Strengthening the scholarly future of Culture Machine via metadata registration, DOI assignation and migration to Janeway, a free and open-source scholarly publishing platform

GABRIELA MENDEZ COTA

Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad

Problem Statement: We ask for resources (time, skills, services/platforms) and incentives (metadata, indexing) that ensure the continued scholar-led operation and long-term conservation of Culture Machine (CM), an open access, peer reviewed journal belonging to Open Humanities Press and is a member of the Radical Open Access Collective. For 23 years CM has relied on the gift labor of well-established scholars based in the UK, and since 2014, of early-career scholars based in Mexico and Canada. To facilitate its autonomous, up-to-date production CM migrated from a static webpage to a WordPress site in 2017-2018. This infrastructure work, as well as a new image, was performed by members of El Rancho Electrónico, a hackerspace in Mexico City, with financial support from the co-editor based in Mexico. After the principal editorship was relocated to Mexico, the journal has continued to attract special issue proposals from guest-editors from Europe and the United States, while the editors have promoted collaborations across the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, mainly Latin America. In order to sustain and deepen this effort to decentralize scholarship, a further engagement with open infrastructure is needed as part of a strategy that attracts new scholarly talent and further funding elegibility through registering of dois, metadata, and inclusion in DOAJ.

Proposed Activities: First stage (3 months) Applying for membership in CrossRef, via Open Humanities Press Testing Janeway on a VPS Diagnosing the quality of information transfer/import via the available Word Press Plugin Determining the amount of manual work required to ensure a correct migration including metadata and doi Resources: 20 hours of infrastructure work per month, 35USD per hour (2,100), VPS (100 USD for the first year), plus CrossRef Application which will range between 300 USD – 800 USD depending on the number of years covered and the quantity of individual DOIs required. Total: approx. 3,000 USD Stage 2 (up to 21 months –aprox. one volume per month, starting with the most recent volume) Manual correction of individual articles as necessary Checking the accuracy of metadata, completing as necessary Assigning dois to each article/item Gradual migration to Janeway, volume by volume (minimum one volume per month) Resources: 20 hours of infrastructure/curatorial work per month, 35 USD per hour (14,700), plus one year of hosting services by Janeway, which is 1,600 sterling pounds plus VAT, approx. 2,300 USD (we would try to get a discount) (17,000 USD) Stage 3 (might overlap with stage 2, starting as early as summer 2024) Recruit new co-editor, managing editor and renew editorial board Test new platform with vol. 23 Apply to the Directory of Open Access Journals Share results of the project and search for other sources of funding Resources for Stage 3: 5,000 USD for project management and overhead costs, including any extra work/software/equipment needed for completion of archive curation/migration

Openness: As part of Open Humanities Press, Culture Machine has always been open access, not just in the sense of being available to read/download for free, but also in that of allowing readers to re-use, re-mix, and create derivative works with published content (through a CC-BY license). On the infrastructure side, CM currently uses the open source platform WordPress. The work is to prepare the whole archive (22 volumes with 10-15 research articles each, plus the Interzone and Reviews sections, giving an estimate of 350 items the metadata of which must be verified/completed, and assigned a DOI) for migration to an open-source platform that (unlike WP) is specifically designed for peer reviewed scholarly journals. We are proposing to try Janeway, a free, open source publishing platform developed by the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. Once the migration has been migrated and the platform tested for a couple of years there would be a possibility to develop modules specific to the needs and principles of Culture Machine –as well as metadata harvesting connected with other open scholarship sites. One way of engaging a broader community in this work, and to share the project output, is to continue to take part in seminars, conferences, reading groups and collaborations with the radical open access community, and to further articulate its critical work with the specific histories of open science practices in Latin America.

Challenges: In technical terms, the problem we expect to encounter is that: 1) The import of the texts to Janeway via the WordPress plug-in has errors (readability, incorrect or incomplete display). In this case, a manual intervention will be necessary, alongside the updating of metadata and assignation of dois. In the test period we will find out whether this will be a problem or not. 2) If a manual fixing process of the files is required, at least 7,000 pages will have to be collated and repairs made - footnotes, images, bibliography. The challenge will be to do this work with the available resources (in terms of fees and time of the project). But we think we can handle it if there is flexibility and supervision that helps us to achieve that goal.

Neglectedness: This is the first time I come across a funding option that covers the kind of infrastructure work that CM, a scholar-led journal which has no university affiliation, needs to catch up with the current rules of the game for scholarly journals. My university provides research grants, not infrastructure development grants for autonomous scholar-led publications. I have learned about the technical side of publishing from my hacktivist collaborators, as well as from my collaborators from the Radical Open Access Collective, which has shared its expertise and invested in the more academic aspects of openness activism (for instance through the COPIM project at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures). Yet those research funds, like those of my university, are linked to university-based publications, which rely on the paid labor of library and computing staff, which Culture Machine does not have. CM’s infrastructure work I have funded indirectly with some help from research money from my university and other state agencies here in Mexico, but the amount I have been able to provide is too small to cover what this proposal describes: the larger-scale care and updating that CM’s archive needs to catch up as a scholarly journal.

Success: The goals are very concrete: 1) to assign a doi and correctly register the metadata of each of the texts that have been published in Culture Machine (reviews, debates and research articles); 2) to migrate Culture Machine to the open Janeway platform; 3) to apply for the Directory of Open Access Journals and 4) along the way, generate the experience and capacities for the current team to develop its own version of the infrastructure, and to train an expanded editorial team (managing editor/reviews editor). It would be a success to publish Vol. 23 already on the new platform.

Total Budget: 24700 USD

Affiliations: Open Humanities Press

LMIE Carveout: No

Team Skills: Since 2014, for the design, maintenance and technical support of Culture Machine (including migration from a previous platform to WordPress) I have counted with the technical skills of a group of independent professionals linked to the free culture movement in Mexico. In both cases the collaboration has had two aspects: an academic aspect (I have been the supervisor of theses for a Master's degree in Philosophy and a Master's degree in Critical Theory) and a more creative aspect based on a shared interest in independent, experimental publishing linked to ethical and political values. Ramiro and Mauricio have been my technicians in several projects such as enbuscadelqueliteperdido.net and filosofiadelapracticaeditorial.net, as well as in a recent collaboration with OHP that consisted in the collective rewriting of a book that is currently available at: https://ecologicalrewritings.pubpub.org/ Ramiro has advanced knowledge of programming and management of open infrastructures for general academic and non-academic publishing. Mauricio Gómez Gómez holds a Master's degree in Critical Theory from 17, Institute for Critical Studies, with a thesis on editorial anarchism supervised by me. Mauricio is responsible for the editorial design and maintenance of CM on WordPress since 2018, and has also been the designer of two aforementioned project pages of mine.I am the academic editor responsible for Culture Machine and have experience in (research) project management.

How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)

Submission Number: 100