Seeking Sustainability in the Widening World of Undergraduate Journals
Hall, Robyn
Betz, Sonya
The rise of open access, locally-hosted undergraduate journals over the past few years has been significant, providing students with valuable opportunities to disseminate knowledge, and gain experience in academic publishing and peer review. These journals often tend to publish erratically, however, due in part to student-run editorial boards that experience frequent turnover given the nature of undergraduate commitments and time constraints. Drawing on recent initiatives at two Alberta universities, this session will highlight ways that library services in partnership with other campus partners can provide technical support, editorial guidance, and the infrastructure necessary to form communities of practice among and within student-led editorial boards to help create and maintain high-quality, sustainable open access student journals. Participants will also be asked to consider ways that the PKP community might come together to enhance support for such journals in line with publishing best practices and content discoverability. Directly after the presentation is a panel discussion with following speakers of the Ligtning Talks (Round 2): Alperin, Juan Pablo; Moore, Allison; Gillis, Roger; Coughlan, Rosarie; Silva, Israel José da; Ludbrook, Ann; Jay, Suzanne; Hall, Robyn; Betz, Sonya
 Okay, hello everyone. I'm Sonia Betz from the University of Alberta. And Robin Hall from McEwen University in Edmonton. We're going to do a super speedy intro to some student journal issues we've been mulling over recently. And I'm hoping that we can start a bit of a conversation with you guys about some ideas we have for better supporting student journals. So I'm so glad Suzanne that your talk came right before ours. Robin's developed this fantastic caterpillar analogy for our talk and I think it's pretty apt if you can imagine students as emerging academics doing research worthy of sharing while gaining experience in academic publishing. Alright, so we have at the University of Alberta several student journals, both undergraduate and graduate level student journals. However, I think when we talk about success stories around student journals, we're almost always in the background balancing that by the many challenges and obstacles around sustainable student publications. For example, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but of the 10 student journals we list on our website, only six are actually actively publishing or actively trying to publish. Four have ceased publication entirely due to reasons that I think we're all familiar with and that Suzanne just articulated a little bit in her talk. So what can we do to help support students more fully? Board the slide. I loved the comments about an advisory committee. I think that's a fantastic idea. And a few ideas at the U of A that I'm pretty excited about. We've developed a partnership with our undergraduate research initiative and they're a group that provides great opportunities for undergrads to do research on campus. They're working on a new student journal called Spectrum that we'll be hosting, but we've also been working with them on educational events for students. So we're planning a year-long seminar series that will feature sessions throughout the year on things like peer review, author rights, licensing and copyright, recruiting reviewers and content for a journal, how to use OJS, all those great things. And another small step that we're taking is to develop a bit of a community of practice for our student journal editors. So earlier this year we held an introductory round table inviting all of those student editors to meet each other. We facilitated a conversation amongst them and asked them about what challenges they'd faced, how they'd solved their problems and how we could help. So it was a good opportunity for them to meet each other and we got some really useful directions to pursue for the future. Thank you. So at McEwen University we only have two undergraduate journals, but they've both been going for about five years. So I consider these successes so far, but we're still learning a lot as we go. It takes a village, a large village to keep undergraduate journals going. I've learned definitely helps to have faculty members as the journal managers and the faculty champion to keep them going, but also support from the library and the research office and IT, all of that stuff. Here's the important stuff that we really wanted to get to you though and talk to you about. Academic publishing is robust. There's lots of options out there for established academics. Could we be doing more to help our little caterpillars in nurture undergraduate publishing? We think yes. There's lots of initiatives out there. There's definitely at least hundreds of undergraduate journals in existence, but we... Whoops. Yes, we do think that we should be doing more. One thing that we've definitely noticed is that it's really, really hard to find undergraduate journals. There's no one-stop shop to locate these things, and then it's really hard to figure out if those journals accept works from students outside of their institution or if they're tied to a class or not. So what we'd like to propose and what we're wondering from everyone here and beyond is whether it might be viable to create a directory of open access student journals similar to the directory of open access journals, where people can go and actually find undergraduate works, but also find some documentation on best practices for starting these journals and keeping them going. So we're just hoping to start a conversation. We have given you our Twitter handles and our email addresses, and now you know our faces as well. So we hope that today and beyond that you'll come and speak to us if you would like to partner with us, if you think it's a good idea, if you think it's a bad idea. Yeah, that's kind of the seeds of our idea here is to start supporting these more in that capacity. Thank you. Okay, at this point I'd like to invite all of the speakers on stage and invite questions from the audience about some innovative and interesting uses of OJSNOMP. There are a couple of mics out there. Don't be shy. Okay. Just curious about mediating new and young scholars as they start to produce scholarship for undergraduate journals. How did they break OJSNOMP? These are kids who have been doing things online and maybe differently. They aren't having any prior lucid Microsoft Word like we have to with many of our more established scholars. How are they breaking it? What are they doing wrong and that we should be listening to? So I don't think they're breaking anything. I think that they're just using it for purposes, which they intend