How to Start Your Own Journal: The Open Journal of Astrophysics

The astronomer Peter Coles officially founded The Open Journal of Astrophysics in 2016. It’s an overlay journal, offering free peer review for selected papers submitted to the arXiv pre-print server. Colin Stuart spoke to Coles about the origins of the journal, how it works, and the challenges of scientific publishing in the 21st century.

Where did the idea for the journal come from?

I was in a meeting at Cardiff University during a financial crisis we had there, around 2010, trying to save costs. Somebody revealed how much subscriptions to academic journals were costing. We could have hired a couple more lecturing staff. It occurred to me that I hadn’t looked at a journal for a very long time. We got all of our information from the arXiv. I thought: why are we wasting money on all these journals when all we really need to do is referee the arXiv, and that’s free?

How did you go about making the idea a reality?

I moved to the University of Sussex, in the UK, and started a prototype. We made our own test web platform, published a few papers, but it really only started in earnest when I moved to Maynooth University, in Ireland, in 2018. I was talking with the Head of Digital here at Maynooth University, Fiona Morley, who said we’ve got a budget to explore this. So we started publishing routinely on a proper platform. We were very small to start with, but gradually we’ve increased. From the start until now is 15 years.

And how is the journal growing?

I think it’s partly word of mouth and partly because we have a very good Editorial Board who are well connected. Last year I also had a sabbatical, traveling to give talks about open-access publishing and the Open Journal particularly. I was in Spain and Australia, and we’re getting quite a lot of submissions from Australia and we’re getting more from Europe as well.

We have some very well-known authors now and I think it’s snowballed. It was a slow start—we went from publishing about one paper a month, to one paper a week. Then last year we published 10 papers a month.

How is the journal funded?

The editorial board, myself and all the editors are volunteers, as are our referees. Last year those 120 papers cost a total of about $5000. That’s less than the cost of one APC or Article Processing Charge (a fee charged by the journal to authors) at a typical journal, and it’s certainly less than the cost of an old-style journal subscription for a year.

In terms of the refereeing process, is there any difference to a traditional journal?

We generally use two referees, whereas most astronomy journals will only use one. I think our refereeing is also quite strict. We accept only about 54% of submissions, lower than many other journals. When we started out, we wanted to do all kinds of radical things and I would still like to be able to do some of those. One of them is to publish referees’ reports alongside papers. The problem there is finding referees. It’s all volunteers and it’s perfectly reasonable that some decline because they haven’t got time. We thought it would make it even harder to get referees if we published their reports, even anonymously. So we went with a model which is pretty much the same as other journals.

If I had a bit more money, we would probably add additional things like a comments facility on papers. I quite like the idea that readers could comment on the platform about papers.

How is the journal being received? Are the papers being cited in a similar way to a traditional journal?

Our citation numbers are higher than some of the other main journals. Our impact factor is around seven, which is certainly competitive with Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Do you have plans to grow the journal and publish more papers?

There’s a basic issue that the people who run this journal are part of Maynooth University, which is a small university in Ireland and we’re up against very big publishing operations. Obviously, it would be a bit unreasonable to expect a small Irish university to shoulder the burden of all publishing in astronomy across the world. However, that’s not the way I see the future. I think the future of this is a much more federated system—a network of overlay journals that cooperate on peer review, rather than growing a mega journal out of this one.

I’ll be retiring in a few years and I do the bulk of the managing editor job and the publishing. If it got much bigger, I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect somebody to do it in their spare time like I am.

In more general terms, is the current state of scientific publishing fit for the 21st century?

The traditional scientific journal is an 18th-century hangover. In the early days of science, places like the Royal Society published papers. You had to make a physical copy and circulate it. It was an expensive thing to do. Now, the cost of publishing is minimal. The basic cost of curating each paper is probably tens of dollars, not the thousands of dollars that you get charged via an APC. I would like to see research institutions live up to their public status as being providers of scientific results, information and dissemination of academic research in a way which is free to the public. I’m afraid that probably means cutting out the commercial publishers who make enormous profits out of this. Most of the APC is not cost, it’s profit. Science can’t afford this any longer. It’s a waste of money—it would be much better spent on actually doing the science.

We haven’t published that many papers, but this little journal has saved the astronomical community worldwide over half a million dollars for a $5,000 outlay. And if lots of other journals tried to do that, then I think it would make a big impact worldwide.

Lead image:"NASA Missions Spot Cosmic ’Wreath’ Displaying Stellar Circle of Life" by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, CC BY 2.0.