Sissa Medialab partners with Janeway to migrate their 7 journals

We are very pleased to announce that the OLH's in-house digital publishing platform Janeway has partnered with Sissa Medialab to migrate their journals. Sissa Medialab is an Italy-based organization owned by SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies). The organisation runs seven online journals in STEM fields and science communication, as well as publishing conference proceedings. This new partnership with Janeway will provide publishing infrastructure for the submission, curation, processing and preservation of this content. 

Sissa Medialab started its activities in 1997 with the launching of the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP), the first electronic journal specialised in the field. Launched shortly after the XXX preprint archives at Cornell University (now known as ArXiV), JHEP took early advantage of new technologies. In recent years, it has been a pioneer in open access and has embraced the philosophy of open science. 

Sissa’s other in-house journals include the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM), the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP), the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment (JSTAT), Proceedings of Science (PoS), the Journal of Instrumentation (JINST) and the Journal of Science Communication - América Latina (JCOMAL). JHEP, JCAP, JSTAT and JINS have particularly high visibility in their fields. JHEP is considered the top journal in its field of high energy and nuclear physics. 

Maria Teresa Leo from Sissa Medialab said of this new collaboration: “Adopting an open-source system like Janeway represents for us another step towards openness and fairness and reinforces our spirit of collaboration with other actors of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. We believe that Janeway will be a good basis which, however, will need 2-3 years of development work by us to reach the necessary level of complexity that we need to run smoothly around 7000 submissions per year both in STEMS and in the Science Communication fields.

“We are thrilled to embark on such an enterprise and to collaborate with the current Janeway developers. We trust that our different expertise and background will enrich us mutually and will increase Janeway’s quality and versatility.

“From a practical point of view, our decision to adopt Janeway was made at the end of March 2022 after a 1-year study phase where we studied the current publishing landscape to make a list of requirements that the new WJS should fulfil and after analysing many alternatives. We studied many open-source systems, the best off-the-shelf systems, and we considered the possibility of developing a new in-house system (which is what we did, quite successfully, in 1996–97 and in 2003–04).

“We have chosen Janeway because we believe that working with an open-source project is ethical and avoids having to re-invent the wheel. Moreover, among the OS systems, we regard Janeway as the best both for its current level of development and for the technology it uses (Django, Python, ...).”

“The Janeway team are looking forward to assisting the SISSA Medialab team in their efforts to make Janeway work for their use cases,” said Andy Byers, Senior Pub Tech Developer. “Janeway was developed with extensibility in mind and it’s always interesting and exciting to see what use other organisations can put Janeway to.”

Janeway is a digital platform designed for publishing scholarly research material. Launched in 2017, the platform provides a workflow for the submission, processing and presentation of scholarly materials. It is developed by Professor Martin Eve, Mauro Sanchez, Andy Byers and Joseph Muller at the Centre for Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London, and the Open Library of Humanities, UK. For more information about Janeway and its hosting packages, please visit: https://janeway.systems/.

Janeway is currently being used by the OLH journals as well as by other external presses such as Washington University, Iowa State Digital Press, Huddersfield University Press, Michigan Publishing, the University of Essex and the University of West London among others. It will be used soon too by California Digital Library for their pre-print publications. The platform has also recently been awarded a $100k grant from the Next Generation Library Publishing project to test and improve publishing pathways and services for authors, editors and readers, for continued work on Janeway.

If you are interested in learning more about Janeway or in hosting your journal with the platform, please visit: https://janeway.systems/hosting. 

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