that maybe we don't intend them to use it for, but it has a lot to do with the metadata stuff that Mike talked about in his lightning talk yesterday. I think forcing things into fields that you wouldn't expect them to put things into. They also really want more flexibility around the content. I found that they really want to create pages that describe what the journal is all about or they want to do things like we have the Alberta Law Review and every year they do a special issue on energy law and they really want a way to highlight those special issues in exciting new ways and they can't really do that with OJSNOMP. So I don't know. Does anybody else have other things they've seen? I can speak from my experience with the classes that we're working with. Students are really interested including a significant number of images in their work and so that just creates kind of a logistical challenge for us getting all those up and running. They want to do audio. We have audio and video so students are really interested in doing audio video posts and it's sort of tricky right now at OJSNOMP to provide nice seamless streamed media content for a student that may not have the skills to develop nice XML files. So I'd like to see those developed a bit. Just one addition to that. In terms of processes for OJSNOMP, the key thing that students want is ease. Easy submission, just seamless, kind of one-step processes. So I really wanted to highlight that because it's really important. So I don't think any of the students that I worked with broke the OJSNOMP. I think the OJSNOMP may have broken them. In some ways, I mean it's a great tool but it is difficult sometimes to maneuver. It's not intuitive for them but I did attend the session discussing the 3.0 and I'm really excited about those new features and those new interfaces. I think that will really ease the use of OJSNOMP and participation in the scholarly journal process. So just some comments first of all but I will get to a question and again this is from the self-serving perspective of PKP. It's really exhilarating, exciting to just hear the whole range of rather strange, unusual, even possibly bizarre ways you're repurposing OJSNOMP to do all sorts of things. Some of it's really affirming because when we talk about student journals, for example, we see lots of evidence out there that there's incredible number of student journals happening. In fact, Kevin and Jana Avan, another iSchool student from UBC that's here, we collected a bunch of information on over like 400 plus scholarly journals. OJSNOMP's journals hosted at Canadian sites. Fully a third of them were undergraduate or graduate students. So it's kind of, you know, something's happening there and I think your presentations gave us a lot of good examples of that. And I think, Sonia, where you were asking, always there a list out there of at least in the Canadian context, we can give you a little starter of probably about 130 student run journals if you want to go and mine them. It was equally interesting to hear from Israel and how you're using OJSN in another way and this is one that's been kicking around because about every few months we see another one popping up where somebody has ended up using that sort of workflow around peer review almost essentially as an academic adjudication system. And not that we're looking for more work on, you know, on the PKP side but it's fascinating to see those. Diddleford in terms of, you know, digital humanities projects and looking at, you know, at Queens there whether OJSN3 can be morphed into that. It's exhilarating. It's also, from our perspective, a little bit overwhelming because potentially that represents a whole lot of kind of stretching and pulling and twisting, you know, OJSN3 in a whole bunch of different directions which requires resources and I'm getting to my question now but, you know, essentially OJSN3 is really purpose built in many ways to be, you know, an academic journal peer review workflow and it's interesting to see how you're using it in different ways but the question is did you go and look at other sort of alternatives for, you know, say academic adjudication or a digital humanities sort of support or scholarly, you know, product support for them rather than using just OJSN3 and is it, you know, what, how did you end up on OJSN3 for some of these rather different uses so I'd be interested just if any of you can shed comments on that. Okay, so for the Queens perspective for this sort of digital humanities push we used OJSN3 because first of all it was a ready platform that we already had. Secondly, the journal team, they, yeah, they're one of our founding journals and they want to push the envelope a little bit with their journal and I guess respecting the sense or the original goal for OJSN3 being a journal publishing peer review infrastructure I guess that one of the key messages that I think I took from meeting with this journal team was and it fits with the questions that have come up so far today around deconstructing the traditional journal. I think it's already happening. I think it's a need that faculty want that we need to unpack so even if our systems are have originally been designed in a way that wants to be sort of, you know, your traditional PDF file that is a journal with an abstract discussion and I think things are moving more quickly and I really think we need to take the challenge and adapt. PKP, it's at a nice point where it's institutional led, it's not a commercial entity. I think that's something that we really should capitalize on in responding to these new needs that are already there so I guess, yeah. Just to clarify what I'm doing here, I'm just a volunteer to Werx, it's the State University of Hickory-Dusso but in my employee job we use OJS to our journals too and this is the older history and the beginning we need to start, we had a journal from 1987 and we have to move from emails to something that helps us the workflow so it's the same thing that works and it moves from email to something that's not expensive because at Werx in a specific case, we do not have a TI staff to take care of OJS. The only person who does that is me and even the backup, I need to talk to someone, may I do the backup, I have to go to the building and my lunchtime and do everything so OJS was the alternative choice because we do not need to expend money or something. All other solutions we would demand or training with the money or something else so this solution was not touch a single line of code, I do not have touch code, develop new code. One thing just the authors of research ask to change author to coordinator that will be changed someday. Well, it's another problem I have to face to code outside here in Canada, I can't touch the code on