Today Scholastica announced the release of a Product Roadmap detailing new features to help journals comply with Plan S and sustainably meet core technical publishing standards.
Since Plan S was announced in September of 2018, there has been a lot for the scholarly community to unpack. The initiative by a consortium of national and international research funders to make research fully and immediately open access (OA) by the first of January 2021, has raised many questions around how to publish OA journals in a financially sustainable way, both within different types of publishing organizations and different disciplines. Many publishers are working to determine which OA models will be viable for their journals and how to meet the technical Plan S implementation criteria.
At Scholastica, we believe that scholarly organizations of any size should be able to publish high-quality OA journals easily and affordably. We work with many societies and universities publishing OA journals, and we’re committed to being a partner platform for those small publishers in the transition to Plan S and sustainable OA publishing. To that end, today, we are excited to announce the release of a Product Roadmap detailing Scholastica features to help journals comply with Plan S and sustainably meet core publishing standards.
New Product Roadmap: Plan S and core OA publishing standards
We are committed to ensuring that all journals using Scholastica will be able to meet the guidelines for Plan S by the 2021 deadline. The new Product Roadmap details improvements to Scholastica’s OA publishing platform to help journals fulfill the Plan S technical requirements and recommendations, including:
- Core machine-readable XML metadata in the JATS standard for all articles
- Automated Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration through Crossref
- Automated metadata, including funding sources, deposited into major indexes and archives including DOAJ and Portico
From quality metadata to integrations with leading scholarly tools — we are building solutions to help publishers of any size take their journal initiatives further. These product updates are part of Scholastica’s ongoing efforts to lower publishing costs and technical barriers to support academic-led publishing.
The new Plan S Product Roadmap is meant to be a living resource. We will update it as we introduce additional improvements to Scholastica and as any changes to the Plan S implementation requirements and recommendations are released.
If you’re still getting caught up on Plan S, you’re not alone. We know many of our users are still learning about the initiative. The roadmap page also includes answers to Plan S FAQs we’ve heard and a resources section with links to useful blog post guides to help publishers stay caught up on available Plan S resources and reports and work through the implementation guidelines. The resource section includes a guide to applying to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), an overview of what to include in journal peer review policies, and more.
Support for our open access publishing users
We want journals using Scholastica’s OA publishing platform to know that we are here to help them navigate Plan S and core publishing standards. Scholastica’s customer support team is available to answer questions about Plan S requirements and other professional journal standards.
We’ve also launched a pilot customer service program to help interested Scholastica users comply with Plan S, at no additional cost. We will offer support to interested journals in areas such as:
- Preparing their DOAJ application
- Registering for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) through Crossref
- Updating their journal website to include core policies and funding information
If you’re interested in joining this pilot program, please contact us to learn more!
Towards a sustainable open access publishing future
For small publishing organizations, fulfilling new journal standards can be a major challenge. Learning what steps to take and then executing them is a time-consuming project. That’s why, at Scholastica, we’re working to help lower the time and financial costs of publishing high-quality OA journals. Our mission is to make it easy and affordable to publish at a professional level to support academic-led publishing initiatives and help make scholarship more accessible.
