Report on the first CRAFT-OA Summer School for Journal Editors

Written by Martina Dvořáková

The first CRAFT-OA Summer School for Journal Editors, organised by Masaryk University Press as part of the European project CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access), took place in the last week of May at the University Centre in Telč, Czech Republic. The CRAFT-OA project aims to improve the situation of Diamond OA scholarly journals, community-driven, academic-led, and academic-owned publishing initiatives that do not charge fees to either authors or readers. The project aims to make the Diamond OA landscape more resilient by centralising expertise, collaboration and a joint visibility/indexing layer. Training of editors is one of the tools the project will use to improve the quality of the Diamond publishing ecosystem.

The whole project has a clear focus on community collaboration, with all project outputs developed and created by CRAFT-OA being created by the community for the community. CRAFT-OA aims to enhance the capacity of the Diamond OA community. The summer school was a unique opportunity to work directly with editors of scholarly journals, who will be one of the main beneficiaries of the project outputs. More than 40 participants from 7 European countries gathered in Telč; the Czech Republic was of course represented, but we also welcomed guests from Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Denmark and Latvia. Speakers from other countries, UK, USA and Ethiopia, participated online.

Opening and first day

On Monday morning, the participants were welcomed by the Deputy Mayor of Telč, Jiří Pykal, the Director of the Telč University Centre, Jaroslav Makovec, the CRAFT-OA project coordinator, Margo Bargheer, the Director of the Masaryk University Press, Alena Mizerová, and the CRAFT-OA project manager for Masaryk University, Jiří Marek. The welcome was followed by a short excursion into the history of the Open Access movement, which provided the participants with a context for the discussions of the following days. Margo Bargheer then presented the current situation in the field of Open Access scholarly publishing, in particular the three large “sister” projects funded under the Horizon Europe call. The DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA projects are running in parallel and their common goal is to improve all aspects of Diamond OA scholarly communication.

A further expansion of the context was offered by Jiří Marek, who spoke about the interrelationship between Open Access, Open Science and the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud). Afterwards, all participants’ attention focused on the main topic of the Summer School: Open Journals System (OJS) developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Dulip Withanage, one of the main developers of the system, gave a presentation on what the developers are currently working on and what new features users can look forward to soon. Most of the Diamond OA journals use OJS to run their operations, but there are other tools available for publishing scholarly journals. The aim of the next session, Publishing Platforms Lightning Round, was to give a brief overview of the most popular ones: Lodel, Janeway, Arpha, Scielo and PubPub.

At the end of the first day of the Summer School, participants focused on the topic of publishing standards. The purpose of the Beyond the everyday session, which was always held in the afternoon, was to allow participants to discuss with others issues that have a major impact on the field of scholarly communication, but which are often not given the time to be considered in the daily hustle and bustle. In addition, most of the Diamond journals and platforms tend to be small-scale projects and are often managed by only one or a small number of people. As a result, the editors of the journals and the administrators of the platforms usually do not have anyone with whom they can directly share their daily joys and sorrows, which is why events like this summer school are so welcome. Other topics discussed during Beyond the Everyday sessions included journal funding and issues related to multilingualism. 

Days two and three: Hands-on OJS and XML publishing workshops

Hands-on workshops were the core of the Summer School. The organisers created an OJS “practice” journal for each participant, where they could try out various new settings and modifications. The second day began with a workshop in which Radek Gomola, the keynote speaker of the Summer School and the administrator of Masaryk University’s platform journals.muni.cz, who showed the participants how to ideally set up a journal in OJS and the entire editorial process. Lenka Dědková, an experienced editor of the journal Cyberpsychology, followed with a presentation on peer review. In detail, she described her experience of peer review management both inside and outside of OJS, and she and the other editors in the room agreed that OJS is not ideal, but it really does help with peer review. Some of the participants were also able to take away very practical recommendations and “tweaks” for their future work.

The two consecutive workshops on XML publishing were the most technically demanding part of the summer school, but much appreciated by all. The XML markup language simplifies the entire publishing process and the resulting format is human- and computer-understandable, especially necessary in a situation where a journal’s success depends on its visibility in various indexing databases. As a later workshop on PDF accessibility showed, PDF-only publishing may not be a viable option for much longer, and it is XML publishing that could help.

The indexing of journals and articles was another important topic of the Summer School. Clara Armengou, Programme Manager of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), focused on the indexing of journals in DOAJ. The information she gave to the Summer School participants is also valid for most other databases.

Day Four and Five: institutional publishing handbook and case studies

In the CRAFT-OA project, both Summer Schools are closely linked to one of the project’s key exploitable results, the Institutional Publishing Technical Living Handbook. Its aim is to document and present the results of the CRAFT-OA project on an ongoing and long-term basis, focusing on the technical aspects of institutional publishing. The handbook is intended as a tool providing a helping hand on technical issues to all those who are involved in the Diamond OA publishing process. As the whole project is based on the principle of working very closely with the Diamond publishing communities, the participating editors have been invited to take part in the development of the handbook.

The workshop took the form of working in groups, first to invent personas (similar to those in marketing, for example) and their needs and motivations, and then to see how they could use the handbook to solve their problems in Diamond OA publishing. The presentation of the results and the final discussion shed new light on related issues. Not only the workshop organisers but also all participants gained new insights and suggestions for future work.

On the last day of the summer school, participants attended another technical workshop focusing on metadata, followed by the presentation of two case studies. Berhanu Asfaw Weldemikael’s presentation on the Journal of Ethiopian Studies shed a spotlight on non-European Diamond OA initiatives. Countries in Africa, and especially in South America, are pioneers in Diamond OA publishing.

Conclusion & Outlook

The first CRAFT-OA Summer School for Journal Editors has clearly shown that editors are very interested in such events and are willing to travel to a small town in the middle of the Czech region of Vysočina to meet colleagues from other European countries and discuss issues that concern all of them alike. The discussions during the summer school proved to be extremely productive and lively, with participants wishing to continue the exchange beyond the time of the event. Whether over meals or during our trip to Brno and the famous Villa Tugendhat, they eagerly shared their experiences, both the highs and the challenges. The importance of sharing experiences was summed up by one participant’s response to the question of what was most useful to him about the summer school: “Mostly my eye-opening moments came by the sharing of experiences and knowing of different realities, that led me to realise the importance of networking and cooperation.”

Besides many words of thanks and appreciation to the organisers, the participants’ feedback also brought suggestions that will inspire the programme of the next summer school, which will take place in Coimbra, Portugal, in June 2025. So, thank you very much and see you again soon!