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Flockademic: Flockademic helps editors who want to convert to/start an Open Access journal by providing the technical journal infrastructure free of charge.
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At a glance
- Submission Name: Flockademic
- Contact Lead: [email protected] or @Flockademic on Twitter.
- External Site Link: Blog, and Flockademic.com
- Region: #Europe
- Issue Area: #OpenAccess
- Issue Type: #Project
- Types of Support Needed: #GraphicDesign
Description
Flockademic is an attempt to get more journals to flip to an Open Access model. By taking over the work of having to set up journal infrastructure and to obtain funding, academics can start a journal independently of the traditional publishers - and make it Open Access.
What are we working on during the do-a-thon? What kinds of support do we need?
The initial version of Flockademic is currently in development. Although it is working well, no designer is involved with the project yet, so it does not look that good. The goal of the Do-a-thon is to design a landing page and/or the article submission flow.
Although they could help, copywriting and coding skills are not needed - it will be made into a working website later. If you'd like to look at what we currently have, view Flockademic on GitLab.
How can others contribute?
This is a remote project. If you're interested in getting involved, let me know at [email protected] or leave a comment here. We can then find the process that works best for you and your skills and interests. ~~I will set up a chatroom for November 13th to facilitate real-time communication.~~ Chatroom here.
This post is part of the OpenCon 2017 Do-A-Thon. Not sure what's going on, head here
Are you aware of PKP's OJS (Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal System)? It has been / is being used by 10,000+ journal titles. It has also been used by many JOLs (journal online) projects, e.g. AJOL (Africa), NepJOL, PhilJOL, BanglaJOL, SLJOL etc.) to give visibility to content from LMICs. It is FOSS. Overwhelming majority of journals on it are OA, though it does not necessarily prohibit non-OA usage.
@asbtariq Thanks for taking a look. Yes, I have done research into the alternatives, so I'm aware of OJS and other alternatives. They mainly provide the software and optionally support, though, rather than a fully hosted solution that is ready to use.
Great @rchampieux! I've set up a chatroom here (sign-in with GitHub possible). If you hop in we can have a chat :)
Take a look ar say BanglaJOL. It is just the basic OJS software. Very little has been done to it except a very small amount of design to give it a brand. OJS is already set up to host multiple journals if you want it to.
@asbtariq Thanks for the links. The purpose of Flockademic, however, is not to provide software to run a journal (although as it's open source, I guess it does that as well), but to provide a hosted solution. In other words, you visit Flockademic.com, enter the details of the journal you want to start (name, who the editors are, etc.) and you can start accepting submissions. Do you know of projects that do that?
An update in response to @JosephMcArthur's email about the Community Call (which will be during a presentation I am giving about Open Access...).
So in January the very first version of Flockademic was launched. There have been a number of updates since in response to feedback by the first users, but usage stats also showed that the barrier to prolonged participation was a bit too high.
Thus, I'm currently working to lower that barrier, hoping to launch that soon. Basically, I want to encourage academics to share their research as preprints on their personal title, the incentive being to raise their academic profile. That will hopefully result in the immediate increase of green Open Access articles, and at a later point be a good gateway towards full community-maintained journals.
As for the design, which this issue was originally created for: unfortunately, although I guess it's passable now, it's also rather bland and standard. In other words: more contributors would still be very much welcomed :) (Also in other areas, of course.)
@Vinnl I have followed your blogs on Medium for a while and really like your initiatives. My colleagues and I have started the INArxiv as well (a preprint/repository server for Indonesian scientists) since Aug last year and it harvested a lot of positive response. I see that you are promoting an alternative hosting platform. That's really good, aside to only use the mature OJS platform with no where to host the software and the files. The other thing that lacking with the OJS that although it's claimed as online journal platform, but it's still using an old perspectives of periodicals. So it won't match with today's needs of an online journals, like for instance PLOS and PeerJ.
Now the problem with Indonesian scientific community and the journal accreditation system (yes we have one, can you believe it), they are too attached to OJS way in looking at scientific publishing. I can say that 98% of Indonesian journals are using the OJS. So if I decide to use your platform, can I adopt the open peer review system and also can I mint DOI to each article?
Hi @dasaptaerwin, thank you for the kind words, and for your work with INArxiv - as you know, I've mentioned it as an example of worthy initiatives on Medium :)
As for your questions: not yet. The end of the period in which I will be able to support the project on my own is nearing, so right now the focus is on raising funds. DOIs especially can only be minted by organisations that pay a membership fee, for which I currently have no funds available. That said, both DOI minting and open peer review are definitely on the radar, so I will get back to you once Flockademic is in a position to better support it.
One question though: is the Open Science Framework lacking in any way in fulfilling your needs? As far as I know it does allow you to host/link software and other files, right?