Open Book: a librarian’s view
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 without a specific journal. Also, authors and reviewers will get the freedom to publish new forms of content, along with traditional publications. Open peer review and a system to credit reviewers and editors will be managed by the community, thus rendering a transparent, community- driven environment, where reviewers own and control the review process. Orvium will integrate and coexist with the already existing publishing channels of TU Delft Open Publishing. The single-article publishing component ensures the dissemination of individual research outputs to different audiences – researchers, teachers, students, citizen scientists – and it can include niche subjects and interactive publications. With this initiative, we intend to encourage our scholar community to embrace complete openness when exchanging ideas, to prove being open from submission to publication contributes to a better, more transparent society.
Reaching out to society Another development that TU Delft Open Publishing hopes to realise is enhanced publication, sometimes called interactive or
dynamic publication. An enhanced publication has many definitions and interpretations. The components of an enhanced publication will therefore vary in time, transforming it into a dynamic object or ‘dynamic publication’. Essentially, traditional publications are enriched with additional information. The enhancement relies on the linking possibilities of the web, and are generally constituted by a set of interconnected parts corresponding to research assets of several kinds (such as datasets, videos, images, stylesheets, services, workflows, databases, presentations) and to textual descriptions of the research (papers, chapters, sections, tables). They are often tailored to serve specific scientific domains. A university press is meant to bring
scholarly communication close to the researcher, their institution and back to academia. But this may be half of the story. In the effort to support publications for different audiences – from researchers
“Our drive is also to help bring academic publishing
level metrics in the post-publishing stage. We are pleased to be able to offer research intelligence services; in this way we can help researchers map OA trends in their scientific discipline, analyse opportunities to publish in OA journals they may have not thought of, to help them define their publication and dissemination strategy. Some services are fully rolled out, others are in development. Having experts in the New Media Center
as part of the Library, we are now adding ‘creating visuals for your scholarly output’ as a new service for authors. In these ways, TU Delft Library and TU Delft Open Publishing transform into THE place for all publishing- related questions.
back in the hands of academia”
to students, and from teachers to society – science needs to be communicated to society. For widespread dissemination, it will be vital to lower the barrier of comprehending scientific content (and researchers do not always have the skills or interest to market their research). That is why TU Delft Open Publishing will consider translating complex scientific articles into layman’s language. This activity is too ambitious for a university publisher that is just starting, but we are anticipating needs and solutions. We’ll thus consider collaborating with endeavors like Wikimedia and make use of the potential of the digital techniques, such as real-time communication (such as Twitter), DTM and AI to create texts in accessible language. An equally important feature of the publishing initiative TU Delft Open are the publishing services. In this way, TU Delft Library supports its scholars throughout the publishing cycle. To name a few: support and consultancy in matters such as copyright, plagiarism check, ‘predatory journals check’, choosing a journal, to offering workshops (such as ‘create a textbook in a day’) and tools, such as Academic Writing Assistant, from the pre-publishing stage; or article
Voice of the community A community-driven initiative usually responds to demands from outside. But it is difficult to solicit the voice of the community when researchers need to focus on research and teaching activities, rather than on international or technical developments in scholarly communication solutions. Do we have evidence that Delft researchers want this new academic press we are building? We have some. We know they do not what to be bothered with financial budgeting for dissemination, nor with copyright matters. They just want to write, and publish with maximum visibility and impact. We have evidence on growing adoption of OA publishing through the university’s Open Access Fund, as it shows a steady increase in spending on OA publications (the number of OA peer reviewed articles increased from 1,304 articles in 2016 to 2,539 articles last year). Dutch monitoring of OA publications at a national level, and reporting to the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science via the VSNU, Association of Universities in the Netherlands, provides further evidence of community need. The percentage of OA publications in the years 2016 to 2019 has grown from 42 per cent to 61 per cent. The need of researchers for support in publishing is not new, but the urgency for publishing and support has become much higher, and underlined with open science values and endeavours. Nevertheless, TU Delft Open Publishing is our unique initiative and take on scholarly publishing, in line with the values and technology of our times, one that will hopefully inspire our academics and give them trust in the route we walk. As a young academic publisher, we are
keen to exchange with others to learn about the challenges we face, to share our experience in open publishing by embracing new ways and new definitions in scholarly publishing, thus making it future-proof, and of value for the authors and citizens searching for science globally. l
Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020/2021 15
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