Journal Publishing Partnerships
Columbia Libraries supports the creation, discovery, and dissemination of open-access research by providing technical publishing support and covering hosting and related costs for over 30 scholarly journals. We collaborate with Columbia-affiliated faculty and students who produce and curate scholarly content focused on a range of topics. We support editors in learning about the traditional scholarly publishing ecosystem and give them support to push its boundaries and leverage its existing infrastructure and strengths.
On this page you can learn more about our partnership program. You can browse our list of resources for journal partners here. Upcoming workshops can be found on the Columbia Libraries Workshops page.
To see our list of current partners with links to their journals, please visit journals.library.columbia.edu.
While we are not actively seeking new partnerships at this time, you can contact us at publishing@library.columbia.edu with questions related to resources for Columbia authors and journal editors.
Our publishing partners receive a thoughtful level of support for their publications. As such, we endeavor to provide a core set of standard services to all of our publishing partners, which includes:
- Access to our journal publishing platform, Open Journal System (OJS) multisite. This includes providing pre-set template options, a design consultation to set up basic journal “look and feel” and help with logo creation
- Training opportunities and consultations for editorial board members
- Training resources on our Partner Resources page
- General technical support for the publishing platform and related workflows, and troubleshooting the digital publishing platform
- Registration and maintenance of unique identifiers (Digital Object Identifiers or DOIs) through Crossref
- Assistance in indexing of your journal in appropriate discovery platforms and registries
- Guidance, consultation, and templates for various journal-related policies and procedures
- Consultation and recommendations for journal legacy/transition planning
- Preservation of journal content in Columbia’s Academic Commons
- Annual statistics reporting
The responsibility of managing and sustaining academic journals is a large commitment. As part of this work, our partners are expected to:
- Develop and share editorial policies and guidelines for your journal.
- Migrate any existing content to your new journal site.
- Select a license for your journal, and include that information on the journal’s website footer, on article HTML pages, and in article PDF galleys.
- Include galley files (PDF, EBOOK, and/or HTML) for all published articles for which DOIs are registered.
- Publish at least one issue a year.
- Manage the editorial and publishing process, which entails
- Following good and ethical editorial practices, as described in the Committee on Publication Ethics Core Practices;
- Creating and maintaining your editorial board;
- Soliciting submissions and managing the review, editing, and publication process through the publishing platform.
- Create and use an Author Agreement template and store all signed documents in a central location.
- Responsibly and ethically use copyrighted materials. Review the following page on the Columbia Copyright Advisory Services, and consult with the Director of Copyright Advisory Services at Columbia University Libraries.
- Keep the information, publishing agreements and administrative materials up to date on your journal website.
- Have a comprehensive transition document that includes your journal’s policies and workflows and that lists important contact information, and is updated annually and stored in a central location.
- Provide the Libraries with current names and contact information for the editorial board members and liaisons annually before the start of the academic year.
- Send one editorial board member (at minimum) to the Libraries’ annual training session for the digital publishing platform.
- Grant the Trustees of Columbia University the non-exclusive right to make a digital copy of the hosted work(s) available for permanent archiving and for public access in the Columbia University Libraries institutional repository, Academic Commons, or any successor initiative based at Columbia University.
Student journals must identify at least one faculty advisor–and ideally two or more–and introduce your advisor(s) via email to Libraries staff. If your advisor changes, you must communicate this to Columbia Libraries staff. Note that for student journals, faculty advisors are required for DOAJ inclusion.
If a student journal is formally affiliated with or seeks to represent a department, center, or institute on campus, the consent of that department, center, or institute must also be obtained in writing.
Student journals are expected to have an Editor in Chief (or co-Editor-in-Chief) who is a current Columbia University student and maintain an editorial board that includes 50% or greater current Columbia University students.
Student journals may not publish high school student work.
At times it becomes necessary for the Columbia Libraries to sunset journals, such as in the cases when a journal has not published an issue in a year or longer, the board is unresponsive, or the faculty advisor is no longer able to support or recruit board members. In the event that the Columbia Libraries decides to end the partnership with a journal, the current editor in chief will be given 60 days notice.
If a journal wishes to end its publishing relationship with the Columbia Libraries, they must provide 60 days notice to publishing@library.columbia.edu, which will initiate a library sunsetting workflow.