[Music]
welcome back everyone um we are now
moving on to jesse lynn's talk about
moving to self-managed open access
publishing uh jesse is a recovering
library and archives academic currently
working at the federal office of the
arts
until 2021 she was voluntary uh
voluntary vice president and managing
editor of the australian society of
archivists and actively involved in the
move from a proprietary publishing model
to open access which is fantastic in my
view
uh jessie has a phd in that considers
how quick um zines queer archival and
collecting practices and has taught
collection management and an archival
product
sorry archival practice in a couple of
australian universities
she has a lapsed zine
maker and stencil press printer which is
really interesting anyway on to you
jesse
thank you sarah and hello to everyone
i'm speaking to out there it's hard to
know who's there but i think there might
be some um
members of the audience who can probably
add more to the story that i'm telling
so i'm going to take today's session as
a bit of a storytelling session and
uh
knowledge sharing and hopefully bring
some other voices in as people ask
questions or as we talk about
experiences
i'm here today at my home in isolation
in canberra on the lands of the unseated
lands of the nana wall and nambri people
i pay my respects to elders past and
present and
acknowledge the important work that
indigenous people do
have always done and continue to do in
preserving and thinking about how we
know things
um
sovereignty was never seen it always was
always his aboriginal land
today uh is an interesting session
i am not uh involved i'm not i'm not i
don't have a day job in publishing um or
and as a
lapsed academic i have been mostly on
the other side of publishing
writing articles and publishing them
my role in the asa as managing editor
though it led me to develop lots of new
skills and knowledge in
the publishing field and the academic
publishing field in particular what i
love about my work with the asa in
particular is that the journal that the
asa
produces is
what we call a society journal and so
it's it's
led and driven not predominantly by the
academic agenda that a lot of journals
are published and
driven by but it's also really member
driven and so
that idea of collective organization
comes before here
and the asa the australian society of
archivists is always putting members
first and at the forefront and that's
what has driven a lot of the decisions
we've been making along the long journey
of this journal
so today
i will give you a bit of a potted
history of how we've come to be where we
are
um at this point
as sarah said i am the
recent vice president and managing
editor i'm no longer on the australian
society of archivist council i was there
for three years and i loved my time
there's a lot to learn
encourage anyone who's interested to get
involved in these governance roles in
your professional associations i think
it's really important that we diversify
the voices that we have in leadership
roles in our professional associations
as well
um
as someone with a very young child it
was really interesting for me to
bring that voice to
some of the discussions and how we think
about care responsibilities for instance
that the professional association offers
um
the
so what else did i want to say and so
my
interest has always been in open access
publishing and i joined council to
continue to
pursue that interest mainly because the
university i worked at at the time
didn't have a subscription to a couple
of key archives journals and that was
really problematic for me
as an educator because i wanted my
students to be reading the research it
was at the cutting edge of
our practice and our profession and the
theory and it was really difficult to
then be able to use the material that
was in the journals because the library
didn't have a budget to subscribe to
them
and when they did they were
eventually there was
archives and manuscripts was bundled up
in within a bigger database and i'm not
a librarian i don't
academic librarian i don't really
know the intricacies of that
the
way those financial structures are set
up so we could get some articles from
archives and manuscripts then what
became the issue was that
many of the articles that i wanted to
use that were historical articles
weren't available anywhere except in
hard copy and so it required a lot of
interlibrary loans and the like
so that's how i came to be part of this
project before me though have been
and still going on uh huge numbers of
active members who have played a role in
the journal over its life either
in editor roles in
author roles in managing the content and
the relationships and the like and a lot
of voluntary roles in
recent projects
so for those of you who are going asa
what are you talking about is it the
authors is it the anesthesiologists who
are these asas um we are the archivists
um the society of archivists is the
national body peak body that advocates
for and supports
both archives and archivists and by
also record keeping
um
where uh and james you might correct me
here we have around a thousand members
um also
we
have been going since 1975 so there's a
long history and we have a long
um
an important role in advocating for the
profession and for the the workers in
the profession
um alongside our friends in the glam
sector so we have really strong
relationships with alia for instance and
other
glam professional associations so
one of the things that society does
amongst many is produce a journal and
this journal is archives and manuscripts
the
journal was started in 1955 and i'll go
back i'll come to that and it was
published in print
only by the society as a society journal
up until 2012 and so it's important to
just look at some of the
uh the materiality of the journal i
think at this point to say anyone who
got the journal got it in print form
um up until that point
from
although catherine may correct me there
but that's i'm just going to put that
out there um from
2012
the journal was published by taylor and
francis who were one of the big players
in the academic publishing world
and then the journal was available print
and online
and then from this year we the society
will be publishing the journal again
self publishing it and we'll be
publishing it open access and
importantly we will also be publishing
it print as well as online
and
that's important to think about when we
go back to that point that i was making
about us being member driven first the
print copy has always been
a material object that gives people from
a lot of the research and surveys we've
done with members it's it's the object
that people hold on to
and gives them a sense of
belonging to the society
um
interestingly in some of the surveys
that we did in the last few years we
have people
telling us that they don't actually read
it but they still want to get it which
is always interesting
without fail we will get a few
full-run copies of the old print version
offered to the society for our archives
every year
um as i
visit people on my journeys i often get
shown
people come and show me their run of
beautiful colors of print journals on
their shelves and so the print copy was
something that was really important to
us and has
given us a bit of a challenge now as we
work forward
but it's important
so
the what has been interesting for me is
to look at the
how we got to where we are now
for what has been a very
long running journal
nearly 75 years and
for a journal that has been driven
purely by volunteer labor in my mind
so originally
the asa didn't start till 1975
as i said but the archive section of the
library association of australia started
the journal in 1955
and so and that laa then became alias so
for those first 20 years alia in theory
owned the journal
our australian library and information
association from 1975 onwards the asa
has continued to publish the journal
from 2002
um and that inserts a more recent 20
past
the journal moved from being a journal
publishing
articles of note for the profession and
of research and publishing research to
where the articles are peer-reviewed so
it became a fully-fledged academic
journal
by
i think from memory the mid
i can't remember exactly when this whole
world happened in academic world but by
the late 2000s the
archives and manuscripts was an a-rank
journal
in the old way of referring to how
journals were ranked which put it up
there with some of the best in the
country
and
made it a very desirable journal to
publish into as well
around 2010 2011 the society started to
go through some troubles we call them
the troubles
we transferred publication to taylor and
francis um was one of the side effects
of those troubles
in 2017 it was put to members that maybe
we should consider not going on with
taylor and francis um or maybe consider
staying with him for another three years
it was decided to stay with another
three years
and that was all by member vote and
that important to know but by 2019 um no
in 2019 sorry
those previous print issues that had
been up until 20 the 2000 early 2000s
had been fully digitized
all the metadata created and then we
released them all online as an online
archive
of 1955 to 2011 um fully searchable and
fully open access so that was a a huge
project that was 10 or 15 years in the
making
to get that done a lot of
people had it played a big role in that
i just happened to be the person
steering it at the end
and for that we used an open source
platform called ojs and supported by pkp
at simon fraser university and then we
decided not to renew the contract with
taylor and francis at a council level so
we took
uh we surveyed members and council made
the decision
and since that decision we've spent the
last um
14 or 15 months getting ready to
move to that full open access model
uh that's a very brief timeline
i just wanted to and this is i've summed
this up i think
the important things to note here are
these troubles so
the role of the society as itself as the
publisher of the journal and how
financial sustainability is really
important in order to have
a sustainable journal
and so those troubles really
led into a lot of the decisions that
were made to move to taylor and francis
there was a lot of tension at around the
time at that decision
about that decision so the move
to taylor and francis was controversial
within the member body but it was seen
as the at the time the way
forward to ensure that the journal could
keep being published um
there were
a lot of
activism there was there was activism
around that time and the board the
editorial board of the journal did
change quite significantly due to that
decision
um it's been very interesting
uh seeing how that's been managed over
the past 10 years and i think it's
important to remember
always about the the decisions you make
being political decisions
taylor and francis had a particularly
unique
green open access license for only four
lis journals and i think that's been
uh quite productive for the society so
that
license means that all
so instead of everything being locked
down forever
on the taylor and francis
platform
the
any every volume is released open access
after three years so it's a three-year
embargo for that license
it's
it's been useful for us in how to manage
some of the member expectations around
access to information
one of the roles of being a member one
of the benefits sorry of being a member
of the society however is around access
to the journal so we had to really weigh
up
some of our
thoughts around
restricting access and and what taylor
and francis offered in that
and how we made more political activist
decisions around access to information
which is what the open access model is
about
so
we did a lot of surveying of members and
we have always been surveying members
and asking them about this
um we did a lot of research over the
last over that whole 10-year period so
we moved to taylor and francis and from
that point committed to
making a good decision into the future
about staying
importantly to note too is um
when we think about open access and
publishing and is actually that
for this these 10 years and the years
previous that there is actually
copyright ownership of all the content
and so
it's not like
we can just say oh it's open so we have
to think about copyright quite a lot at
this point and we are having some
interesting discussions with lawyers
around this as well
so
from what we can see and what we know is
that asa has a content copyright and
taylor and francis owned the
the visual copyright of the sort of
layout of the those 10 years worth of
journals and that's
been good for us to get to the bottom of
but it's been interesting as well
so the online archive i've got the link
there i'm happy to share it it was a
huge job to seek permission so talking
about copyright again
every author of every article or their
delegate or their
air had to grant copyright transfer and
agree to
open
creative commons or i think it's a
creative commons license on
their material
so that was a huge project of managing
all that data
the permissions data and we have that
all safely stored away
once that was all done then we worked to
we there was a lot of evaluation done of
service providers for to host for
journal
pkp
was decided as the best option
so there's a cost involved the society
carries that cost to
host
the journal on the pkp server
so it's a public knowledge project at
simon fraser university
and
um the
we launched that and there's still a lot
of tweaks to be done but the best bit
has been working with open source
software and that's what ojs on open
journal system is
is that there's some flexibility
to tailor it when we need to
interestingly there we procured the
services of a
journal
publishing service i'm not sure what
they actually call themselves um to do
the bulk of the
the transfer work and the upload work
with us and to do the desktop publishing
and design of some of the parts of the
website
and i think that was a good recognition
from the society of the fact that none
of us are experts in
in all of these different fields and so
it's more cost efficient and sustainable
for us to actually pay the experts
rather than
um
those of us on council at the time
trying to or those volunteer members
trying to get the expertise we're really
good at archives we're not so good at
managing websites necessarily
so
the last 15 months has been
a big project trying to get this
happening our contract with taylor and
francis had a 12 month notice period and
so
the first thing we had to really do was
make that decision we gave the notice
and um so our contract finished with
taylor francis on 31st of december 2021
and so they have uh we have terminated
any relationship with them and they're
no longer
giving the access that we have to the
journal in that way
so
um
from there once we've made that decision
that was quite a big decision to make
and it i feel like um at the time the
council that made that decision
one of the
motivating factors for us there was
around the statement we were making
about who can access information and how
they access it
and what was important to council and
still continues to be i believe
is
the
information and about practice and the
findings of research are important for
all to be able to access regardless of
where they are and what limits they have
on that information
we have a large member base in the
volunteer sector or in the small archive
sector that might not necessarily have
as much a higher as a budget to access
that information for instance
um we also there is also a huge
the global audience for our research
that gets published is quite important
as well
during 2021 we did a lot of research it
was very interesting trying to find a
place
to publish the journal so we weren't
able the council is not staffed
incredibly well i don't know james you
may have some other thoughts on that
but we don't have someone whose job it
is to manage a journal and so we needed
to find someone to host the journal for
us
um and to do a lot of the and who had
the expertise in managing journals we
approached a couple of local university
presses
who publish open access because the
decision had been made to go open
and
as to be expected we
weren't able to work with them because
despite us even having a budget to spend
on it there's just not enough resources
in universities at the moment
and so the council decided to continue
our relationship with the
publishing
services support company based out of
europe who work with pkp
to provide that front-end service and
also help manage the back end of the
publishing process so we have budgeted
um there's a yearly budget line in for
the council for the society to manage
so to cover the cost of managing the
journal
we made a decision to print the journal
and some of the decisions around that
printing are
still to be finalized so there's a lot
of research still to be done there
we're looking at print-on-demand models
and we're trying to incorporate some of
the politics of
labor and
distribution
through those decisions but at the end
of it we will need to make sure we still
get a print copy to those people who are
entitled to it mainly members and
subscribers we've been learning a lot
about publishing so a lot of the work
that tnf did was very untransparent and
so that's been interesting and hard to
know what we don't know until they
suddenly tell us that here's some
information for you that we don't need
we don't do any more
and most importantly we've been
communicating with members very clearly
about the decision making and where
we're going forwards
so
it's been a very bumpy road i would say
um
