2009 Conference Archive

PRESENTATION C11

E-PUBLISHING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE LIBRARY: A CASE STUDY

Jane Garner, Shirley Sullivan & Eve Young
University of Melbourne Library, Melbourne, VIC

Aims:

To examine the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software and to test it in creating an online journal for a Department of the University.

Methods:

IT support downloaded the OJS software and configured it to fit the requirements of a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

Results:

An online journal will be created and populated for the department. The team expects to then market OJS and create further publications within the University.

Conclusion:

Open access publishing, e-publishing and supporting e-scholarship is becoming an increasingly common role for university libraries. The University of Melbourne Library has long been a supporter of open access publishing and has an established eprints repository. It seemed a natural progression for us to explore moves towards more formal publishing media. One option that the University has investigated is the use of Open Journal Systems (OJS) software to create and publish peer-reviewed, open access online journals.

The software is used by many successful and well regarded journals such as First Monday and the International Journal of Communication. There are supporting materials easily available and a user's forum. OJS software is able to fulfil all requirements of a peer-reviewed scholarly journal and has the flexibility to support many permutations of structure. Linking between open access institutional repository software and OJS journals can improve the publishing options for our academic staff.

Our approach to investigating the software started with a technical staff member downloading and configuring OJS. Library staff then explored the software noting the many options in presenting the look and feel and structure of the publications created.

The paper will give an account of our examination of the software and our experiences in creating an online journal for use by one of our departments. The paper will outline the possible journal configurations, how we made policy decisions and how we used the software to create an online journal. We hope that our experiences will assist other Librarians to offer online publishing options via the use of OJS.