Photo by Tim Mossholder
Photo by Tim Mossholder

There’s arguably never been a better time to start an Open Access (OA) journal, with more potential funding models to explore and time and cost-saving digital publishing technologies to help than ever. And it’s well worth the effort. OA publishing has the potential to not only expand access to research but also lower the cost of knowledge through the development of more sustainable and equitable journal publishing models than traditional subscriptions.

At Scholastica, we’re proud to be among mission-driven service providers working to lower the barrier to entry to OA publishing, and we’re always excited when small publishers come to us with aspirations to launch journals — from scholarly societies to university departments to library programs to scholar-led startups. We know those dipping their toes into the OA waters often have many questions about how to move from ideation to execution. So, we wanted to offer a current OA publishing primer to help.

In this blog post, we break down tips for determining the best OA publishing route for your organization and the primary steps to get an OA journal off the ground, with links to additional external guides. You can jump to any section of the primer from the Table of Contents below:

  1. Determine the niche your journal will fill and draft its aims and scope
  2. Get to know the OA needs of your research community
  3. Break down OA models by category to determine a viable funding route
  4. Build an editorial board
  5. Develop editorial and publishing processes
  6. Seek technical solutions to streamline publishing workflows
  7. Prioritize journal promotion and discoverability
  8. Work your way up to publishing standards and recommendations
  9. Approach your first few years of OA publishing as a pilot
  10. Seek OA publishing support networks

Determine the niche your journal will fill and draft its aims and scope

Since you’re reading this blog post, you likely already have a high-level idea about the kind of OA journal you plan to launch. But have you identified the specific niche it will fill?

The first step to starting a successful OA journal is determining the differentiating factors that will set it apart from existing titles. In short, authors need to know why they should choose to publish with you.

Among some of the many possible questions to consider are:

  • Why is your organization launching this journal, and why is it uniquely positioned to do so?
  • Will you provide a publication platform for an underrepresented subject area?
  • Will you introduce one of the first OA journals in a discipline dominated by subscription titles?
  • Will you offer a better author experience than competing journals, like a faster peer review and publishing turnaround time or more personal editor attention?
  • Will you work to advance DEIA in your discipline?

For example, renowned mathematician Timothy Gowers explained how he identified a niche for his academic-led journal, Advances in Combinatorics, in the below publication launch statement:

“The rough level that Advances in Combinatorics is aiming at is that of a top specialist journal such as Combinatorica. The reason for setting it up is that there is a gap in the market for an ‘ethical’ combinatorics journal at that level — that is, one that is not published by one of the major commercial publishers, with all the well-known problems that result.”

Once you identify your journal niche, you can hone it and kickstart publication planning by drafting an “aims and scope” paragraph to include on the About page of your publication website. Your aims and scope should quickly and concisely convey the primary goals of the journal, the research topics it will cover, and its intended audience. Below this overview paragraph, you’ll want to outline particulars that warrant more detail, including:

  • Fields/subfields that your journal covers: note whether articles must fit within a subfield or can be of general interest
  • The nature of the research you seek: practice-oriented, theoretical, or either
  • Selection criteria: such as originality, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness
  • Types of content your journal accepts: original research articles, book reviews, etc.
  • The publishing model of the journal (e.g., diamond open access)

Now’s also the time to pick a title for your journal!

For more information on crafting a journal’s aims and scope and choosing an appropriate mix of content types to publish, as well as publication naming dos and don’ts, check out the Getting Started section of the Open Access Journals Toolkit from the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ).

Get to know the OA needs of your research community

Next, it’s essential to understand the needs of the research community you intend to serve to determine which OA funding models you can realistically pursue and if there are gaps in OA awareness among authors that you’ll need to address. Key questions to consider include:

  • Which OA journals currently serve your target authors, and how are they supporting or hindering research equity?
  • Is there a high level of interest in OA publishing among target authors for this journal?
  • What OA mandates and recommendations (i.e., from funders and government entities) are target authors most concerned about?
  • Which OA publishing models are target authors most and least familiar with?
  • Do target authors have access to reliable funding to cover OA publishing fees?
  • What are your target authors’ attitudes toward depositing articles into open archives?

To answer the above questions, you’ll need to conduct market research. Start by reviewing the latest reports on the state of OA publishing in your discipline. From there, you can seek on-the-ground insights from scholars in the field by conducting interviews, surveys, or social listening via virtual and in-person forums and social media platforms.

For example, to help guide the development of their OA publishing program the American Physiological Society (APS) ran an author survey and webinar on “Open Access: What Researchers Need to Know Now.”

In a past Scholastica blog interview about the APS survey and their learnings Publications Director of Open Access Transformation, Digital & Marketing Engagement Stacey Burke noted:

“Like most societies, we have sort of two sides of the organization, the publishing side, and the society side. I think the OA outreach we’re doing is really merging the two. As we navigate different OA mandates, we need our authors and our members to be part of the dialogue, and this webinar and the white paper we’re planning are one step in that direction.”

Break down OA models by category to determine a viable funding route

Once you have a clear picture of the OA needs, resources, and limitations of your research community, you can start tackling what tends to be the biggest question of all. How will your organization fund your OA journal initiatives?

Publishing isn’t free, and even nonprofits need to ensure their journals have sustainable revenue sources to survive and thrive.

In a 2021 CHORUS Forum recap, publishing consultant David Crotty stated the following helpful basis for defining sustainability:

“The new business model has to be planned around being sustainable, generating enough revenue to support the services you offer, and to provide some level of surplus to both allow your organization to thrive and to continue to maintain and develop more publishing services.”

There is no one-size-fits-all OA funding approach. But, there are resources to help you weigh your options, including a new framework for assessing the growing array of OA publishing models (and acronyms!) developed by Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Executive Director at COUNTER Metrics and Founder of Mellins-Cohen Consulting.

The framework breaks OA models into seven categories based on shared attributes:

  • Transactional: publishers charge research producers fees for each item published (e.g., APCs, submission fees, processing charges, split payments, offsetting)
  • Bundled: bundled models repurpose existing spending on both subscriptions and OA, often via transformative agreements (e.g., “Pure Publish” and “Publish-Plus”)
  • Cooperative: models that rely on cooperation between institutions (e.g., Subscribe to Open, Community Action, Read and Let Read).
  • Non-library funding: often called “Diamond OA,” these are models where the publishing organization, a partner institution/sponsor, or an external funder covers all journal costs, so there are no author or reader-facing fees (e.g., society support, endowment, grants)
  • Pseudo-models: new revenue streams or cost-cutting/cost-shifting systems publishers can adopt to support their OA publishing strategy (not OA models on their own)
  • Delayed OA: delayed access to the version of record, which may or may not be in perpetuity (e.g., threshold flip, customer backflip, Bronze)
  • Green OA: offering immediate access to something other than the version of record (e.g., preprinting, archiving)

Of course, the last two categories above would not apply to publishing fully OA journals (i.e., the article version of record is free to read immediately upon publication), a point worth noting for this blog post. However, both can be ways to increase access to research as you explore fully OA publishing options.

Factoring in your initial market research, you can use the above framework as a guide to identify the most viable funding categories for launching an OA journal in your discipline or flipping one or more existing titles to OA if you decide to go that route (e.g., via a bundled or cooperative model). That may mean honing in on a singular funding source (e.g., Subscribe to Open) or a mixed revenue stream (e.g., a combination of transactional and pseudo-model options).

You’ll, of course, then need to figure out the nitty-gritty details of whatever funding approach you choose. Recent industry reports and examples you can look to for guidance include:

In terms of funding options, journals affiliated with university libraries or departments may have the benefit of receiving institutional subsidization in the form of a line of funding or sponsored publishing tools and services. For example, many university libraries are launching publishing programs and providing resources to faculty interested in starting journals, including content hosting and peer review management support. Journal programs based out of universities may also be eligible for grants to support academy-led publishing efforts.

Scholarly societies and university press publishing programs will generally have to come up with independent journal funding models. In these cases, it may be possible to seek financial support from grants or charitable organizations, particularly to get new titles off the ground, but coming up with self-sufficient funding is essential to maintain journals over time. For example, when ASCO launched JCO Global Oncology with plans to fund the title via APCs with discounts and fee waivers for authors from low and middle-income countries, they used a combination of grants and donations to waive APCs during the first year of publication to attract submissions and build up a following. Similarly, UC Press covered APCs for Advances in Global Health the year that it launched.

When it comes to journal funding, it’s imperative to keep in mind the limitations that some models may pose, even if they seem attractive at the outset. For example, APCs have proven problematic for disciplines where authors lack designated funding, and they tend to create added administrative work for authors.

