Launching a Multidimensional Open Access Journal in Historical Demography

Prepared for the Second European Historical Population Samples Network Meeting, Budapest 4-5 September 2012

Koen Matthijs & Paul Puschmann on behalf of EHPS Working Group 2

1 Aims of the Journal

1. Offering historical demographers a journal to publish their international comparative research conducted with the help of IDS and the EHPS community.

2. Informing the EHPS community and other interested people about the progress of the different working groups.

3. Exchanging information on data (databases, data structure, data mining, etc.)

4. Giving credit to programmer’s by offering them a portal to publish about the extraction programs they develop.

5. Functioning as an outlet for full grown products from the EHPS collab.

2 Why Open Access?

• All entries in the journal are free available for researchers, students and the broader public. This– Increases the visibility and citation chances; – Decreases inequality in access to research results around the

world;– Creates equal opportunities for authors around the world to

publish;– Decreases dependency of scholars of commercial publishing

houses.

3 The Road to Open Acces: A Short History

• Budapest Open Access Initiative 2001• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the

Sciences and Humanities 2003• LERU Roadmap to Open Access

– Two open Access Strategies:1. Green Route towards Open Access

2. Golden Route towards Open Access

4 Feedback from Meetings in Amsterdam and Glasgow

• Nature of the Journal: double blind peer reviewed journal versus newsletter versus blog.

• Name of the Journal: the word ‘newsletter’ should be avoided in the title.

• Financial issues: making an overview of costs and revenues.

• Publishing strategy: assistance of a publishing house versus software packages like Open Journal Systems versus assistance from non-commercial library services like Igitur.

5 A Potential Way to Proceed

• The Journal will combine a blog, a newsletter function and peer-reviewed articles in different sections

• Specific offer from Libis (IT Service of KU Leuven)– For about 20.000 Euro’s Libis will take care of the IT related tasks of

the establishment of the journal: hardware and software.– KU Leuven will pay 50% of the costs, the other 50% is paid from the

ESF budget. The latter percentage can be lowered if we find additional partners.

– To keep the journal functioning we would need another 10,000 Euro’s a year (5,000 paid by KU Leuven, 5,000 by ESF).

• Editorial assistance (proof reading, facilitating review) from Leuven University Press.– Costs are estimated at some 5.000 Euro a year.

• Voting for name for the Journal.

6 Planning

• With the help of Libis the Journal can be launched ideally in the beginning of 2013