Policies

Journal policies and submission requirements must be publicly stated and clear. Consider crafting both internal and external policies, requirements, and guidelines. The LibraryPress@UF offers recommendations for journal policies to reflect better practices in scholarly publishing—contact Chelsea Johnston (DigPart-Staff@uflib.ufl.edu) for more information. We’re also happy to consult with your editorial team if you’d like to write your own policies. Consider focusing on the following areas:

• Authorship. Generally, these are external-facing policies. An example would be a statement on what the journal will consider for publication, including authorship criteria, publishing ownership, and authors’ rights information.
• Submissions. These may be external or internal policies. Externally, consider statements that clarify the submission process. What is considered a duplicate submission, a redundant publication, a translation, and/or a summary? What are the journal’s stances on publication of academic material, such as theses, dissertations, or group research?
• Copyright and licensing. The policy for copyright and licensing should be clear and available for all published material. If the journal uses a Creative Commons license, that information should be clearly displayed on the journal’s About page as well as on the individual articles.
• Research misconduct. Consider preemptive policies and process that deal with allegations of research misconduct including plagiarism, citation manipulation, IRB, and data falsification/fabrication. Editors should plan reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred.
• Marketing and outreach. Advertising policies should be considered, and responsibilities allocated. Think about appointing a member of the editorial board to handle outreach and direct marketing activities.

Archiving

The LibraryPress@UF provides archival services for issues of UF-based journals on Florida OJ. While Florida OJ editorial teams don’t have to worry about the actual act of preserving the journal archives, they should consider sharing information about these services with their readers and authors. This can be done with a basic preservation policy.

Beyond archiving public journal content, editorial teams should think about ways to archive their internal documents, such as author agreements or workflow documents. This can be done easily through Florida OJ’s Publisher Library.

Crafting calls for papers

Consider an open and broad call for papers. Even if the call is restrained to a department or particular event, it is important to state which voices were translated into articles. Consider engaging current and former members of the department or institution, integrating voices that best represent the group.

Subscriptions and fees

While the majority of publications on Florida OJ are open access—and open access is the primary recommendation of the LibraryPress—it is important to be clear on journal fees, even if there are none. Any author fees for editing, translation, or reviewing should be stated, as well as any fees that are required for manuscript processing, publishing, or translating. Again, even if there are no fees, this information should be clearly stated. This information should be available to authors prior to submitting their manuscripts.

It is also important to state any revenue sources or business models on the journal’s About page for transparency.