Scholarly Communications Officer

Image by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash