Dear all,
The following message was inspired by messages that I got from HIFA members. Thank you for encouraging this conversation.
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I will share some of the experiences related to our journal evolution, the International Journal of Medical Students (IJMS, https://ijms.info/IJMS/index), some reflections about APC and the system of academic promotion in research, and our budget to keep the IJMS as a diamond open-access, meaning free for all (apologies in advance for the long message).
The journey of being an editor is not an easy one. I also think that our job is overlooked/underestimated because of the amount of work that we have to put into the creation and development of a Journal, not to mention to guarantee its sustainability, all of this when we are not in a big fancy profitable editorial house. Sadly, these industries are killing science just because of money. Predatory journals keep coming to life, strengthened by the system of promotion and funding of researchers that asks us to publish in visible high-impact or, in other cases, in any journal. On the other hand, independent and self-sustained journals are having difficulties staying alive or are overwhelmed by the amounts of submissions. Their rejection rates are higher (>80%) compared to paid-based open-access journals (50%). Finding a journal that accepts our papers and does not charge an APC but with the required quality to receive job promotions is sometimes challenging.
I have an anecdote to share. We applied to be indexed in a database owned by one of these publishers, and their response included that we were “not attractive monetarily.” Outrageous and unbelievable.
Everything started when a group of medical students found themselves without an international venue to publish their research with the quality and indexation they wanted. The lack of a venue to publish could be translated into many of our research areas, where there aren't non-profit international journals or existing ones are overwhelmed by the amounts of submissions and/or the rejections rates are overly high.
A barrier to a journal's growth is credibility. Finding a supporting organization to back the creation of a journal is not easy. Predatory journals, or money-based ones, bypass this by having their big Publishers' names on the header of the journals. We never got the support we were looking for from an organization. We are finally having serious conversations with an international organization about their support to the journal. We finally got their attention after 10 years of continuous publications. An alternative to this is to create your own organization. You will need a team of people to be Editors and supporters. There you have a group of people with similar interests, an organization.
To reveal the truth about publishing and APCs, we must ask ourselves what a journal's expenses are?
- The most basic expense is a website domain and a hosting/server to keep the information. Printing a journal is a thing of the past; environment protection, reach, and costs are just a few reasons not to print on paper.
A website was our only expense for over seven (7) years. We were using (still) Open Journal System (OJS, https://pkp.sfu.ca/software/ojs/), a free open-access web-based platform to manage journals. We paid out of pocket for the website, we designed our logos, corporate image, and template for the layout of the papers, and here and there, we paid for updates to the website or some diagramming help or proofreading. Nothing crazy, and using platforms such as freelancer.com, we found the right people to do those tasks for affordable prices.
One day, while searching for a journal to publish a paper on physical rehabilitation, I came across the International Journal of Telerehabilitation (https://telerehab.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/telerehab). I was confused as this journal has a Pitt.edu (University of Pittsburgh, Pitt) extension on its website, and I happened to be a student there. I contacted the Editor in Chief, Dr. Ellen R. Cohn, and she was kind enough to have lunch with me to talk about our journals and share her experience with me. She confirmed that Pitt has a publishing organization in the University Library that publishes several different journals: the University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS, https://www.library.pitt.edu/publications).
I was referred to the ULS and got a glimpse of what they offered: knowledge and experience publishing journals and the name of a serious organization to back up the IJMS. We all wanted the journal to be there but were afraid of losing our identity. That wasn’t the case, as our editorial independence is a cornerstone of what the ULS promotes. The ULS charges 1000 USD for hosting a journal. The journals no longer have to pay for website services (we kept our website just because we already had a long history with our web address), and if the Editor in Chief is enrolled at Pitt, we get a 50% discount on the annual fee.
We had to apply to the ULS to get accepted among their journals, going through a peer-review process of the journal itself. Yes, you read that correctly, the ULS peer-reviewed our journal (not the articles). The revision helped us tremendously to improve the quality of our work and fill gaps in information to make us look more professional (nobody is going to teach you how to create a journal and what you should have written, but they did). I said more professional because maybe due to a lack of information on our website (i.e., editorial office location), we were arbitrarily flagged by Bell’s list as a predatory journal (we are still on those lists, and it is impossible to get out of there as people reposting the list don’t listen). We continue to improve and inform people about the lack of clear procedures with the “list” creation and demonstrate by our work that we are not predatory (how a journal for students could be predatory?).
