Enabling change in scholarly publishing in HSS in Greece: The case-study of ePublishing at EKT

Abstract

See video of the presentation.

The present contribution concerns a case study of open access publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Greece, its history and effect in helping the local researcher community transition from a print-only mode of work to online working environments and in rendering Greek publications and scholarship more relevant to the international scholarly community. The presentation provides Greek context in scholarly communication with an emphasis on HSS; it elaborates on the goals of the project and the challenges that were encountered and addressed during its implementation. One of the main reported successes of the project is the increased awareness among Greek researchers in HSS of the capabilities and potentials of modern scholarly communication systems and the creation of a demand originating from the corresponding research communities themselves for the continuation and expansion of similar activities in the future.

The project, which started in 2007 with the transition of three print journals in the humanities to an online and print format and online working environment, culminates with the development of an online platform that provides access to content and services from a single point in the web, ePublishing.ekt.gr. As part of EKT’s services, we systematize and upgrade the journals’ policies according to international standards, provide an online working platform and training, digitize and release in open access academic articles (2,555 articles in established journals, published by small, non-profit, academic/scholarly society publishers, so far), gradually provide DOIs, and concentrate (apart from articles) on books and conference proceedings but in the future we’ll also include purely online books.

In a nutshell, we have focused on providing publishers of journals in HSS a range of comprehensive services which are constantly updated and improved in the light of the developments in scholarly communication, and which foster the internationalization, visibility, and preservation of research in these fields. We have also concentrated on increasing the awareness of the Humanities and the Social Science communities on open access and electronic publishing. It is worth mentioning here that the aforementioned services constitute only one of our activities relating to HSS. Another major and relevant project concerns the Greek Reference Index for Publications in the HSS, a comprehensive registry of Greek peer-reviewed journals that registers metadata, provides access to content where this is possible, and measures a variety of indicators.

We continue our efforts to provide a comprehensive digital framework for HSS research in Greece, and, given that we are aiming at further expansion in our range of services and further growth in our output, we are also exploring a variety of business models that will help us achieve our goals. Particular effort will be placed in further researching the financial implications of this endeavour and choosing the appropriate business models for the future, as well as promoting awareness about digital scholarship and OA to researchers. Future plans include the intensification of our efforts to publish more e-journals and the exciting new prospect of publishing OA monographs in HSS, in collaboration with institutions in Greece and abroad.