Crash Course in OA Journals Publishing with Open @ UTA Libraries!

Co-written with Hang Pham-Vu, Digital Publishing Specialist

Open publishing presents opportunities for authors, researchers, and creators from any background to put their work out into the world and make an impact. As Jessica McClean discussed in her recent blog post, funding for open projects serves as one means to get your work out there for the public to see. In this edition of the Open @ UTA Libraries series, we would like to bring attention to another open opportunity at no cost. As a department focused on collaboration and accessible research, UTA Libraries Open Partnerships and Services encourages and oversees the publication of open access journals through Mavs Open Press. What does this mean? Open access journals are scholarly publications available and free to read for everyone, from the UTA community right here in Arlington to researchers, students, and professionals across the globe. 

In the Open @ UTA Libraries posts, we’ve established that the Open Movement generates a world of possibilities for equitable access in terms of both producing and consuming content. But what drives the urge to publish not just one article but a full journal? In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “ ‘It Feels Like Things are Breaking Open’: High Publishing Charges Spur Neuroscientists to Start Own Journal,” Megan Zahneis (2023) writes about one team’s journey in turning away from traditional publishing practices and creating their own open access journal. Zahneis highlights this quote from a former editor at that same journal named Kristen M. Kennedy:  

“We’re having to pay to do the science, but then we’re having to pay a third party who didn’t have anything to do with the science to disseminate the information, and they’re for-profit... The taxpayers who’ve paid for the grant money to exist, if they want to read the outcome of that science, they then have to pay again, because all of our publications are put behind a paywall behind these major publishing houses.” 

This “for-profit” outlook paired with high costs nearly prohibited this team of over 40 editors from publishing and sharing valuable research with the world. However, in their decision to leave the existing journal together and rebrand as a new open access journal, this team is now free to publish their findings at more affordable costs and able to provide more equitable access to their research.  

UTA Libraries Mavs Open Press has published 10 open access journals covering a multifaceted array of topics. We have research-oriented professional journals like Fast Capitalism,  PALARA: the Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association, and the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning in Teacher Education that feature  many peer-reviewed essays annually, student research journals like Global Insight: A Journal of Critical Human Science and Culture that gives UTA student researchers a publication venue for their work, and creative journals like Cuaderna Vía that showcase poetry and short stories written in Spanish.  

Regarding the scope and longevity of our journal publishing, UTA Libraries has worked with Dr. Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez, editor of Cuaderna Vía for nearly three years. This article titled “The Penrose Stairway: Jorge Luis Borges at the Center of Christopher Nolan's Inception” by Brian Durán-Fuentes from Volume 2 has garnered over 300 views in the past year. We’ve worked with Fast Capitalism on volumes spanning almost four years, and their most-viewed article titled “The Manosphere as an Online Protection Racket: How the Red Pill Monetizes Male Need for Security in Modern Society” by Bujalka, Rich, and Bender has over 2,000 views since last July. We’re also proud to support two student-led journals—one called STET: an Interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Journal and one called Stimulus: A Medical Humanities Journal, a magazine-style journal designed by a student team with the Mavericks for Medical Humanities of UTA student organization. They have a new issue coming soon. Our full collection of journals as well as all archived issues can be found on the UTA Published Open Access Journals page on the UTA Libraries’ website.  

UTA Libraries Digital Publishing Team offers a variety of services to assist members of the UTA community in creating their own OA journals or transitioning an existing paywalled journal to open access. These services include: 

• Obtaining an ISSN or ISBN and permanent identifiers (DOIs) 

• Assisting with all aspects of technical setup and production, including in some cases layout using Adobe InDesign (a professional publishing software), and copyediting (when funding is available) 

• Ensuring all publications are as accessible as possible for all readers 

• Providing a publishing platform that simplifies and automates the peer-review process and includes options for blind or double-blind review 

• Hosting open access digital content on a secure server with frequent backups and built-in redundancies 

• Consulting on copyright, Creative Commons, and intellectual property questions 

• Maximizing discoverability of your publication through search-engine optimization and robust metadata 

• Preserving and archiving publication content in perpetuity 

Working in conjunction with UTA Libraries, journal creators have creative freedom to determine the scope of their journal as well as the frequency of publication and all design elements. At Open Partnerships and Services, our goal is to help you make your vision come to life. This level of editorial flexibility is not typically found in the publishing world. Publishing with UTA Libraries provides a unique opportunity for the UTA community. 

All members of the UTA community have the opportunity to create fully open access academic, professional-level, and/or creative journals at no cost. This removes the financial barrier which authors often face in publishing their work open access. Article processing charges from commercial publishers can often run up to thousands of dollars each, greatly obstructing the equitable access to open research dissemination—not to mention that the reader of that work then has to pay to read as well. 

Our most recent open access journal publication was a special issue of PALARA titled “Afro-Diasporic Protest: Black Women & LGBTQIA+ Resistance in Cali/Colombia and Santo Domingo/Dominican Republic.” This dual-language (Spanish & English) special issue, guest edited by Sarah Soanirina Ohmer, Melissa Gómez Hernández, and Aurora Vergara Figueroa, is a wonderful example of the impact and awareness that open research can offer, not only to UTA but the wider academic community and the public at large. 

If you are interested in open access journals, the Digital Publishing team at Open Partnerships and Services is here to help! Contact us directly at librariesops@uta.edu. Whether you are interested in starting a brand-new journal from the ground up or transitioning an already-existing journal into open access, the Digital Publishing team can provide support and guidance! 

Bibliography  

Zahneis, Megan. ‘It Feels Like Things Are Breaking Open’: High Publishing Charges Spur Neuroscientists to Start Own Journal. The Chronicle, April 21, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/it-feels-like-things-are-breaking-open-high-access-charges-spur-neuroscientists-to-start-their-own-journal.  

The cover image for this blog post is "Mix of Open Books with Banner" by Hang Pham-Vu, licensed CC BY 4.0. It is a derivative of "Open Books on White Surface" by Sincerely Media, licensed on Unsplash, and was modified to add the "Open @ UTA Libraries" banner.