going if we go all the way back to the
decision to move to taylor and francis
and now the decision to move away from
taylor and francis
but it's been excellent the last two or
three years of my involvement has been
really interesting in it uh some of the
findings we have or some of my own
personal reflections are that it's
really important to be able to feel
confident to spend money
um volunteer labor is really excellent
but it's important that we recognize
people's skills and knowledge and reward
them for it with the um with money
it's
often impor one of the other really
important things has been in networks
that we've lent on and are very grateful
for around the open access publishing
community and they are in those
university libraries and presses
as well as with colleagues
at
sister type journals for instance
archivaria in canada
and the relationship between the
editorial board and the
journal is also very important they were
very supportive of the decision
going forwards
um
so networks are very important and
communication
and then
the other thing
i would like to reflect on there is that
if you get the chance to
make these type of decisions don't be
afraid to bring your politics and and
where you stand in it to the fore so
because you'll realize that lots of
people might also be thinking the same
way and so that voice is really
important to be to have out there
i think um sarah is that enough time
should i leave some time i'm not sure if
there's any questions there
uh there is actually quite a few
questions okay so
i'm going to stop sharing if that's or
maybe i can put this up for a little
while but i'm happy
thank you so much that was fantastic um
first question would you do it again
knowing what you know now
yes totally i think the um
the what's motivating me now is to know
that people more people are going to be
able to access the information and
actually we think and we're seeing it
we're going to get more research being
published as well more people's
choosing the journal as a venue for
their research so yes definitely
um how aligned do you think the members
are in the idea of open access is there
a better feeling of the members that uh
then there are troubles despite all the
changes
uh can you say that one i'm like yeah
can you say that one again is that how
online do you think the members are in
the idea of open access i guess that's
the best way
um
i
think it's either a measure of active
or apathetic and so it's the the apathy
is it's not a bad thing to be apathetic
and not have an opinion
but those who do have opinion we had
very little active resistance to the
idea of moving to open access
so it was either people didn't really
need to not like didn't know or didn't
want to know or were very supportive
uh how much was the move to real open
access with pkp driven by the general
membership and how much was it driven by
the council
um it
that's a hard
question to quantify the answer to i'm
not really a quant person and i can't
give you stats but
um there were a lot of
there were a number i would say of vocal
members
um and always were since we made the
decision to move to taylor and francis
we being not me on the council but the
society
um there's always been a vocal group
about that
of members
um and
yes sorry no no keep going
i was just gonna say there have been
uh
and and there is always a vocal minority
but um the
underlying message we got through our
surveys as well was that it was either
um yes supported or unless it was there
were some concerns i think in a survey
about the cost of the society
that's all
um and this one's probably more of a
comment but um
i assume or hope that there's a paper or
two in the archive about the bumpy road
that you were telling us about
yes
it will come now i don't have to be an
academic i'd love to write a paper about
being about doing this work so
yeah definitely some work coming
wonderful to hear um
did the move to pkp for the
2011 and earlier journals influence your
decision to go pkp again this time
yes so that our preference initially was
to go local and so to go the local press
and once we realized we couldn't do that
because it wasn't a sustainable model um
we
went and we did evaluate a couple of
different online journal systems but we
went with pkp because we did have that
pre-existing relationship
and
it gives us a smooth uh
kind of image for the journal
okay and one last question
hypothetically
if there is
uh some australian library association
out there that wanted to do this with
their publication do you think that
there would be different or other
barriers and how would you suggest that
they go about changing their journal
i think the um
the
part of the decision-making that was the
easiest was the confidence the financial
stability that the society has at the
moment
so we're not in uh unstable position
and so that stability made us
gave us the confidence so i think for
any society but
any association that might be
considering it got looking at your
financial stability in the first place
because the thing that was also quite
eye-opening
to me was that we were making money from
taylor and francis there was a bit of an
income stream coming in and so what
we've had to do is sacrifice that income
stream and look to diversify it in other
ways
which i think is definitely there's so
we've done a lot of planning around that
too
um but i think it's been very well
received by our glam community the
decision from what we can see we haven't
had any resistance
and so i would encourage other
glam type journals to consider it as
well
i would i would definitely encourage
that as well well thank you so much
jesse for joining us today and it was
amazing hearing about
the process that you've been through
next up at 5 pm we have daniel sobi
telling us about musicbrainz.org and
wikidata.org
hopefully you can join us at 5 00. thank
you again jesse
thank you thanks for the invitation bye