the OJS in the Werx so the solution was taken to not expensive and easy to understand and common knowledge of all researchers just I'm an author and coordinator. That's it. Thank you all. I have a long list of to-dos and to-explorers. Great. With regard to student use or use of OJS as a pedagogical tool, I differentiate a bit between student journals where it is a formal journal process versus course use and I'm wondering what is your experience working with those journals about the student who is not successful? What about the sort of refusal rate and also the students who decide maybe they are not so proud of their undergraduate work backward, how are you doing with repudiation and take down requests? It's something we take very seriously. I think I didn't have time to talk about this but we do encourage instructors to pitch this to 400 level students who are ready, they are writing a capstone paper, it's an appropriate use of their final papers. I wouldn't encourage someone in a 100 level course to necessarily be putting student work online. That doesn't mean you can't but it's one of those things where we want to make sure they are proud of their work, that they get the chance to do a peer review, they get the chance to go through the editing process and revising and we want to be responsive to students who say, you know what, this just isn't for me. Obviously that's negotiated with the instructor deciding whether or not students must publish their work online but there's no real reason why they couldn't use OGS to go through the scholarly communications workflow, experience what it's like to do the peer review and then just not post the final paper. We've also worked with an instructor that only posted excerpts of the students work because she just felt that that was a stronger representation of their writing ability. So we're trying to negotiate that and be respectful of what the students want. Yeah. So on the internet there's one of my undergraduate student essays. I'm so embarrassed about it but I don't know how to get someone to take it down. Don't search for it. What we've noticed for, we've hosted undergraduate journals for a very long time and maybe Leah can confirm this but I don't think we've ever had a take down request from a student for an article that they've written. So I do, I think the problem is out there and exists but I think that the, you know, the cases are so infrequent that we could probably deal with it on a case by case basis but definitely I think that's a concern. We are working on a project right now with a high school to put capstone papers for AP students so that's great. 12 students working on a final big research project and I do, I've been thinking about this a lot too. So how do we manage those, you know, students who aren't even 18 yet when they're publishing that content and what are their rights around owning it and taking it down when they want it taken down? I think that's a falls in with best practices though and it just occurred to me. We have nothing about take down on our websites for our student journals and we probably should have a little statement there. If you want this taken down here's what you can do sort of thing but we've never had that request either but conceivably I could see that happening so we should take that into account. Well so Sonia and Robin kind of invited this chat here with this idea of there's at the end so maybe I'll kind of get that conversation started certainly we can continue it later over lunch or whatever. So you floated this idea of a directory of undergraduate open access journals or open access undergraduate journals or whatever. Student journals, right sorry. So you know my first thought with that is that the directory of open access journals I think kind of serves two different purposes right now so when you go to the website it looks like it's meant to be a portal to discover scholarship which it sort of can be but my sense is that not many people use it that way right. They come to these journals through other discovery paths which is a broader trend in like library resources as a whole for example. So what it actually does is mostly serve as a white list of vetted journals and a sort of talking point for open access advocates to say there are however many 9000 you know vetted journals so see there's a lot of open access out there and so it actually kind of serves that purpose and I think for a directory of student journals the the need for a white list or for numbers are less clear but if you really just want to share best practices I mean maybe what we just need is a kind of Google Docs file of best practices that we start sharing around and all contribute our ideas and try to sort of evolve and build up something a shared resource in that way so those are my initial thoughts on that. Thank you for the feedback there is it's just it's really hard to find these journals and more and more I'm getting students and faculty coming to me saying you know the student or I produce this really great work and I want to publish it where can I publish it it's so hard to find journals for them I don't know they exist they definitely do and so having that one stop shop and having search facets that release are specific to students would be really helpful to you in such a directory because there are a few journal student journals in the DOAJ but again it's really hard to search through those so just to add to that I think one of the problems that we do have with student journals is sustainability and so if we were able to create you know really strong subject specific student journals where you know film studies student who wants to publish their work would know that there's a good one to go to rather than deciding to create their own it lasts for a couple years at their university until someone can sustain it so I think it's a possible way to kind of respond to those those issues. You're talking about journals that are subject specific but will publish student work from anywhere and I assume we were talking about journals that publish more or less any topic but only from their discipline from their institution so everything I said was from that perspective when you have journals like this it's a different picture and now I see where you might well need a directory. I just wanted to point out that we do have two DOAJ ambassadors at least in the crowd I think both Ina and Yvonne so maybe you can just raise your hand so that if you can yeah and then you can if you want to follow up on how DOAJ is actually used they're probably two good people to talk to. Not going for a question. Oh, fake out. Okay so I think we'll we'll wrap up here I did want to take a moment to again thank all of our presenters for sharing their work with us this morning.
