[JoPP-Public] Sustainability of JoPP

[Mathieu O'Neil]

PS. Steve had already indicated he was interested in CMS stuff and Kat is running the Twitter account so it seemed logical to sound them out about this.

________________________________
From: JoPP-Public <jopp-public-bounces at lists.ourproject.org> on behalf of Mathieu O'Neil <mathieu.oneil at anu.edu.au>
Sent: Thursday, April 4, 2019 21:28
To: Journal list
Cc: Chris Giotitsas; Ekaterina Chertkovskaya
Subject: [JoPP-Public] Sustainability of JoPP

Hi all

Since I inadvertently broadcast my intention to post about this issue I guess I should do it...

I want to start by copying my answers and that of the editors of ephemera to the OA editor questionnaire we just published in jopp #13. In some ways ephemera is one of the closest to jopp in that they are volunteers and have a very low (or no) budget. Others were similar but for some reason the ephemera eds' answers resonated with me.

@Ekaterina and Chris: FYI.

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7. What are the most challenging aspects of running an open-access journal?

Chris Giotitsas (ephemera)
Decision-making and coordination of a large group of people scattered across the world (that are otherwise very busy and receive no remuneration) in the complex operations required to produce a high-quality journal with virtually no budget. This inadvertently leads to delays, occasionally, as well as some missed opportunities.

Ekaterina Chertkovskaya (ephemera)
Timely publication of solid issues requires a lot of commitment and concerted effort of the editorial collective’s members, who are located in different parts of the world. Physical distance also makes it difficult to implement changes and make important decisions fast. The focus on smooth running of the journal sometimes distracts from broader – political and intellectual – vision. So finding a balance is a big challenge. Passing the knowledge to new members of the collective, especially when it comes to production tasks and procedures of ephemera, is another important but challenging task, ensuring there is a continuity in the journal even when members leave. Finally, despite working on a voluntary basis and running on a very low budget, we still have some costs, like maintaining and upgrading the website. We had a model where people could support us by subscribing to our issues in print, but this has proved to be costly to maintain and we’re now again going completely online.

Mathieu O’Neil (Journal of Peer Production)
Issues such as the sustainability of the technical and organisational infrastructure derive from the distributed nature of the editing process (see next section). The JoPP website was originally hosted by friendly organisations such as Oekonux and the P2P Foundation; it is now supported and maintained by Peter Troxler, a member of our editorial collective. JoPP is a completely DIY project which mainly exists without money (exceptions include funding to support printing the ‘Book of Peer Production’ project). We rely on the goodwill of individual volunteers so all tasks not directly related to editing and releasing an issue – whether organising technical backup plans, getting indexed in SCOPUS, etc. – depend on whether people have the time and energy to take them on.

8. How do you overcome these challenges (if you can overcome them)?

Chris Giotitsas (ephemera)
Through unique and ever-adapting mechanisms of collaboration assisted by various web tools. A highly developed sense of community and belief in the importance of the journal’s work are also important.

Ekaterina Chertkovskaya (ephemera)
To make sure the knowledge stays within collective and it is easy to integrate new members, we have created various rotating roles that people fill in, usually in little teams (e.g. layout, web, cover, managing editors), as well as various templates and guidelines on how we do things. We have developed a production process where each issue goes through the so-called ‘double-checking’ stages for formatting and layout, which aim to ensure the journal is published in a particular format and intellectual quality is not compromised by, say, poor or inconsistent formatting. Here we tried to create a process that is clear and not too complicated. Finally, some of our quarterly meetings are now devoted to longer-term vision for the journal, and we try to take more production issues in online spaces.

Mathieu O’Neil (Journal of Peer Production)
We adopted early on the principle of rotating themed issues between groups of editors. This is a good way to bring in new people who can contribute their own unique interests. However this in turn raises issues, such as the heavy burden on issue editors who take on all aspects of production, from finding and chasing up authors and reviewers, to copy-editing, layout and web formatting (some have obtained grants locally and hired RAs to do some of this work). The distributed issue structure also means no long-term allocation of roles has been achieved, beyond the essential functions of website maintenance (Peter) and issue planning (Mathieu).
JoPP’s transparent system does have its benefits: reviewers may be motivated to produce excellent work because their reviews will be published in any case, and non-anonymously if they so choose. We can also rely on our public and archived mailing list, which has around 120 subscribers, to bring in new suggestions or come up with solutions to problems if the need arises.

http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-13-open/open-access-bouillabaisse/ten-questions-to-open-access-editors/
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So the above made me realise a couple of things that had been percolating for a while.

I'm not forgetting that we also discussed a few months ago whether the project might not end, but then Maurizio and Peter stepped up to propose #14 and #15 so we're alive until then, I guess.

Our distributed structure does mean each issue of jopp has a really strong and unique focus and identity coming from editors bringing in their ideas and networks and that is great. But the downside is that overarching structures are really undeveloped. I'm not suggesting we have rotating roles as outlined by Ekaterina above. But I think we need to at least have a discussion about what could make the project more resilient (it might also be worth looking at the report on Open Community Health in jopp#13 but it seems to me that that applies more to much larger projects).

Previous attempts along those lines have failed to elicit much enthusiasm. I successfully applied to get us listed in DOAJ a year or so ago but there are probably more things that could be done to make us (a) more resilient and (b) more attractive. On the latter: getting a DOI for ex. is relatively uncontroversial (no idea how to do that but at the very least it would be time-consuming); whereas getting indexed in SCOPUS (and thus counted in some university metrics systems) of courses raises ethical issues (Elsevier), plus we may not even qualify (not sure we meet the rate of publication threshold).

In terms of resilience as a first step I think at the very least we really need to strengthen our resistance to unexpected events. It is really risky that only two people basically run our infrastructure: what would happen if I or Peter had an accident, or fell seriously ill, etc for example? Which is why I suggested backup people for the list and for the CMS.

As for the servers, another critical infrastructure, we also need a backup plan but I can't really speak to that. @Peter: any thoughts on what could be done in this respect?

cheers
Mathieu


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