That’s not to say that the APC route can’t work, but rather that, if you’re considering APCs, you should do your due diligence to keep costs as low as possible and offer adequate discounts and fee waivers for those from low and middle-income economies. You can also ease the administrative burden of APCs for authors and their institutions using a service like CCC’s RightsLink solution to manage OA publishing charges.

Build an editorial board

As you figure out the details of your OA model, you can start compiling an editorial team. Bear in mind that founding editors must handle tasks touching all aspects of journal operations. So, it’s critical to ensure those you offer editorships have the time and desire to take on everything from submission and peer review process development to supporting early publication promotion.

The editors of a new journal send a signal about its research caliber, commitment to DEIA, and the types of content it will cover. So, think carefully about whom you want to be on your editorial board and how you can recruit seasoned scholars who will lend their reputations to the journal while helping to cultivate publication diversity in terms of people and content. For guidance on building diverse editorial boards, check out this COPE guide.

At the same time, don’t be afraid to bring accomplished early-career researchers into the mix. Working with scholars at various stages of their careers will imbue your journal with new perspectives helping to spur novel content and outreach ideas.

Develop editorial and publishing processes

Once you have an editorial team, you can move on to publication planning. When starting a new OA journal, you’ll naturally have to develop its peer review and publishing processes from the ground up. And even if you end up flipping one or more existing titles to OA, you’ll need to revisit some aspects of your previous publication plans. Journal flips can also be a great time to identify new ways to streamline operations and lower publishing costs, such as transitioning to an online-only publishing model, as the Microbiology Society did in 2021.

The DOAJ Open Access Journals Toolkit includes a helpful “Journal setup checklist and timeline” you can refer to. Among fundamental areas of publication planning all teams should consider, whether starting or flipping OA journals, are:

Core journal policies: You’ll need to map out ethical policies and submission guidelines for new journals (e.g., manuscript formatting requirements like citation style) and copyright policies for new or flipped titles. When it comes to copyright, bear in mind that even OA journals need to have licenses (saying content is fully “open” is not enough). Many recent funder initiatives, like Plan S, require that authors or their institutions retain the copyright of their work and that articles be published under a Creative Commons CC BY or equivalent license. Plan S funders will also consider CC BY-ND licenses in select circumstances.

For more information on journal policy development, refer to the “Policies” section of the DOAJ Open Access Journals Toolkit and the COPE policy guidelines.

Peer review processes: If you’re starting a journal, developing editorial policies and a peer review process outline will likely take up a large chunk of your launch time. At the highest level, you’ll need to outline the type of peer review the journal will use (e.g., single-anonymized, double-anonymized, or open peer review) and the steps you will take to vet incoming submissions. All journals should make their peer review policies available on their website.

For more detailed information on journal policy development, refer to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), DOAJ, Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). The DOAJ Open Access Journals Toolkit also includes guides on establishing article selection criteria and peer review quality assurance.

Even if you’re flipping a journal, it’s worth revisiting your peer review workflows to look for optimization opportunities to improve your time to publication and free up editorial team bandwidth. Doing so can help your team support other aspects of your publishing program, such as journal promotion or developing new content products that can provide additional income streams for your organization.

On a more technical note, whether starting or flipping a journal, you may also need to establish a plan for collecting and releasing annual peer-review stats. This is one of the requirements for journals to be Plan S compliant.

Publishing processes: Whether launching or flipping an OA journal, you’ll also need to consider your publishing processes. Journal launches will, of course, entail figuring out a hosting solution and creating a publication website. Additionally, you’ll need to decide your publication frequency. For example, you might choose to publish articles on a rolling basis and compile them into issues quarterly, bi-annually, or annually depending on the number of articles you anticipate publishing. You can always change this later!

If you’re flipping an existing journal to OA, you may have to adjust your current workflows to support that new model. As with peer review processes, you can also look for opportunities to streamline publishing operations and lower costs. Ways organizations might do this include looking for more efficient digital publishing tools and services and/or working to bridge gaps between peer review, production, and publishing.

Content archiving: Building off your journal publishing process, you’ll want to establish a plan for content archiving. It’s imperative to deposit content into a long-term digital preservation service, such as Portico or CLOCKSS, to ensure your articles will remain available to readers in perpetuity, even if you should cease publication one day. For more detailed information on the benefits of archiving and how to get started, check out this Scholastica guide.

