Focus
Moving to a new journal platform brings opportunities to evolve services so that users and the publishing team will benefit. There are many people involved in this type of migration, the vendor, authors who have waited patiently for their article to be published, but most importantly is the team who have spent years to make this new platform a reality.
Migrating a Journal Platform: Stars Wars and a New Future
Last week while sitting on the lawn at Tanglewood in Lenox, listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing John Williams’ score for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope , I thought of the new journal platform being built for Lamar Soutter Library’s publishing services, and thought, “Yes, we DO have new hope and we’re breaking free so that we can provide a more inclusive and accessible publishing environment for our authors, editors, peer reviewers, and readers.”
Moving to Janeway aligns with JeSLIB’s goal to utilize an open-source platform that integrates with existing open-source scholarly infrastructure and tools (e.g., DOI minting and plagiarism detection with Crossref, ORCID lookup/sign-in). This platform increases our internal efficiency, flexibility, and security – which is important for a team of volunteer editors. JeSLIB’s interface will be clear and intuitive, with a modern looking journal and article display. The editors and the Janeway team have been developing structured, easy to follow workflows for submissions, editorial management (with in-context instructions), and copyediting, which will improve the experience for our authors, peer reviewers, and copyediting services. Looking to the future, JeSLIB editors will be able to display HTML and XML versions of articles, not just PDF, to make our content more accessible. And most important to us is the Janeway support and growing community of adopters and knowledgeable developers – they are laser-sharp in their responses and solutions to issues that are brought to their attention.
A publishing platform migration doesn’t happen with a “flip-of-a-switch”, it took a few years of planning. The key person in the migration, Lisa Palmer, the Lamar Soutter Library’s Institutional Repository Librarian, organized all the discovery, trialing, decision-making, and then implementation, and more, in preparing the library and its publishing services for “going live”. We wouldn’t be launching anything without Lisa’s determination and project management expertise. Her team from the Library’s Research Services and Scholarly Communications (RSCS) department, Sally Gore, Associate Editor, Tess Grynoch, RSCS Librarian, and Robert Aframe, RSCS Library Assistant, along with the journal’s Managing Editor, Julie Goldman (Harvard University), have spent the summer working to get the platform’s policies, procedures, forms, graphics, and workflows ready for our internal and external users. And thank you to the Library’s Director, Dr. Mary Piorun, for her continued support and confidence in the Library’s publishing services – she knows the importance of building dependable and evolving services to support library publishing.
A new issue wouldn’t be complete without a new article. The inaugural article using JeSLIB’s new look and platform, Train the Teacher: Practical guidance for effective, critical teaching approaches for science and data librarians , is authored by Margaret M. Bresnahan, University of New Hampshire and Dianne N. Brown, Harvard Graduate School of Education. The article focuses on guiding science and data librarians in their development as teachers, providing a review of the workshops they designed and delivered, and presenting practical strategies for creating and facilitating effective information and data literacy instruction for STEM audiences. Thank you to the authors for agreeing to be the first manuscript to go through our new publishing process – we like it and hope you do too!
As we become expert with the new platform, look for new content to be published in the next few months.
Like the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars epic, we’re small, but using forward-facing tools and working with an alliance of users that have the same goals: open-source infrastructure, community support, accessible content – take that, Galactic Empire!