When academic societies keep their journals in the big publishing houses, what do they get in return? Cheap or free infrastructure? Or do they even still pay even for that?
I’m trying to wrap my head around what it would take for societies to transition their journals elsewhere (or have their own infrastructure). Can anyone pitch in with experience?
[#]ScholarlyPublishing
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@roaldarboel it's gotta be the infra, and i would bet they still pay , if not just as a cut of the APC.
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@roaldarboel hosting journals is genuinely hard. there are a decent amount of turnkey 'just runs' journal platform programs, but they keep getting abandoned or bought, though PKP just did the deal to become the platform for the EU and hcommons is doing stuff i love.
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@jonny @roaldarboel See my post above. Many of us at institutionally support libraries are doing it! https://librarypublishing.org/ https://escholarship.org
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@lschiff @roaldarboel just to be super clear i know this and i love it!!! i did not mean to downplay y'alls work at all which i think rocks, just to say it's a ton of labor to maintain any kind of journal infrastructure (as i'm sure you know!) and offering a piece of an explanation why it might be happening at academic societies. more shared work into the commons only lowers that barrier, which is why i'm personally v grateful for work in libraries (among other reasons)
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@jonny @roaldarboel Thank you and totally get it. That said, most folks don't know about this option, so I'm always looking for opportunities to promote it and to encourage scholars/researchers to take control back and start journals with the support of their library!
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@lschiff @jonny @roaldarboel Journal hosting requires effort, but I think it's more or less a solved problem. In the humanities, I think the main issue is typesetting. It's hard to beat just submitting a word file and not caring about which Indian sweat shop produces the final PDF. Libraries usually don't offer it, and soc.s don't have the knowledge or staff. (Might be different in math/science where authors do that themselves via latex.)
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@felwert @lschiff @jonny Yeah, such a pity if that's a barrier - it really shouldn't be when we have HTML. But yeah, a nicely typeset PDF is lovely to behold (I've made several LaTeX templates for e.g. preprints, and am making for Typst atm), but whether they provide anything over a dynamic HTML page, I really doubt.
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@roaldarboel
@felwert @lschiff
Working with JOSS, which should be the place all the dope document tech accumulates, it becomes pretty clear how all the obligations of playing the publication game detract from doing dope shit like having good document tech
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@roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff no shade intended, it makes perfect sense - you want to make a long-lived publication so that all the people who took a risk by trusting you are rewarded rather than punished for doing so. there is no room for experimentation in journals if you don't control the recommendation and bibliometric evaluation systems, part of the hidden value hoarding proposition is punishing the ability to have the value of work survive the journal
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@jonny @roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff I agree that typesetting is a barrier. I do a lot of self-publishing (digital archives is my field) and we publish our work as PDFs, using OSF as repo & access point, and do our own promotion. We often have to bank on someone from the author group having access to an Adobe product (it's never me lol so I forget which one is for publishing) to do typesetting that looks good. Otherwise it's basically unformatted besides headings.
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@jonny @roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff as a bit of a side tangent, I would rather post as HTML but would like to retain the option for someone to export as PDF. Any tips on how to achieve this in a pretty DIY way?? I have no idea what LaTeX is but I love learning new tech :)
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@j_feral
@roaldarboel @felwert @lschiff
Totally. Bunch of routes depending on source medium. Simplest would be to have source markdown and generate html and PDFs from that. Dont try and touch latex if you dont have to and dont want to take on an inordinate amount of psychic damage, but you can make nice templates to use with eg. pandoc. Alternatively if you only have html you can make special css rules that only apply when you print, so use the print dialogue to render PDF.
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@jonny ah great, I write in markdown usually and I think I have pandoc integrated with Obsidian already (but I had some hiccups getting it set up, not sure it works yet!). Most colleagues write collaboratively in google docs, though, so there's a translation step to obsidian's flavor of md before publishing. Hmmmm. OK so this would be a fun workflow to build but then I'm like, where to host the HTML version lol but I do love the idea of typesetting in md and exporting thank you!!!!
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@j_feral @jonny I'll jump on the tangent train. ;-) This is my perspective as someone who feel there's already a good tech stack and workflow (not perfect by any means, but getting closer), but who also struggles with having to send Word documents back and forth (I know...).
I do most of my writing in VS Code (since I also do most of my coding there), but I really like Obsidian too! Obsidian is about to get real-time collaboration on documents (and a plugin recently "solved" the issue, so can already be done). I would recommend looking into Quarto, which is basically markdown with the option to have code blocks. With Quarto, you can then export either to a website, serve a single HTML, export to LaTeX or Typst (the new player on the field, if you need to I would avoid LaTeX and go straight to Typst) or DOCX.
As a stand-alone solution however, Overleaf, which is sort of Google Docs for LaTeX, does this really well and I previously managed to get collaborators on board. I have since moved away from Overleaf for reasons.
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@roaldarboel
@j_feral
Oh is typst a document syntax? Interesting
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@roaldarboel
@j_feral
Initial thoughts: document and layout macro system seems nice especially after years of being subjected to TeX. I am at once impressed by the audacity and wary of the hubris of choosing not to reuse markdown and TeX math markup when there's no obvious reason why not. Super curious to see if they ported the TeX character-level typesetting engine which is truly the thing it had going for it
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@roaldarboel
They certainly got this right where markdown is wrong
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@roaldarboel
Reversing the order of the link syntax is diabolical tho, and im still wrapping my head around what the doubled function calls are about. I guess as a document syntax it makes sense that the text of something is a special case and always goes in [] where params go in () but its bringing back flashbacks of MATLAB with its whacky(1).ass{[1..3]}.indexing[]
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