Tools and practices in Scholarly communication initiatives in Greece: take the «OJS» train?

• Κύριοι συγγραφείς: Georgiou, Panagiotis, Papadatou, Fieroula
• Άλλοι συγγραφείς: Γεωργίου, Παναγιώτης
• Μορφή: Conference (paper)
• Γλώσσα: English
• Έκδοση: 2011
• Θέματα: Scholarly communication; Electronic publishing; Open Access; Επιστημονική επικοινωνία; Ηλεκτρονικές εκδόσεις; Ανοικτή Πρόσβαση

It is only the last 5-6 years that Greek scholarly communication stakeholders have realized the importance, the necessity and the opportunities of going digital. Nevertheless during that period a significant progress has been made in the direction of transition to digital environment. Academic Institutions, Libraries, societies and lately commercial publishers have set up a considerable number of e-journals and digital journals archives opening new ways to Greek scholars, mainly those in humanities and medicine, to communicate their work and to overcome barriers and limitations such as this of the language. In this paper we are attempting a detailed analysis of current scientific publishing landscape in Greece, with a specific focus to tools, practices and services utilized in the various e-publishing and e-archiving initiatives. This work is based on data from the operation of the Greek Directory of Digital Resources (http://www.lis.upatras.gr/Libworld/gr_resources_EL.php), as well as from our systematic work on monitoring scholarly communication in Greece the last 4 years. We study traditional print journals, exclusively e-journals and hybrid titles and we analyze information on a series of aspects like: publishing model and type, subject areas, software platforms and tools and level of services provided to users (indexing level, search & retrieval services, content delivery methods, personalization etc). The analysis states a clear positive message about the digital transition progress of current Greek scholarly publications: -- More than a third of current active titles have some or all their content available on the web, in different formats and ways -- Most of these cases refer to hybrid titles (40%) while 25% of the cases concern pure electronic journals and the rest 35% journals that maintain a kind of digital archive of their content. -- Academics and scientific and professional societies are leading the way in e-publishing -- In 72 % of the cases there is Open Access to the available content. Most initiatives are operating through a more or less advanced/sophisticated application/platform: 28% a standardized one (e.g. OJS, DSpace) and 34% a custom one although with a low level of basic and advanced services to the users. This seems to be a major discordance to the general image as in less than 30% a basic level of tools and services are employed (e.g. systematic article indexing, search the content, alerts etc.). Finally OJS is used in something more that 10% of the total cases, but when it comes to exclusively electronic publications, then this percentage rises up to 43%! (The rest concerns cases using simple HTML pages or custom applications). This fact, along with the upcoming of the already known relevant initiatives, obviously makes OJS the dominant e-publishing platform in Greece so far.