Publishing data and reporting: Another aspect of publication planning your organization should focus on, whether you’re starting or flipping OA journals, is what data you’ll need to evaluate the performance of your OA efforts and how to gather it. To start, you’ll need to determine how you will collect financial insights to track the growth and sustainability of your OA journal or OA publishing program. As noted by Erich van Rijn, Director of Journals and OA at UC Press:

“In the old subscription ecosystem, it was easy to determine whether something was working or not because it all came down to whether it was generating subscriptions. But in an OA publishing ecosystem, all of the data points are changing, and we’ve got to change how we’re evaluating the success of different products.”

The financial data your organization requires will, of course, depend on the OA model(s) you employ. For organizations taking transformative routes to OA, such as TA agreements or Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) models, there will also be a need to provide journal program data to institutions and funders. This was discussed during the third 2021 CHORUS Forum.

For example, organizations flipping journals via TAs will need to report on the proportion of OA articles they are publishing over time, and organizations using a Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model will want to collect institutional usage statistics. To promote financial transparency, some funders, like the members of cOAlition S, are also beginning to encourage or require publishers to provide data breaking down the cost of their publishing services and any associated fees.

Regardless of the OA publishing model you choose, you should ideally also collect readership analytics to determine whether your audience is growing over time and how. This includes article page views, download counts, and referrers. You can even share article-level readership data with authors to help them demonstrate alternative impacts of their work.

Persistent Identifiers (PIDs): Now is also the time to register journal PIDs, starting with an International Standard Serial Number or ISSN. An ISSN is a unique 8-digit code used to identify print or electronic media. Your ISSN will make it easier for discovery services to find and index your journal, and it will also signal to readers that it is a serious publication.

As you get closer to publishing, you’ll also want to apply to register Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for your articles through an official agency like Crossref. Registering DOIs for articles with accompanying metadata will create persistent links to them and help you expand their reach. Many indexing services require journal articles to have DOIs, and some discovery services use DOI registration metadata to index content. You can learn how to get started with Crossref DOIs here.

Seek technical solutions to streamline publishing workflows

The success of any OA journal or OA publishing program will depend, in large part, on the tools and systems used to run it. As noted in the previous section, during OA journal launches, it’s imperative to choose publishing solutions that will be logistically sustainable. And journal flips can also be a prime opportunity to reevaluate your current publishing software and services mix.

Some key considerations when looking for or reevaluating journal tools and services include:

  • Technical barriers and available support: It’s best to avoid tools with high learning curves or that require advanced technical knowledge unless you have an IT team to maintain them. For most OA journal publishing programs, software that is easy to set up, requires minimal upkeep, and comes with technical support for editors (and ideally authors and reviewers) will be the best option.
  • Level of manual work required: Manual tasks can make scaling your journal difficult and increase room for error (especially when you wade into more technical territory, like depositing metadata into a DOI registration agency). As your publication grows, look for tools to automate peer-review tracking and affordable services you can use to outsource or automate labor-intensive aspects of journal publishing, such as DOI registration, index deposits, and XML creation.
  • Gaps between peer review and publishing: It’s important to consider how well journals are set up to move manuscripts from decision to publication. If your team can’t easily integrate the peer review, production, and publishing solutions you’re using, it may be creating extra work.
  • Real and hidden costs: Consider not only the upfront costs of the tools you’re using but also the “hidden” costs of your organization’s technical resources and time.

Be sure to outline your organization’s specific needs before exploring new or alternate peer review and publishing solutions. Check out The Modern Journal: Technology and Peer Review Management, a past Scholastica guide for tips for choosing peer review software.

Prioritize journal promotion and discoverability

At any stage in OA journal publishing — and especially in the early days — organizations must also work to expand the reach and reputation of their publications to attract more submissions and readers. To do this effectively requires a mix of journal promotion and discovery strategies.

Journal Promotion: Let’s start with promotion. With more competition than ever, there’s no question that promotion is essential to building and retaining a journal following. Your team should actively communicate new and timely content, calls for papers, and even calls for reviewers regularly. There are many possible promotion outlets to explore, including:

  • Becoming active on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Mastodon, and X (formerly Twitter)
  • Starting a publication blog or podcast
  • Setting up an RSS feed or email alerts for your latest content

We cover examples of how different publishers are approaching journal promotion in this blog post. As in the case of selecting publishing tools and services, keep in mind the real and hidden costs of different promotion channels and aim to select the most efficient mix for your team. Journals that collect publishing analytics can use that data to help inform their promotion decisions by tracking which of their chosen channels are resulting in readers and which aren’t.