 Okay, hello everyone. I'm Sonia Betz from the University of Alberta.  And Robin Hall from McEwen University in Edmonton.  We're going to do a super speedy intro to some student journal issues we've been mulling over recently.  And I'm hoping that we can start a bit of a conversation with you guys about some ideas we have for better supporting student journals.  So I'm so glad Suzanne that your talk came right before ours.  Robin's developed this fantastic caterpillar analogy for our talk and I think it's pretty apt if you can imagine students  as emerging academics doing research worthy of sharing while gaining experience in academic publishing.  Alright, so we have at the University of Alberta several student journals, both undergraduate and graduate level student journals.  However, I think when we talk about success stories around student journals, we're almost always in the background  balancing that by the many challenges and obstacles around sustainable student publications.  For example, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but of the 10 student journals we list on our website,  only six are actually actively publishing or actively trying to publish.  Four have ceased publication entirely due to reasons that I think we're all familiar with  and that Suzanne just articulated a little bit in her talk.  So what can we do to help support students more fully?  Board the slide.  I loved the comments about an advisory committee. I think that's a fantastic idea.  And a few ideas at the U of A that I'm pretty excited about.  We've developed a partnership with our undergraduate research initiative and they're a group that provides great opportunities for  undergrads to do research on campus.  They're working on a new student journal called Spectrum that we'll be hosting,  but we've also been working with them on educational events for students.  So we're planning a year-long seminar series that will feature sessions throughout the year on things like peer review,  author rights, licensing and copyright, recruiting reviewers and content for a journal,  how to use OJS, all those great things.  And another small step that we're taking is to develop a bit of a community of practice for our student journal editors.  So earlier this year we held an introductory round table inviting all of those student editors to meet each other.  We facilitated a conversation amongst them and asked them about what challenges they'd faced,  how they'd solved their problems and how we could help.  So it was a good opportunity for them to meet each other and we got some really useful directions to pursue for the future.  Thank you.  So at McEwen University we only have two undergraduate journals, but they've both been going for about five years.  So I consider these successes so far, but we're still learning a lot as we go.  It takes a village, a large village to keep undergraduate journals going.  I've learned definitely helps to have faculty members as the journal managers and the faculty champion to keep them going,  but also support from the library and the research office and IT, all of that stuff.  Here's the important stuff that we really wanted to get to you though and talk to you about.  Academic publishing is robust. There's lots of options out there for established academics.  Could we be doing more to help our little caterpillars in nurture undergraduate publishing?  We think yes. There's lots of initiatives out there.  There's definitely at least hundreds of undergraduate journals in existence, but we...  Whoops. Yes, we do think that we should be doing more.  One thing that we've definitely noticed is that it's really, really hard to find undergraduate journals.  There's no one-stop shop to locate these things, and then it's really hard to figure out if those journals accept works  from students outside of their institution or if they're tied to a class or not.  So what we'd like to propose and what we're wondering from everyone here and beyond is whether it might be viable  to create a directory of open access student journals similar to the directory of open access journals,  where people can go and actually find undergraduate works,  but also find some documentation on best practices for starting these journals and keeping them going.  So we're just hoping to start a conversation.  We have given you our Twitter handles and our email addresses, and now you know our faces as well.  So we hope that today and beyond that you'll come and speak to us if you would like to partner with us,  if you think it's a good idea, if you think it's a bad idea.  Yeah, that's kind of the seeds of our idea here is to start supporting these more in that capacity.  Thank you.  Okay, at this point I'd like to invite all of the speakers on stage and  invite questions from the audience about some innovative and interesting uses of OJSNOMP.  There are a couple of mics out there. Don't be shy.  Okay.  Just curious about mediating new and young scholars as they start to produce scholarship for  undergraduate journals. How did they break OJSNOMP? These are kids who have been doing things  online and maybe differently. They aren't having any prior lucid Microsoft Word like we have to  with many of our more established scholars. How are they breaking it? What are they doing wrong  and that we should be listening to?  So I don't think they're breaking anything. I think that they're just using it for purposes,  which they intend that maybe we don't intend them to use it for, but it has a lot to do with the  metadata stuff that Mike talked about in his lightning talk yesterday. I think forcing things  into fields that you wouldn't expect them to put things into. They also really want more  flexibility around the content. I found that they really want to create pages that describe  what the journal is all about or they want to do things like we have the Alberta Law Review and  every year they do a special issue on energy law and they really want a way to highlight those  special issues in exciting new ways and they can't really do that with OJSNOMP. So I don't know. Does  anybody else have other things they've seen? I can speak from my experience with the classes  that we're working with. Students are really interested including a significant number of  images in their work and so that just creates kind of a logistical challenge for us getting all  those up and running. They want to do audio. We have audio and video so students are really  interested in doing audio video posts and it's sort of tricky right now at OJSNOMP to provide  nice seamless streamed media content for a student that may not have the skills to develop nice  XML files. So I'd like to see those developed a bit. Just one addition to that. In terms of  processes for OJSNOMP, the key thing that students want is ease. Easy submission, just seamless,  kind of one-step processes. So I really wanted to highlight that because it's really important.  So I don't think any of the students that I worked with broke the OJSNOMP. I think the OJSNOMP  may have broken them. In some ways, I mean it's a great tool but it is difficult sometimes to  maneuver. It's not intuitive for them but I did attend the session discussing the 3.0 and I'm  really excited about those new features and those new interfaces. I think that will really ease  the use of OJSNOMP and participation in the scholarly journal process.  So just some comments first of all but I will get to a question and again this is from the  self-serving perspective of PKP. It's really exhilarating, exciting to just hear the whole range  of rather strange, unusual, even possibly bizarre ways you're repurposing OJSNOMP to do all sorts  of things. Some of it's really affirming because when we talk about student journals, for example,  we see lots of evidence out there that there's incredible number of student journals happening.  