The ULS has mastered getting journals indexed, so they help with indexing in major and minor databases (avoiding the predatory ones). Their teams of professionals in areas related to publishing are impressive, and that experience is vital to keep journals evolving.
In addition, they are subscribed as an organization with a Digital Objects Identifiers (DOI) managing organization. Because of that, we don't have to pay for a DOI for each article we publish. DOIs increase articles' visibility and help create automated connections between citing articles. If we were to pay for this, we would have to pay for a yearly service (+/-250 USD 5 years ago) and a fee per article (+/-2.5 USD 5 years ago, if my memory works correctly).
The ULS also offered us the conversion of our articles from PDF to HTML and XML (PubMed formatting, i.e., https://ijms.info/IJMS/article/view/2011/2100) to increase visibility and be prepared when we get indexed in PubMed. They subcontract with a company that charges cents per page to convert articles. A 100 pages issue costs us around 100-120 USD.
After being accepted by the ULS the Journal boomed. We gained more credibility among our audience, and the number of submissions skyrocketed! We hired an editorial assistant to run plagiarism analysis, initial checks of articles, and assignment of articles to associate and student editors (we are a different journal as we also train early career editors, so we have a two-step peer-reviewers process, the first one with students and the second one with external peer-reviewers with publications in PubMed (https://ijms.info/IJMS/article/view/1092). The editorial assistant can be a student, working a couple of hours a week. Initially, we had student volunteers doing that, but their occupations delayed some processes, so we changed to somebody hired to do that. I would advise not to hire early in the establishment of the journal. Find the right moment to do so to save money. Most of the journal money goes to our editorial assistants.
Moving forward, we hired two editorial assistants; one filters, sorts, and assigns articles, and the other diagrams and puts together the issues.
The ULS reviews every issue before publication to keep the metadata perfect and avoid conflicting data sent to indexation services.
Regarding proofreading, we have an intern position for students that do this work. Finding volunteers is easy once you have a big organization (https://ijms.info/IJMS/writer). However, as Editor, you will be doing most of the job in the journal's early years, including diagramming, proofreading, and publishing. I still review each issue before its final publication to ensure that diagramming is correct.
We also pay a subscription to COPE, the Committee of Publication Ethics (https://publicationethics.org/members/international-journal-medical-stud...), to learn from them and share their online courses with our team of student editors. Among our goals, we aim to train the next generation of medical editors worldwide. Each year, we select, among hundreds of applications, the team of student editors to learn about journals, peer-reviewing, publishing systems, and more (https://ijms.info/IJMS/about/editorialTeam). To be fully named in the team of student editors, this team has to go over the COPE courses on publication ethics and the Web of Science Academy (former Publons Academy, https://clarivate.com/web-of-science-academy/) courses on peer-reviewing.
Based on the abovementioned items, our yearly budget is approximately 6000 USD. We covered most expenses, mainly the Editors in Chief, and still do if insufficient funds are collected.
Our monetary resources come from donations mostly. However, we came to the idea of "selling" two products:
1. Publication of abstract books of conferences (medical student conferences) in 3 different packages going from 300 to 1000 USD (all abstracts in one book or each abstract with its DOI). An example of our supplements: https://ijms.info/IJMS/issue/view/v09suppl01
2. An online conference of research where we charge authors 10 dollars per submission (https://ijms.info/IJMS/Conference/welcome). We decided to make it online and easy to access for everyone, so we opened a space for students to share their work. Only those peer-reviewed and with the highest scores are presented and published: https://www.youtube.com/live/0JIMP5Fyl7s?feature=share
For those who reached this sentence, thank you for your time and patience. I hope this was in any way helpful. I am cc'íng Lauren Collister, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication & Publishing at the ULS in case that you want your journal to be published by the ULS.
Let me know your thoughts, questions, or concerns. I am open to further conversations and, why not, to help you achieve the goal of having your diamond open-access journals so we have more free and accessible venues to publish people's work.
With warm regards,
Francisco
Francisco Javier Bonilla-Escobar, MD, MSc, PhD(c)
Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Medical Students
PhD Candidate, Department of Ophthalmology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Profesor Asistente, Servicio de Oftalmología, Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia
ORCID, PubMed, Web of Science, Scholar, LinkedIn
