Tech focus
Towards a community- driven, open access university publisher
Alenka Prinčič and Frédérique Belliard describe how they influenced the change from traditional academic publisher to innovative and community-driven university press at TU Delft
When speaking to researchers in Delft about open publishing we’d often get questions ‘Open publishing? Is it open access, or open science?’ Open publishing has various definitions and interpretations in the academic world. We tell our academics in Delft that open publishing stretches beyond open access: ‘Open publishing entails not only free access to and reuse of scientific publications and research data, but also includes the infrastructures and the processes of creating content that are transparent to the authors and readers. Open publishing infrastructures use open source software wherever possible, thus reducing the intrinsic costs of the publishing process.’ The TU Delft Library believe that open publishing is the right thing to do. The library is committed to supporting transparency, access and diversity in science and engineering disciplines at TU Delft and beyond. This is our motivation for raising awareness on open publishing principles in scholarly communications among all academics, from early career researchers to senior scientists, and embracing researchers and teachers alike. Our drive is also to help
bring academic publishing back in the hands of academia, as opposed to commercial publishing. The TU library does this from the financial objective,
which is extremely important; but more importantly we carry forth open publishing with somewhat idealistic, sometimes naïve aspirations, intrinsic to the academic environment, with opportunity and room for experimenting.
Empower authors – visibility and impact Setting up – in fact we should say rebirthing – the university publishing services has been on the agenda at TU Delft for several years. The publishing activity under the name Delft University Press was founded in 1972 and recognised as a scientific publisher of books, theses and scientific journals for many years. The publishing house was acquired by IOS Press in 2005. Several years later a new publishing initiative took place at the Faculty of Architecture. The open access publishing platform TU Delft Open was established in 2016. Journals, dissertations and monographs were published, and a limited number of open access journals were started with the Open Journal System (OJS) model. The new form of TU Delft Open Publishing was launched in 2019 – a ‘diamond’ open access publisher of Delft University of Technology that publishes high-standard, peer- reviewed content authored or edited by academics of TU Delft. TU Delft Open
16 Research Information October/November 2020
Publishing initially focuses on three main streams: books, journals and textbooks. The platform operates at a minimal investment, and thus has no charges for authors. The current portfolio of TU Delft Open includes TU Delft Open Journals, Open Text Books, BK Journals and BK Books covering open access journals and books in the field of architecture and the built environment; BK Books also facilitates the digital distribution and open access for scholarly journals and books of selected publishers and organisations. As at many institutions
worldwide, the new university publisher starts fully embedded in the structure of the university, including financial and technical support. The press is now in its early age, so it needs to become well- rooted in the solid base of the university. But in the rapidly- developing world of scholarly publishing, researchers’ needs are changing, and universities are continuously adapting to those changes by developing new skills and targeted support. To feed this thirst for
innovation, the new platform seeks to expand and include other types of scholarly content and adopt transparent processes of creating and curating content. The innovation has been seeded already in 2018 with Open Text Books, complied and produced by TU Delft teachers to be used in bachelor and master courses, that are published and made freely accessible. The platform plans to
expand to include turning PhD dissertations to monographs, and publishing research data papers of the 4TU. Researchdata Repository, conference proceedings,
Sponsored by
registered reports as opposed to pre-prints. These should be digitally innovative publications, with interactive content like research datasets, open source (development) software, videos, and links to databases, and so on that are nowadays offered on dedicated platforms (like Gitlab, Gitbooks, Pressbooks).
No more journals – transparency Priority now goes to publishing individual articles adopting transparent processes, rather than producing new journals. Although, journals are still the vehicle for building communities of scientific disciplines. One of the developments of TU Delft Open Publishing is what is now called ‘single-article publishing’ – a platform and software for TU Delft authors to publish their articles without having to assign these to a specific journal. The model of ‘Welcome Open Research’ and other mega journals approaches have certainly been an inspiration. In the Open Science
framework, the transparency surrounding the research process and the publication of the research outcomes requires innovative solutions for a smooth but rigorous publishing experience for researchers. Together with Orvium (orvium. io), a start-up from Cern that strives to accelerate scientific publishing by improving quality and efficiency, the TU Delft Open publishing is embarking on a project that combines incentivised peer-review and single-article publishing in one publishing environment. How will it work? A single article publishing channel will publish rapidly diverse research outputs - topics and formats - using open peer review
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