In fact, Kevin and Jana Avan, another iSchool student from UBC that's here, we collected a bunch  of information on over like 400 plus scholarly journals. OJSNOMP's journals hosted at Canadian  sites. Fully a third of them were undergraduate or graduate students. So it's kind of, you know,  something's happening there and I think your presentations gave us a lot of good examples  of that. And I think, Sonia, where you were asking, always there a list out there of at least in the  Canadian context, we can give you a little starter of probably about 130 student run journals if you  want to go and mine them. It was equally interesting to hear from Israel and how you're using OJSN  in another way and this is one that's been kicking around because about every few months we see another  one popping up where somebody has ended up using that sort of workflow around peer review almost  essentially as an academic adjudication system. And not that we're looking for more work on, you know,  on the PKP side but it's fascinating to see those. Diddleford in terms of, you know,  digital humanities projects and looking at, you know, at Queens there whether OJSN3 can be  morphed into that. It's exhilarating. It's also, from our perspective, a little bit overwhelming  because potentially that represents a whole lot of kind of stretching and pulling and twisting,  you know, OJSN3 in a whole bunch of different directions which requires resources and I'm  getting to my question now but, you know, essentially OJSN3 is really purpose built in many ways to be,  you know, an academic journal peer review workflow and it's interesting to see how you're using it  in different ways but the question is did you go and look at other sort of alternatives for, you  know, say academic adjudication or a digital humanities sort of support or scholarly, you know,  product support for them rather than using just OJSN3 and is it, you know, what, how did you end  up on OJSN3 for some of these rather different uses so I'd be interested just if any of you can  shed comments on that. Okay, so for the Queens perspective for this sort of digital humanities  push we used OJSN3 because first of all it was a ready platform that we already had.  Secondly, the journal team, they, yeah, they're one of our founding journals and they want to push  the envelope a little bit with their journal and I guess respecting the sense or the original  goal for OJSN3 being a journal publishing peer review infrastructure I guess that one of the key  messages that I think I took from meeting with this journal team was and it fits with the questions  that have come up so far today around deconstructing the traditional journal. I think it's already  happening. I think it's a need that faculty want that we need to unpack so even if our systems are  have originally been designed in a way that wants to be sort of, you know, your traditional PDF file  that is a journal with an abstract discussion and I think things are moving more quickly and I really  think we need to take the challenge and adapt. PKP, it's at a nice point where it's institutional led,  it's not a commercial entity. I think that's something that we really should capitalize on in  responding to these new needs that are already there so I guess, yeah.  Just to clarify what I'm doing here, I'm just a volunteer to Werx, it's the State University of  Hickory-Dusso but in my employee job we use OJS to our journals too and this is the older history  and the beginning we need to start, we had a journal from 1987 and we have to move from emails  to something that helps us the workflow so it's the same thing that works and it moves from email  to something that's not expensive because at Werx in a specific case, we do not have a TI staff  to take care of OJS. The only person who does that is me and even the backup, I need to talk to  someone, may I do the backup, I have to go to the building and my lunchtime and do everything so  OJS was the alternative choice because we do not need to expend money or something. All other  solutions we would demand or training with the money or something else so this solution was not  touch a single line of code, I do not have touch code, develop new code. One thing just the authors  of research ask to change author to coordinator that will be changed someday. Well, it's another  problem I have to face to code outside here in Canada, I can't touch the code on the OJS  in the Werx so the solution was taken to not expensive and easy to understand and common  knowledge of all researchers just I'm an author and coordinator. That's it.  Thank you all. I have a long list of to-dos and to-explorers.  Great. With regard to student use or use of OJS as a pedagogical tool,  I differentiate a bit between student journals where it is a formal journal process versus  course use and I'm wondering what is your experience working with those journals about  the student who is not successful? What about the sort of refusal rate and also the students who  decide maybe they are not so proud of their undergraduate work backward, how are you doing  with repudiation and take down requests? It's something we take very seriously. I  think I didn't have time to talk about this but we do encourage instructors to pitch this to  400 level students who are ready, they are writing a capstone paper, it's an appropriate use of  their final papers. I wouldn't encourage someone in a 100 level course to necessarily be putting  student work online. That doesn't mean you can't but it's one of those things where we want to  make sure they are proud of their work, that they get the chance to do a peer review, they get the  chance to go through the editing process and revising and we want to be responsive to students  who say, you know what, this just isn't for me. Obviously that's negotiated with the instructor  deciding whether or not students must publish their work online but there's no real reason  why they couldn't use OGS to go through the scholarly communications workflow, experience  what it's like to do the peer review and then just not post the final paper. We've also worked  with an instructor that only posted excerpts of the students work because she just felt that  that was a stronger representation of their writing ability. So we're trying to negotiate that and be  respectful of what the students want. Yeah. So on the internet there's one of my undergraduate  student essays. I'm so embarrassed about it but I don't know how to get someone to take it down.  Don't search for it. What we've noticed for, we've hosted undergraduate journals for a very  long time and maybe Leah can confirm this but I don't think we've ever had a take down request  from a student for an article that they've written. So I do, I think the problem is out there and  exists but I think that the, you know, the cases are so infrequent that we could probably deal with  it on a case by case basis but definitely I think that's a concern. We are working on a project  right now with a high school to put capstone papers for AP students so that's great. 12 students  working on a final big research project and I do, I've been thinking about this a lot too. So how  do we manage those, you know, students who aren't even 18 yet when they're publishing that content  and what are their rights around owning it and taking it down when they want it taken down?  I think that's a falls in with best practices though and it just occurred to me. We have nothing  about take down on our websites for our student journals and we probably should have a little  statement there. If you want this taken down here's what you can do sort of thing but we've never had  that request either but conceivably I could see that happening so we should take that into account.  