If starting a new journal, as you work to drum up initial submissions, in addition to promoting your call for papers you may want to directly seek contributions from notable scholars in the field who can help raise awareness of the journal. For example, you can invite editorials, commentaries, and other short pieces, as recommended by Publishing Consultant Pippa Smart in this blog post. Read the full post for additional tips.

Journal Discovery: Moving to content discovery, all journal teams should prioritize article indexing in both mainstream and scholarly search engines and databases. That means developing a solid search engine optimization (SEO) and indexing strategy — both topics that require their own blog posts. You can learn more about journal SEO best practices here and indexing strategy and execution here. On the topic of indexing, all fully OA journals should put the DOAJ at the top of their list, as it’s the leading general OA indexing database and will consider journals relatively early in their publication life.

Different scholarly search engines and databases will require journals to meet varying publishing and technical criteria before being eligible for inclusion. So, ensuring you’re on track to fulfill those standards and making a graduated indexing plan is essential. At the highest level, once a journal meets the necessary inclusion criteria, effective journal search engine optimization and indexing require making content available in formats that machines can easily parse, including producing HTML and XML article-level metadata.

Journal SEO and indexing can get pretty technical, so you’ll likely want to seek tools and services to help. For example, Scholastica offers a digital-first production service that generates PDF, HTML, and full-text XML article files in a fraction of the time of traditional processes and an end-to-end OA journal hosting platform that includes integrations with discovery services.

Increasing journal awareness and discoverability will open the door to generating bibliometric and altmetric article impacts. Learn more about increasing the impact of OA journals (and why it’s not all about the impact factor) in this blog post.

Work your way up to publishing standards and recommendations

There are also many new and emerging OA journal standards, requirements, and recommendations for publishers to consider from organizations like NISO and funder initiatives like Plan S, as well as developing government mandates. These include:

  • Metadata: Producing machine-readable metadata files for all articles in the standard JATS XML format to support interoperability
  • Additional PIDs: supporting PIDs beyond the standard ISSN and DOIs, including funder IDs (e.g., the Crossref Funder Registry), ORCID iDs, and ROR IDs.
  • Openly accessible data on citations: incorporating open, machine-readable citations in line with the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) into article-level metadata.
  • Providing transparent pricing information: to be Plan S compliant, publishers must publicly state any OA journal publication fees they charge and submit annual pricing data to cOAlition S, as explained here.
  • Adopting emerging taxonomies: these include the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) and Peer Review Taxonomy from NISO.

OA journal teams should aim to work their way up to reaching these standards (think Agile!), all of which can improve the quality, reputation, transparency, and inclusivity of your publication. Harkening back to the previous section on technical publishing solutions, publishing tools and services can also do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Approach your first few years of OA publishing as a pilot

In the changing research landscape, trying to map out publishing plans and predict journal trajectories years in advance is becoming more challenging. Publishers can turn uncertainty into opportunity by approaching new OA journal plans as pilots, applying principles of the Agile project management methodology to iterate on journal development plans as they go with room to pivot in new directions as necessary or beneficial.

For example, Erich van Rijn, Executive Director of the University of California Press, explained how UC Press is incorporating Agile methods into its publication planning to mitigate risk while testing new journal models in this Scholastica blog interview.

For more examples of how scholarly society and university press publishers have been approaching OA publishing pilots, check out Scholastica’s 2021 SSP session recording, “Launching Agile OA Journal Pilots to Meet New Mandates,” and our Iterate to Innovate Your Publishing Processes report.

Seek OA publishing support networks

Finally, as you explore different OA publishing options, know that there are many groups and resources you can look to for help. To name a few there’s the:

For more detailed information on the various publication planning topics covered here, be sure to also check out the Scholastica resources page, which includes guides to managing peer review, digital publishing, and more. We also encourage you to check out our “How We Open Knowledge: Scholastica users share their stories” OA Week blog series.

Update Note: This blog post was originally published on the 20th of August 2018. It was republished on the 24th of June 2024 with substantial updates to reflect the latest OA publishing approaches and best practices.

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