Repository interface for overlaid journal archives
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This project worked with the Astrophysics community to investigate aspects of overlay journals. For the purposes of the project, an overlay journal was defined as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories.
Executive Summary
The primary technical deliverable from the project (RIOJA) was a toolkit for the creation and maintenance of overlay journals. The toolkit supports the exchange of data between a repository and a piece of journal software. It supports functions such as author validation, metadata extraction from the source repository, and submission tracking. The toolkit is platform neutral and could, in theory, be employed by any journal using content from any number of repositories, in any discipline. The project also implemented a demonstrator overlay journal, applying the RIOJA toolkit to the arXiv subject repository, and a demonstrator implementation of the RIOJA tool for GNU EPrints.
Aside from creating the demonstrator and its underlying tools, the project aimed to test the acceptibility and feasibility of the overlay model. First, a large-scale survey of the Astrophysics community was undertaken. The survey collected data about research and publishing practices within this community, and probed its reaction to the principle of overlay publishing. Second, the views of editors and publishers in this discipline were sought through interviews. These views were added to findings from the literature and summarised in a more general report on issues around the sustainability of an overlay journal.
The survey confirmed the everyday importance of the arXiv repository in the working lives of astrophysics researchers. Moreover, the project found that researchers are, in general (and with very little variation between those with different first languages, career lengths and other demographics), sympathetic to the overlay model. Their main concerns about the model were that the long-term accessibility of the research material should be guaranteed - surprising, perhaps, in such a fast-moving, repository-dependent discipline - and that the process of quality certification should be robust. Researchers' career concerns also informed their reaction to the overlay model, and it was clear that to attract submissions, an arXiv-overlay journal would need to be able to demonstrate academic acceptibility and a substantial readership. All of these concerns are generic issues, which would be faced by any new journal whether or not overlaid on repository-housed content.
In the interviews, publishers and editors showed a certain willingness in principle to experiment with new models, but not to lead the academic community in this respect. The impression received was that change in this sector, particularly within the established journals managed by commercial and professional society-based publishers, is generally driven by the consumer. (Of course, these interviews were largely informal, and cannot be said to be in any way representative of the publishing community.) Meanwhile, ascertaining the detailed costs of the various parts of a publishing operation proved to be beyond the reach of the project team - unsurprisingly, given the element of commercial competition in the field, and the very substantial range of journal business models in use - although the interviews and the literature did support the project's initial contention that, in general, the costs of parts of the publishing process, notably submission and storage (and, in cases where responsibility lies with the repository, archiving and digital preservation), could be significantly reduced by the incorporation of repository overlay workflows.
The toolkit, demonstrator and supporting reports, together with copies of all the papers and presentations prepared by the project team, are available through the project website