Well so Sonia and Robin kind of invited this chat here with this idea of there's at the end so  maybe I'll kind of get that conversation started certainly we can continue it later over lunch  or whatever. So you floated this idea of a directory of undergraduate open access journals or open  access undergraduate journals or whatever. Student journals, right sorry. So you know my first  thought with that is that the directory of open access journals I think kind of serves two different  purposes right now so when you go to the website it looks like it's meant to be a portal to discover  scholarship which it sort of can be but my sense is that not many people use it that way right.  They come to these journals through other discovery paths which is a broader trend in like  library resources as a whole for example. So what it actually does is mostly serve as a  white list of vetted journals and a sort of talking point for open access advocates to say  there are however many 9000 you know vetted journals so see there's a lot of open access out there  and so it actually kind of serves that purpose and I think for a directory of student journals  the the need for a white list or for numbers are less clear but if you really just want to  share best practices I mean maybe what we just need is a kind of Google Docs file of best practices  that we start sharing around and all contribute our ideas and try to sort of evolve and build  up something a shared resource in that way so those are my initial thoughts on that.  Thank you for the feedback there is it's just it's really hard to find these journals and more  and more I'm getting students and faculty coming to me saying you know the student  or I produce this really great work and I want to publish it where can I publish it it's so hard  to find journals for them I don't know they exist they definitely do and so having that one stop  shop and having search facets that release are specific to students would be really helpful to  you in such a directory because there are a few journal student journals in the DOAJ but  again it's really hard to search through those so  just to add to that I think one of the problems that we do have with student journals is  sustainability and so if we were able to create you know really strong subject specific student  journals where you know film studies student who wants to publish their work would know that  there's a good one to go to rather than deciding to create their own it lasts for a couple  years at their university until someone can sustain it so I think it's a possible way to  kind of respond to those those issues.  You're talking about journals that are subject specific but will publish student work from  anywhere and I assume we were talking about journals that publish more or less any topic  but only from their discipline from their institution so everything I said was from  that perspective when you have journals like this it's a different picture and now I see where you  might well need a directory. I just wanted to point out that we do have two DOAJ ambassadors  at least in the crowd I think both Ina and Yvonne so maybe you can just raise your hand so that if  you can yeah and then you can if you want to follow up on how DOAJ is actually used they're  probably two good people to talk to. Not going for a question. Oh, fake out.  Okay so I think we'll we'll wrap up here I did want to take a moment to again thank all of our  presenters for sharing their work with us this morning.
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Okay, hello everyone. I'm Sonia Betz from the University of Alberta. And Robin Hall from McEwen University in Edmonton. We're going to do a super speedy intro to some student journal issues we've been mulling over recently. And I'm hoping that we can start a bit of a conversation with you guys about some ideas we have for better supporting student journals. So I'm so glad Suzanne that your talk came right before ours. Robin's developed this fantastic caterpillar analogy for our talk and I think it's pretty apt if you can imagine students as emerging academics doing research worthy of sharing while gaining experience in academic publishing. Alright, so we have at the University of Alberta several student journals, both undergraduate and graduate level student journals. However, I think when we talk about success stories around student journals, we're almost always in the background balancing that by the many challenges and obstacles around sustainable student publications. For example, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but of the 10 student journals we list on our website, only six are actually actively publishing or actively trying to publish. Four have ceased publication entirely due to reasons that I think we're all familiar with and that Suzanne just articulated a little bit in her talk. So what can we do to help support students more fully? Board the slide. I loved the comments about an advisory committee. I think that's a fantastic idea. And a few ideas at the U of A that I'm pretty excited about. We've developed a partnership with our undergraduate research initiative and they're a group that provides great opportunities for undergrads to do research on campus. They're working on a new student journal called Spectrum that we'll be hosting, but we've also been working with them on educational events for students. So we're planning a year-long seminar series that will feature sessions throughout the year on things like peer review, author rights, licensing and copyright, recruiting reviewers and content for a journal, how to use OJS, all those great things. And another small step that we're taking is to develop a bit of a community of practice for our student journal editors. So earlier this year we held an introductory round table inviting all of those student editors to meet each other. We facilitated a conversation amongst them and asked them about what challenges they'd faced, how they'd solved their problems and how we could help. So it was a good opportunity for them to meet each other and we got some really useful directions to pursue for the future. Thank you. So at McEwen University we only have two undergraduate journals, but they've both been going for about five years. So I consider these successes so far, but we're still learning a lot as we go. It takes a village, a large village to keep undergraduate journals going. I've learned definitely helps to have faculty members as the journal managers and the faculty champion to keep them going, but also support from the library and the research office and IT, all of that stuff. Here's the important stuff that we really wanted to get to you though and talk to you about. Academic publishing is robust. There's lots of options out there for established academics. Could we be doing more to help our little caterpillars in nurture undergraduate publishing? We think yes. There's lots of initiatives out there. There's definitely at least hundreds of undergraduate journals in existence, but we... Whoops. Yes, we do think that we should be doing more. One thing that we've definitely noticed is that it's really, really hard to find undergraduate journals. There's no one-stop shop to locate these things, and then it's really hard to figure out if those journals accept works from students outside of their institution or if they're tied to a class or not. So what we'd like to propose and what we're wondering from everyone here and beyond is whether it might be viable to create a directory of open access student journals similar to the directory of open access journals, where people can go and actually find undergraduate works, but also find some documentation on best practices for starting these journals and keeping them going. So we're just hoping to start a conversation. We have given you our Twitter handles and our email addresses, and now you know our faces as well. So we