Vardi helps launch new open-access journal

Vardi helps launch new open-access journal

Rice faculty member Moshe Y. Vardi and colleagues recently celebrated the launch of an open-access electronic journal called Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS), which is believed to be the first exclusively network-based, online journal developed by a Rice faculty member.

Moshe Vardi

Most academic journals are either printed on paper or in a hybrid paper-electronic format. Pure-electronic journals are a relatively new phenomenon, but according to the Directory of Open Access Journals, compiled by Lund University, there are already more than 1,400 pure-electronic journals that are either peer-reviewed or editorial board-reviewed.

“This is a relatively small subset of the tens of thousands of available academic journals, but the number is growing,” said Chuck Henry, vice provost and university librarian.

The Rice News recently interviewed Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and professor of computer science and director of the Computer and Information Technology Institute, about his experiences in launching the electronic journal.

Q: It took more than two years to get the journal off the ground. What took the most time and effort to iron out?
A: There are the standard issues of deciding on scope and assembling a top-notch editorial board. Then there are issues that are unique to online journals. For example, the editorial process is completely paperless, supported by a software tool called “Open Journal Systems.” We invested many months of programming in developing the tool.

Q: What were the issues with archiving and copyright? How were these issues different for a pure-electronic journal as opposed to a print-electronic hybrid or a pure-print journal?
A: Acid-free paper lasts 500 years, so persistence of data is not an issue for paper journals. It is very much an issue for an online journal. How can we guarantee that the papers will be found in 25 years? Also, in print journals the publisher takes ownership of the copyright. This did not seem to us to be consistent with the open-access philosophy.

Q: How did you solve these two issues?
A: First, we decided to store the papers on arXiv.org, a large online archive with more than 300,000 articles. It has numerous mirror sites around the world. This ensures availability of the archived material. (A mirror site holds a complete copy of the content from the main archive.) It is considered “too large to fail.” In the case of copyright, we left ownership with the authors. We require the authors to adopt a Creative Commons license, which has a very liberal usage policy.

Q: Private publishers make a lot of money publishing academic journals. Cost recovery must have been a big issue for you here as well. How were you able to fund the journal in a sustainable way?
A: The key is to minimize cash expenses and leverage institutional resources and volunteer labor. As mentioned above, we are leveraging the resources of arXiv. All editorial work is done pro bono. The main Web site of the journal <www.lcms-online.org> is hosted by the Department of Theoretical Computer Science of the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. The department has generously supplied disk space and server capacity on its computers. So far, our only expenses consist of $250 in membership dues to <http://crossref.org>, which is a collaborative, cross-publisher reference-linking service. Thus, our business model is quite different than the more publicized author-pays model of, say, the Public Library of Science.

Q: As the first faculty member at Rice to get one of these off the ground, what advice, if any, would you offer to other faculty who are interested in starting a pure electronic journal?
A: First, be ready to invest many, many hours. The task is much less trivial than it may seem (i.e., “Just create a Web site”). Second, leverage as much as possible the experience of other people. For example, we created an advisory board of scholars with experience in electronic publishing.

Q: As one of several managing editors on the journal, did you divide up the project management tasks related to getting the journal started, or did one person act as the primary lead on resolving issues?
A. We have a chief editor, two managing editors and an executive editor. We ended up working as a collective, with all major decisions arrived at either by consensus or, in certain cases, by voting. My LMCS e-mail folder has over 2,700 notes.

Q: If you had it to do over again, is there anything you’d do differently?
A: I’d start addressing the major issues (archival, copyright and software support) much earlier. We did not realize their importance early on and spent the early period dealing with print-journal issues, since these were the issues we were familiar with.

For more background on open-access to peer-reviewed research, visit <www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm> or <www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm>.