Building a community-led diamond open access journal in the marine sciences
Funding Area: Community governance / Gobernanza comunitaria
Problem Statement: Recently, science funders have spearheaded a reform in scholarly communication, leading to international initiatives to create accessible publishing models. In marine sciences, which include all scientific fields that study the marine realm, the current publishing landscape does not reflect this effort. Only 34% of the 61 Open Access (OA) journals currently listed in the Depository of Open Access Journals allow for copyright retention by authors, whereas 40% charge Article Processing Fees (APCs). The journals that do adopt OA policies often have a narrow, regional scope. This situation impedes scientific dissemination, diversity and inclusion, which in a widely interconnected system such as the ocean, is detrimental to knowledge production. Climate change impacts, resource extraction and prospective deep-sea mining have led to international efforts to manage and protect the marine realm, posing an urgent demand on marine scientists to raise the bar and guide future actions. This is impossible without publishing models that are unimpeded by financial and societal bias. Here, we propose the creation of a diamond, community-led OA journal, led by a diverse community of researchers with enhanced capacity to employ principles of community values, equitable science, and fairness to build a fully accessible publishing platform. This will revolutionize scientific publishing in our field, as well as communication with a wide array of stakeholders that rely on the marine realm.
Proposed Activities: 1. Project launching (November 2023-January 2024). We have compiled a detailed plan that drafts the logistic details of the journal structure and organization. This plan will serve as a starting point for discussions with the wider research community in marine sciences. We will present this plan in conferences and foresee organizing a commencement meeting where we will invite participants to join a series of workshops (Activity 2) to create the journal. 2. Marine Community Workshops (January 2024-September 2024) We will organize a series of online workshops to bring together a diverse group of people that will form the core team leading our initiative. These workshops aim to: a) Expand our current plan: Our plan has been conceptualized by 6 researchers, predominantly based in Europe. We will develop a more inclusive plan by expanding the core team and involving participants with diverse perspectives and experiences; b) Populate the editorial board and technical teams: In our proposed organizational structure, our editorial board is led by a committee, while five technical teams oversee the functioning of the journal: Copyediting and proofreading, Technical, Outreach and communication, Community, Learning support. We will invite participants with different areas of expertise to join these teams that will require a diverse and comprehensive set of strengths; d) Finalize the journal documentation: At the conclusion of the Marine Community Workshops, we will have achieved the final document detailing the guiding principles, scope, organizational structure, code of conduct and workflow management of the journal. 3. Technical preparations (April 2024-November 2025): a) A hosting company will be contracted to help us build our journal and host it using the open software Open Journal Systems (OJS); b) Reviewer pool: Our Community team will build a reviewer database by launching an open call inviting participants. We will make a concerted effort to include underrepresented groups such as researchers from Low- and Middle-Income Economies (LMIE) and early career researchers. 4. Community strengthening and capacity building (October 2024 - November 2025). To ensure the long-term success of our initiative, our strategic vision involves education and empowerment, both within the core team and the broader journal community. Specifically, we propose the creation of a Learning Support Team with members experienced in the best practices of knowledge dissemination, community involvement, and peer-to-peer training. The responsibilities of this team will include organizing courses and workshops that will: a) Strengthen editorial and reviewing skills; b) Promote and disseminate OA best practices; c) Promote leadership, community values, social inclusion and the principles of equitable science in our editorial board; d) Provide additional support to the wider community, including science communication and language support to non-native English speakers.
Openness: The prime concern and ambition of this proposal is openness, through facilitation of a truly free, accessible journal that enables publication and dissemination of scientific results independent of the researcher’s social, financial or national background. As diamond-open access, our planned journal will be free to read and free of charge for publication. As a community-led initiative, we will invite a diverse group of people to actively participate in the creation and early steps of the journal as authors, editors, and reviewers. Our determination to involve members of the scientific community that may typically have limited access to the prohibitory world of conventional scientific publishing, is born out of a desire to facilitate open exchange of expertise, experiences, and perspectives in the realm of marine science. Transparency is at the heart of the journal creation process, for example we will share the minutes from all proposed workshops and we will openly engage in the ongoing dialogue among similar initiatives on the creation of community-led, diamond open-access journals. We will exchange experiences, challenges and solutions, to ensure capacity building within and beyond the marine science community and steer towards a generally open, fair academic system.