hope that today and beyond that you'll come and speak to us if you would like to partner with us, if you think it's a good idea, if you think it's a bad idea. Yeah, that's kind of the seeds of our idea here is to start supporting these more in that capacity. Thank you. Okay, at this point I'd like to invite all of the speakers on stage and invite questions from the audience about some innovative and interesting uses of OJSNOMP. There are a couple of mics out there. Don't be shy. Okay. Just curious about mediating new and young scholars as they start to produce scholarship for undergraduate journals. How did they break OJSNOMP? These are kids who have been doing things online and maybe differently. They aren't having any prior lucid Microsoft Word like we have to with many of our more established scholars. How are they breaking it? What are they doing wrong and that we should be listening to? So I don't think they're breaking anything. I think that they're just using it for purposes, which they intend that maybe we don't intend them to use it for, but it has a lot to do with the metadata stuff that Mike talked about in his lightning talk yesterday. I think forcing things into fields that you wouldn't expect them to put things into. They also really want more flexibility around the content. I found that they really want to create pages that describe what the journal is all about or they want to do things like we have the Alberta Law Review and every year they do a special issue on energy law and they really want a way to highlight those special issues in exciting new ways and they can't really do that with OJSNOMP. So I don't know. Does anybody else have other things they've seen? I can speak from my experience with the classes that we're working with. Students are really interested including a significant number of images in their work and so that just creates kind of a logistical challenge for us getting all those up and running. They want to do audio. We have audio and video so students are really interested in doing audio video posts and it's sort of tricky right now at OJSNOMP to provide nice seamless streamed media content for a student that may not have the skills to develop nice XML files. So I'd like to see those developed a bit. Just one addition to that. In terms of processes for OJSNOMP, the key thing that students want is ease. Easy submission, just seamless, kind of one-step processes. So I really wanted to highlight that because it's really important. So I don't think any of the students that I worked with broke the OJSNOMP. I think the OJSNOMP may have broken them. In some ways, I mean it's a great tool but it is difficult sometimes to maneuver. It's not intuitive for them but I did attend the session discussing the 3.0 and I'm really excited about those new features and those new interfaces. I think that will really ease the use of OJSNOMP and participation in the scholarly journal process. So just some comments first of all but I will get to a question and again this is from the self-serving perspective of PKP. It's really exhilarating, exciting to just hear the whole range of rather strange, unusual, even possibly bizarre ways you're repurposing OJSNOMP to do all sorts of things. Some of it's really affirming because when we talk about student journals, for example, we see lots of evidence out there that there's incredible number of student journals happening. In fact, Kevin and Jana Avan, another iSchool student from UBC that's here, we collected a bunch of information on over like 400 plus scholarly journals. OJSNOMP's journals hosted at Canadian sites. Fully a third of them were undergraduate or graduate students. So it's kind of, you know, something's happening there and I think your presentations gave us a lot of good examples of that. And I think, Sonia, where you were asking, always there a list out there of at least in the Canadian context, we can give you a little starter of probably about 130 student run journals if you want to go and mine them. It was equally interesting to hear from Israel and how you're using OJSN in another way and this is one that's been kicking around because about every few months we see another one popping up where somebody has ended up using that sort of workflow around peer review almost essentially as an academic adjudication system. And not that we're looking for more work on, you know, on the PKP side but it's fascinating to see those. Diddleford in terms of, you know, digital humanities projects and looking at, you know, at Queens there whether OJSN3 can be morphed into that. It's exhilarating. It's also, from our perspective, a little bit overwhelming because potentially that represents a whole lot of kind of stretching and pulling and twisting, you know, OJSN3 in a whole bunch of different directions which requires resources and I'm getting to my question now but, you know, essentially OJSN3 is really purpose built in many ways to be, you know, an academic journal peer review workflow and it's interesting to see how you're using it in different ways but the question is did you go and look at other sort of alternatives for, you know, say academic adjudication or a digital humanities sort of support or scholarly, you know, product support for them rather than using just OJSN3 and is it, you know, what, how did you end up on OJSN3 for some of these rather different uses so I'd be interested just if any of you can shed comments on that. Okay, so for the Queens perspective for this sort of digital humanities push we used OJSN3 because first of all it was a ready platform that we already had. Secondly, the journal team, they, yeah, they're one of our founding journals and they want to push the envelope a little bit with their journal and I guess respecting the sense or the original goal for OJSN3 being a journal publishing peer review infrastructure I guess that one of the key messages that I think I took from meeting with this journal team was and it fits with the questions that have come up so far today around deconstructing the traditional journal. I think it's already happening. I think it's a need that faculty want that we need to unpack so even if our systems are have originally been designed in a way that wants to be sort of, you know, your traditional PDF file that is a journal with an abstract discussion and I think things are moving more quickly and I really think we need to take the challenge and adapt. PKP, it's at a nice point where it's institutional led, it's not a commercial entity. I think that's something that we really should capitalize on in responding to these new needs that are already there so I guess, yeah. Just to clarify what I'm doing here, I'm just a volunteer to Werx, it's the State University of Hickory-Dusso but in my employee job we use OJS to our journals too and this is the older history and the beginning we need to start, we had a journal from 1987 and we have to move from emails to something that helps us the workflow so it's the same thing that works and it moves from email to something that's not expensive because at Werx in a specific case, we do not have a TI staff to take care of OJS. The only person who does that is me and even the backup, I need to talk to someone, may I do the backup, I have to go to the building and my lunchtime and do everything so OJS was the alternative choice because we do not need to expend money or something. All other solutions we would demand or training with the money or something else so this solution was not touch a single line of code, I do not have touch code, develop new code. One thing just the authors of research ask to change author to coordinator that will be changed someday. Well, it's another problem I have to face to code outside here in Canada, I can't touch the code on the OJS in the Werx so the solution was taken to not expensive and easy to understand