Implementing community-led governance in publishing services

Abstract

These guidelines on community-led governance in publishing services will help ensure coherence, transparency, and effectiveness in editorial management. Community-led governance of journal publishing services requires that clear processes, policies, and structures are put into place that regulate operations and decision-making across publications. Every aspect of how the journal is run, from the composition of the editorial team to peer review protocols and editorial ethics, must be explicitly defined and publicly accessible.

The transparency of the editorial processes leading to the selection of articles is essential for ensuring a trusted relationship between all members of the scientific community who are involved in the journal: authors, reviewers, editors, and readers. A selection process that involves the participation of experts that are external to the editorial team can help ensure the objectivity of editorial decisions.

In this context, the introduction of clear protocols and the dissemination of guidelines are necessary to promote the quality and consistency of publications.

Main Text

Governance refers to the set of processes, policies, and structures that regulate the functioning and decision-making uniformly across all publications in a journal. It is good practice to fully articulate the relationship between publishing services and the publications resulting from them.

Governance. Publishing services:

Elements that Diamond OA publishers could consider:

1. Adopt procedures and guidelines about the composition and responsibilities of the editorial team, submission handling and selection processes (peer review), publication policies, editorial ethics, and transparency in content management.
2. Declare the journal’s mission, objectives, and scope in a clearly structured and easily accessible way on their website.
3. Provide style sheets or guides that provide information about the desired presentation of submissions in a coherent and uniform manner.
4. Define protocols that formalize and make explicit how the different members of the scientific community – authors, editors, and reviewers – interact in decision-making.

These actions include:

• Publication identification: The publisher and its journals should put into place a mechanism that unambiguously establishes a recognized and identified link between the publisher and its journals.
• Dissemination activities.
• Training, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Cooperation with other infrastructures. In the case of co-edition, establish a contractual relationship.
   

5. Ensure that all journals have transparent mechanisms for selecting the members of their respective governance bodies (such as advisory or editorial boards), based on their functions and responsibilities. Make these selection processes publicly available to ensure transparency of governance. It is good practice to have a detailed procedure for the duration of the positions, the required profiles, and the established time, when and how it is renewed: A public, detailed, and accessible protocol, reflecting and ensuring the degree of external decision-making in the publication of content.
    
6. Establish and disseminate guidelines for proper publication planning in aspects related to bodies and decision-making:

• Formalisation and explicitness of decision-making: who makes editorial decisions? How is consensus reached? Are there editorial meetings and what is their frequency? Make a clear distinction between journal-level and publisher-level policies, processes and decisions.
• Provide a timetable specifying how often editorial policies are reviewed, and how new elements and changes are introduced in the editorial guidelines and practices.
   

7. Ensure transparency and homogeneity in submission selection processes. All selection processes must follow general guidelines defined by the Diamond OA publisher, which can be complemented by more specific journal-level guidelines. Recommend that reviewers of submissions are sought outside of the editorial team and the Diamond OA publisher’s institution.
8. Assessment processes: Consider alignment with international initiatives such as DORA and CoARA.

Tips:

• Establish clear protocols for decision-making at every level, from editorial team selection to the review and selection of submissions. This allows to clearly establish the interactions, roles and responsibilities of the various members of the scientific community – authors, editors, and reviewers – in decision-making. These protocols should also address the identification of publications, institutional relations, dissemination activities, training, monitoring, evaluation, and follow-up, as well as collaborating with other services, especially in co-publishing scenarios.
• Implement a detailed and transparent selection process for members of the editorial teams and boards, and clearly define their roles and responsibilities. This process should specify the duration of their appointment, the required profile, renewal procedures, and the selection protocol.
• When applicable, formalise editorial decision-making and planning with defined meeting frequencies.
• Make a clear distinction between journal-level and publisher-level policies, processes and decisions, and establish a schedule for periodic reviews of editorial policies.
• Recommend that reviewers of submissions are sought outside of the editorial team and the Diamond OA publisher’s institution.

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• Ownership and Governance

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• Copyright, authors’ rights policy

Related Training Materials

• Ownership and governance

Further reading

• Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA): https://sfdora.org/
• Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (COARA): https://coara.eu

Licensing

This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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