A View from Editorial

In November, the OLH team was delighted to host our 2024 Editors Workshop, ‘Community and Inclusion in Scholarly Publishing’. This event brought together editors from many of our OLH journals to discuss important and evolving topics in open access scholarly publishing, ranging from the need for greater accessibility for users of our journals, the importance of inclusion and community to build strong open access publishing networks, and the growing use of AI tools and generative AI in publishing workflows. The event gave participating editors the opportunity to present an overview of their journal’s latest developments, and encouraged them to contribute their own perspectives on the topic of each session. The OLH Editorial Team was thrilled to welcome keynote speaker, Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication for Lyrasis, who presented an in-depth look at the importance of building global open access scholarly networks for the longevity of journals and their research. The OLH Editorial Team has listened to these valuable contributions and will take on board all feedback to improve our own editorial policies, practices and plans moving forward. We hope that everyone who took part in the event found it both useful and enjoyable!

In light of feedback from our editors over the course of the year, the Editorial Team at the OLH recently put together guidance on image reproduction permissions for the OLH open access journals, which outlines best practice on securing and declaring the right to reproduce images within open access articles, particularly those published under Creative Commons licenses such as CC BY 4.0, the OLH’s preferred license for articles. We also updated our guidance on ensuring anonymous reviews, with particular emphasis on supporting our current and incoming journals to undertake smooth anonymous peer review processes. We have asked our journals to work with us to make sure that their journal’s own editorial policies are updated to reflect the latest guidance given by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), an important ongoing process that means all the OLH journals will be working to the highest editorial standards of research integrity, transparency, and ethical practice.

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