and common knowledge of all researchers just I'm an author and coordinator. That's it. Thank you all. I have a long list of to-dos and to-explorers. Great. With regard to student use or use of OJS as a pedagogical tool, I differentiate a bit between student journals where it is a formal journal process versus course use and I'm wondering what is your experience working with those journals about the student who is not successful? What about the sort of refusal rate and also the students who decide maybe they are not so proud of their undergraduate work backward, how are you doing with repudiation and take down requests? It's something we take very seriously. I think I didn't have time to talk about this but we do encourage instructors to pitch this to 400 level students who are ready, they are writing a capstone paper, it's an appropriate use of their final papers. I wouldn't encourage someone in a 100 level course to necessarily be putting student work online. That doesn't mean you can't but it's one of those things where we want to make sure they are proud of their work, that they get the chance to do a peer review, they get the chance to go through the editing process and revising and we want to be responsive to students who say, you know what, this just isn't for me. Obviously that's negotiated with the instructor deciding whether or not students must publish their work online but there's no real reason why they couldn't use OGS to go through the scholarly communications workflow, experience what it's like to do the peer review and then just not post the final paper. We've also worked with an instructor that only posted excerpts of the students work because she just felt that that was a stronger representation of their writing ability. So we're trying to negotiate that and be respectful of what the students want. Yeah. So on the internet there's one of my undergraduate student essays. I'm so embarrassed about it but I don't know how to get someone to take it down. Don't search for it. What we've noticed for, we've hosted undergraduate journals for a very long time and maybe Leah can confirm this but I don't think we've ever had a take down request from a student for an article that they've written. So I do, I think the problem is out there and exists but I think that the, you know, the cases are so infrequent that we could probably deal with it on a case by case basis but definitely I think that's a concern. We are working on a project right now with a high school to put capstone papers for AP students so that's great. 12 students working on a final big research project and I do, I've been thinking about this a lot too. So how do we manage those, you know, students who aren't even 18 yet when they're publishing that content and what are their rights around owning it and taking it down when they want it taken down? I think that's a falls in with best practices though and it just occurred to me. We have nothing about take down on our websites for our student journals and we probably should have a little statement there. If you want this taken down here's what you can do sort of thing but we've never had that request either but conceivably I could see that happening so we should take that into account. Well so Sonia and Robin kind of invited this chat here with this idea of there's at the end so maybe I'll kind of get that conversation started certainly we can continue it later over lunch or whatever. So you floated this idea of a directory of undergraduate open access journals or open access undergraduate journals or whatever. Student journals, right sorry. So you know my first thought with that is that the directory of open access journals I think kind of serves two different purposes right now so when you go to the website it looks like it's meant to be a portal to discover scholarship which it sort of can be but my sense is that not many people use it that way right. They come to these journals through other discovery paths which is a broader trend in like library resources as a whole for example. So what it actually does is mostly serve as a white list of vetted journals and a sort of talking point for open access advocates to say there are however many 9000 you know vetted journals so see there's a lot of open access out there and so it actually kind of serves that purpose and I think for a directory of student journals the the need for a white list or for numbers are less clear but if you really just want to share best practices I mean maybe what we just need is a kind of Google Docs file of best practices that we start sharing around and all contribute our ideas and try to sort of evolve and build up something a shared resource in that way so those are my initial thoughts on that. Thank you for the feedback there is it's just it's really hard to find these journals and more and more I'm getting students and faculty coming to me saying you know the student or I produce this really great work and I want to publish it where can I publish it it's so hard to find journals for them I don't know they exist they definitely do and so having that one stop shop and having search facets that release are specific to students would be really helpful to you in such a directory because there are a few journal student journals in the DOAJ but again it's really hard to search through those so just to add to that I think one of the problems that we do have with student journals is sustainability and so if we were able to create you know really strong subject specific student journals where you know film studies student who wants to publish their work would know that there's a good one to go to rather than deciding to create their own it lasts for a couple years at their university until someone can sustain it so I think it's a possible way to kind of respond to those those issues. You're talking about journals that are subject specific but will publish student work from anywhere and I assume we were talking about journals that publish more or less any topic but only from their discipline from their institution so everything I said was from that perspective when you have journals like this it's a different picture and now I see where you might well need a directory. I just wanted to point out that we do have two DOAJ ambassadors at least in the crowd I think both Ina and Yvonne so maybe you can just raise your hand so that if you can yeah and then you can if you want to follow up on how DOAJ is actually used they're probably two good people to talk to. Not going for a question. Oh, fake out. Okay so I think we'll we'll wrap up here I did want to take a moment to again thank all of our presenters for sharing their work with us this morning.
University of Alberta. And Robin Hall from McEwen been mulling over recently. And I'm hoping that experience in academic publishing. Alright, so we sustainable student publications. For example, developed a partnership with our undergraduate copyright, recruiting reviewers and content for a develop a bit of a community of practice for our So at McEwen University we only have two going for about five years. So I consider these them going, but also support from the library and Could we be doing more to help our little undergraduate journals in existence, but we... create a directory of open access student documentation on best practices for starting wanted to highlight that because it's really were undergraduate or graduate students. So it's know, an academic journal peer review workflow review infrastructure I guess that one of the key student journals where it is a formal journal long time and maybe Leah can confirm this but I of undergraduate open access journals or open first thought with that is that the directory of this really great work and I want to publish it you in such a directory because there are a few journals that are subject specific but will