How to Run a Caring and Quality Open Access Journal
Training Organisation: Magnetic Ideals
Delivery: Online, one full day
Programme Description:
Post-graduate and graduate journals run by volunteers bring a great deal of value to institutions and doctoral training partnerships. They act as a training ground for future publishing, offering a place for open access publishing for researchers and early career researchers, and providing networking opportunities and career gateways to publishing. They are frequently open access, and often set the tone for future academic engagement, but it is rare that time and care is given to the issue of Open Access.
This training is directed at students on editorial boards of Open Access (OA) graduate journals, peer reviewers of OA journals and researchers looking to set up their own OA journals or engage with them in future. While graduate and post-graduate journals are open access they are often passively so, accepting and endorsing the fact they are open access without understanding fully the politics and principles that underpin it, and the different approaches to open access. This training is an opportunity for these journals to open a debate and raise awareness of open access with their editorial boards, writers and reviewers.
This training is unique in its content and has been designed by Magnetic Ideals with input from members of the Radical Open Access Group. The training is designed to be delivered online and builds in groupwork, interactive activities and is designed to be delivered to multiple members of single graduate journal editorial boards and reviewers, but ideally also across multiple graduate journals to allow and encourage sharing of best practice, problem solving and networking that is at present greatly lacking across these graduate journals.
Many scholars are largely unfamiliar with the variety of Open Access options. The session will address what OA is, and where did the ideas and principles of Open Access originate. This session will cover issues around copyright and intellectual property rights, areas which are often overlooked and underdiscussed for research students more broadly. There will be a chance for participants to reflect on their own models and assess if how they are working is the best way for them and their authors.
Graduate journals can be a space for modelling practices of care and development in journal management that can operate differently and more considerately than in mainstream publishing. The training will address practices of care, ensuring adequate training and support, managing burnout, supportive and developmental peer review processes and considering impact of intersectional oppressions and divisions of labour in what is usually a voluntary unpaid environment.
Ethicists have a particular interest in the promotion of diverse and experimental forms of publication and debate and in supporting new, more creative and more participatory approaches to publication, but this also has an impact for traditional modes and methods of paywalls and research quality. This training will also feature reflection on the ongoing impact of the pandemic and global movements and endeavors to ensure scholarship is open and accessible to all.
Learning Outcomes:
Knowledge building across the graduate journal community of the principles and history of Open Access.
Raising awareness of the different Open Access models at a time when its popularity is increasing.
Networking across multiple graduate journal editorial boards.
Investigating how to embed a more ethical and caring approach therefore enhancing wellbeing in graduate journals and their largely volunteer members when they are already working in a potentially stressful graduate research courses.
Understanding the ethics of being an Open Access journal.