Open Access

Internet Policy Review considers the open access movement integral to the future of scholarly work. Two foundations of the journal's embodiment of openness include that

Concept

As an open access journal that thematically focuses on developments in internet policy, Internet Policy Review enjoys the unique advantage of a journal where academic content and form coincide. We take this as a calling to further think through the role that journals play in the broader academic environment, to actively test new possibilities for scholarly communication, and to build on journals as useful discursive platforms for established academics, emerging scholars, civil society actors, as well as the general public.

The Internet Policy Review’s guiding principle is that small, area-specific journals play an important role in fostering academic development and transdisciplinarity. By maintaining control over the presentation and organisation – that is, avoiding standardised platforms or ready-made mega-journals – the process of academic publication grows with the needs of evolving fields in a reciprocal relationship.

In this regard, the journal’s understanding of open access extends beyond the classic ‘gratis’ or ‘libre’ open access definitions, i.e. the removal of cost barriers to reading articles (the “green” and “gold” paths) and the lack of restrictions on repurposing, respectively. Instead, it encompasses a more diffuse, flexible, and innovative approach: an ethos that supports emerging fields.

It is in this context, that Internet Policy Review is proud to be a member of the Radical Open Access Collective.

Accessibility

One integral aspect of open access lies in ensuring that articles are not only available but also accessible to readers – Internet Policy Review details its efforts in this regard in its accessibility statement.

Exchange on open access

The Internet Policy Review team participates in the open access community in a variety of ways; these include debates, blog posts, and conference attendances. Here are just a few examples:

Innovations

As part of its commitment to open access and to advancing the field of internet research, Internet Policy Review constantly explores new possibilities.

One of these is Open Abstracts, a feature developed through a pilot grant from the European Commission (OpenAIRE FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot). This new journal feature applies the open source “release early, release often” philosophy to academia. It allows anyone to submit (topical) extended abstracts for a proposed or conjectured academic item such as an article, paper, conference talk, or any other project. The particularity of the feature is that the authors receive peer review within two weeks, including by seasoned reviewers in our database and by the larger academic community. All levels of scholars are encouraged to use the feature; from an undergraduate student writing a final paper for a seminar, to a long-term study undertaken at an established institution.

This reflects the Internet Policy Review’s attempt to leverage existing journal infrastructure to build new forms of academic exchange.

Read Open Abstracts: a new peer review feature that helps scholars develop connections and encourages transdisciplinarity” on the LSE Impact Blog.

Standards & interoperability

As important as new and innovative approaches are, the spirit of open access calls for adherence to established standards of interoperability and archiving. Internet Policy Review undertakes a number of efforts to ensure this.

One of the ways is metadata accessibility:

  • The journal’s OAI-PMH endpoint can be reached at the following URL and interacted with as a standard REST API: policyreview.info/api/oai
  • All of our journal articles are automatically uploaded to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Metadata can thus be retrieved over the DOAJ API as well.
  • Accurate metadata can also be retrieved from digital object identifiers (DOIs) or from each article's URL.
  • Furthermore, one fourth of the journal’s articles are available in JATS XML - Journal Article Tag Suite - form. This format, developed by the United States National Institutes of Health, is the preferred form for long-term archiving and semantic enrichment of journal articles. We hope to have all articles in JATS form soon.
  • As part of the JATS effort, structured reference lists (in citeproc-json format) will be made available in this timeframe as well. In addition to enabling indexing, this may help researchers easily trace bibliographic data.

Tools & knowledge

In order to contribute to the long-term health of the open access ecosystem, Internet Policy Review returns knowledge, experience, and tools to the broader community. This is meant to give new players guidance and minimise infrastructural costs for other small open access journals, allowing them to benefit from our experimentation and likewise invest in further features.

We maintain a Github repository of resources that includes an instruction manual for running your own Lagotto instance to track metrics. These are living documents through which we try to share recommendations and point out pitfalls to be avoided.

As tools reach feature stability, maturity in terms of functionality, and thorough documentation, these will be released as well. Web developers that we are working with, dieSachbearbeiter, have been placing Drupal modules online:

Addittional works-in-progress – for which we are open to collaboration – include:

Contact & collaboration

Internet Policy Review is always open to collaboration in the open access field. These might include jointly developing tools or other pieces of infrastructure, creating innovative new formats and exchanging over organisational and revenue models. The overarching aim is to:

  • Minimise technical overhead costs, especially for journals with small staff
  • Streamline complicated or time-intensive processes
  • Support open standards and interoperability
  • Encourage field-responsive innovations in academic publishing.

Write us at editor@policyreview.info