Building a university Open Access scholarly publishing environment

Abstract

As Open Access publishing has been playing a more important role in scholarly communication, well-developed Open Access publishing infrastructure should be adopted by universities in order to make their outputs more competitive and provide its authors the immediate impact of their work. More than that, such “in-house” publications are very good starting points for early career researchers while they are joining the world of scholarly publishing. Not because of lower quality or reduced requirements, but because of extra help and guidance that might be provided to students by editorial office.

The Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) - Central Library has developed, based on the community needs, an Open Access journal publishing environment including the complete set of publishing standards, and being linked to the global Open Access infrastructure. One university scholarly journal and proceedings series is published there by the library, the platform also hosts a number of subject-specialized journals published by smaller departments. Such hosting is essential for many editorial teams, since it provides current publishing standards that they would hardly be able to keep by their own. Furthermore, being part of a university library, the editorial office has skills to provide value-added services in full range of information and publishing skills to researchers, authors, and students.

To capture a full scale of Open Access publishing services, an Open Access monograph platform ought to be adopted in such a manner that is able to deal with various multimedia document types and contents, live monographs etc.

The hosting of publishing platforms and guidance in Open Access publishing, research assessment and information and publishing literacy enhances good cooperation between the library and the academic community, and also provides the community with a lot of practical added value and help in meeting the current publishing criteria to succeed in the competitive research environment.