Getting Found, Staying Found, Increasing Impact

Abstract

Publishing a journal is about more than simply putting ink to paper (or pixels to screen). It is a collaboration between you and your readers. Two critical aspects of this relationship are, first, making your journal visible to your prospective audience. By putting your content online and making it freely available through open access, you can be reaching of millions of people around the world. But if they don’t know you are out there, they will not be able to become part of your scholarly community. Second, once you have your content in place, and have established an audience of dedicated readers, you will want to ensure that your journal is always available – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Unlike paper publications, electronic journals can disappear rather easily, either temporarily or permanently. Regular downtime caused by an unreliable server environment, or worse, complete loss of your content due to a lack of any kind of backup or preservation strategy, can seriously undermine your credibility with your readers, or even totally wipe out all of the work you and your collaborators have done together.
 
 This revised edition of Getting Found, Staying Found highlights many aspects of the publishing process that are important for increasing your journal’s “findability” and building a wider audience. Moreover, it will also show you how to ensure reliable and ongoing access to your valuable content. Much of the information in this resource is intended to be generic and could be applied to any journal, using any software platform. However, the authors have opted to include additional information pertaining to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software developed by the Public Knowledge Project to provide further illustrations of how to apply this information in a real world setting.
 
 This guide is designed to offer practical advice on various considerations for making Open Access journals more discoverable and sustainable, and is geared largely towards journals that use the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. This guide is intended largely for journal managers, editors, and those responsible for a journal’s operations. Some of PKP’s other documentation, such as the Learning OJS 3 guide and the PKP Administrators guide contains information pertinent to using and administrating OJS.