Vilnius University Press recently joined OASPA as member in the professional publisher category, adding them to the expanding community of members. We had the opportunity to interview Dr. Arūnas Gudinavičius, Managing Director of Vilnius University Press, and Vincas Grigas, Head of scholarly journals, to delve deeper into their recent decision to become a member of OASPA and learn more about them.
Q. Tell us a bit about your organisation and the service it provides- and your role within it
Vilnius University Press is an academic publishing house in Lithuania that publishes scientific, informational, representational, and popular science books, study literature, scholarly journals, and doctoral theses. The press has been in operation since 1575, when it started as a printing house for Vilnius Academy. The Press is a leader among academic publishing houses in Lithuania and is included in the list of Clarivate Web of Science publishers. It also is one of the largest publishers of scholarly periodicals across the Baltic States and annually publishes about 50 titles books, 70 volumes of scholarly periodicals, and 150 dissertations. All books and scientific papers published by Vilnius University Press are peer-reviewed, and the press supports ethical publishing principles and we operate on the basis of guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Our editors, authors, and peers are subject to these guidelines. A modern scholarly periodicals platform for journal publishing, submissions, peer review and production management was launched in 2011-2013 on the basis of Open Journals Systems. From 2020, articles are published in two formats – PDF for the web and HTML. Most of the scholarly journals published by Vilnius University Press have been awarded the highest openness rating in the DOAJ database – DOAJ Seal.
Q. Why did you decide to join OASPA and what do you hope to get out of your OASPA membership?
The main benefit of OASPA membership is networking opportunities and access to a community of organizations and individuals involved in open access publishing. This could lead to collaborative projects, sharing of experiences, and knowledge exchange. Also, OASPA is a great leader in the open access publishers’ field so members can learn about the benefits of open access publishing and best practices to ensure the success of their OA publications. It is important that OASPA sets standards for ethical practices in open access publishing.
OASPA membership may also provide opportunities to promote innovation in scholarly publishing by contributing to the development and dissemination of new and innovative approaches to OA content. It is valuable that OASPA encourages a competitive market for pure open access publishing in the longer term. We hope that OASPA membership could provide a platform for Vilnius University Press to engage with the open access community and stay up-to-date with industry developments and standards.
Q. How is your organization showing its commitment to making globally equitable participation in open scholarly communication a reality?
We are committed to participation in open scholarly communication by using the latest technology to publish research results from all over the world, including electronic books and scholarly journals in OA format. All our scholarly journals (40+) are diamond open access journals. We aim to follow the international trends of scholarly communication by implementing the latest publishing technologies to ensure long-term preservation. Most of our journals have been assessed as meeting the highest requirements for an open access journal with the DOAJ Seal. To ensure open access to scholarly publications we launched a modern scholarly periodicals platform for journal publishing, submissions, peer review, and production management based on Open Journals Systems, an open-source software. We aim to bring the archives of all published scholarly journals into the current publishing platform, including journals with a long history dating back to the 1950s. This will ensure that their publications are easily accessible and preserved for the long term.
Q. What do you think are the main challenges for funders and institutions to move to incentivising open publishing practices as a positive contribution to career development?
One of the main problems is researchers’ lack of awareness of OA initiatives and resources, reluctance to embrace OA sometime due to traditional academic values, perception of OA as a low-ranked factor when deciding where to publish, concerns about plagiarism and copyright, the high prevalence of predatory journals, and finding resources to finance publishing without employing APCs (staying diamond open access). For journals from less known countries, for relatively young publishers and journals with relatively low impact factors it is difficult to attract high quality papers and widely recognised authors. This is highly related to reliance on prestige and impact factors of journals to evaluate research and researchers, which can hinder the adoption of open publishing practices. The Metrics Tide report and the Leiden Manifesto provide a basis for the development of alternative evaluation criteria, but implementing them on a large scale may require significant effort and time. There is also a need for a cultural shift in academia, where open science practices are seen as valuable. Strangely enough there are still concerns about the quality and credibility of research published in open access journals (diamond open access journals usually have lower IF than those with APC). Addressing these concerns through appropriate quality control mechanisms can help alleviate these concerns.
Q. How do you think OASPA can help mitigate those challenges?
Using strong network and communication channels OASPA could lower researchers’ lack of awareness of OA initiatives and resources, reluctance to embrace OA, differentiate OA journals from predatory journals (for some it as if equal, especially if a journal is from “unknown” country as Lithuania), helping in finding resources to finance publishing without employing APCs (supporting diamond OA). OASPA’s advances in organising workshops and widely recognized conferences, wide network of members, including fully open access publishers, mixed-model publishers, is a strong basis for impact on the OA field at scale.
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