Journal flipping: A case study from Metropolitan Universities

Abstract

Recent events in scholarly publishing, such as the editorial board of Elsevier’s Lingua resigning en masse, shed light on the dilemma faced by many journal editors: balancing a desire to increase impact with promoting open and sustainable models for publishing. These two goals are not mutually exclusive. Recently, editors and publishers are seeing success in reconciling these goals by converting subscription-based journals to open-access, through a process commonly called journal flipping.

The IUPUI University Library has a history of supporting the publication of open-access scholarly journals through its Open Access Journals at IUPUI program (http://journals.iupui.edu/). A number of titles, most notably Advances in Social Work and Metropolitan Universities, began as subscription-based journals that were only available in print. This poster presents the process for "flipping" Metropolitan Universities, digitizing the full run of issues and making them openly available via IUPUI’s instance of Open Journal Systems.