Challenges: We are a new group of early career researchers, and the success of our initiative depends on the mobilization of a broad network of peers with different backgrounds. Although our group involves members with strong leadership skills, managing such a large and diverse group of peers will be challenging. Moreover, in its first steps our journal will not have an impact factor and might be mistaken for a predatory journal. We intend to address this by involving researchers with editorial experience and scientific societies early in the development of our journal. We believe that by opening our initiative to the wider community, we will be able to identify individuals with diverse management and leadership skills that can join this initiative and assist in this task. Moreover, the capacity building activities will be crucial to strengthen our ability to establish effective workflows for journal management. Lastly, this project requires considerable effort and human resources which are principally voluntary, creating a high workload. We plan to address this by delegating and implementing a flexible management plan. In our organizational structure, positions of high workload and responsibility that are typically fulfilled by one person, such as the chief editor, are substituted by committees and teams, dividing the workflow among peers. Moreover, we will continuously ask for feedback from members to adapt the structure, procedures, and workflows according to the workload.
Neglectedness: The initiative we are proposing here is just starting and we have only begun looking for funding opportunities. To our knowledge there are other sources of funding available supporting diamond open access journals. These include opportunities to fund hosting services and editing software, such as KOALA project or UvA Diamond Open Access Fund. However, we recognized that for a community-led journal we need to help build and maintain a community, alongside logistical solutions. This is the reason we chose this application as our first, since it enables us to simultaneously expand on both fronts. More importantly, this call is mostly not geographically limited, which supports our vision and necessity of a global network.
Success: Although we feel that the ultimate success of this endeavor will be the receiving and publication of the first manuscripts, we propose to measure success based on a series of milestones that will ultimately lead to a global community-led diamond open access journal for marine sciences. The milestones will enable us to adapt our strategy towards the goal, according to the feedback provided by the community along the way. The milestones are: a) Successful marine community workshops; b) Assembling an editorial board, technical teams, pool of reviewers; c) Completion of the journal documentation and workflow; d) Launching the journal; e) First journal activities and establishment of support events (workshops, courses, online material). We also hope that by regularly requesting and reviewing feedback we will be able to better measure success based on open communication and stakeholder engagement. We consider open communication and plasticity in actions to be key in achieving this ambitious goal.
Total Budget: 10400
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: No specific affiliation
LMIE Carveout: Although our initiative is not directly linked with LMIEs, involvement of individuals and organizations from LMIEs in all stages of the journal development is a crucial part of our proposal, as previously explained. Our journal aims to support and promote equitable marine science by facilitating diamond open access publications, which we believe would be well-received and adopted by LMIE communities worldwide.
Team Skills: Our team consists of 5 female and 1 male early-career researchers, including 2 PhD students, 3 post-doctoral researchers and 1 associate professor who come from six different countries (EU and India). We have broad expertise in marine science, including fields such as coastal, open ocean and deep-sea research. Collectively, we have worked in 13 countries worldwide and can speak a total of 12 languages. We have been active members of student and scientific societies (MR, MB, SM and AG: Deep-Sea Biology Society, RB: European Cetacean Society council, Society of Marine Mammalogy). Our members have been actively involved in science communication, community and stakeholder involvement as well as capacity building in different countries all over the world, including India (DD), Portugal (MB, MR, DD), Greenland (SM), Italy (MB, AG), UK and New Zealand (RB), Greece and Canada (MR), as well as Spain (AG). Members of our team have been publishing and reviewing in several scientific journals, AG is currently associated editor in a scientific journal, while MB and MR have been closely following the OA reform by participating in workshops and conferences organized by Science Europe, DIAMAS and OPERAS. Lastly, our member DD, born and educated in India, has worked in institutes both in India and other parts of the world, providing important connections with researchers in marine sciences that will be a starting point to involve partners from LMIE countries.
Submission Number: 111
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