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Since 2004 the Library & Information Center (LIC) of the University of Patras (UoP), Greece, has been playing a leading role in promoting Open Access in Greece. LIC was watching closely the international trends and developments in Scholarly communication, and it has quite early realized the need and the coming of changes in scientific publishing chain in Greece. Back in 2007 LIC started to experiment with e-publishing, initially within the University environment and later expanding within a national level.
As a first outcome of this experimentation LIC adopted the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform, establishing a close collaboration with the PKP development team which includes interface translations, seminars/tutorials, promoting the platform to the Greek community etc.
On 2007 LIC has lunched the the “Dexameni” digital archive for Greek scholarly journals (xantho.lis.upatras.gr/dexameni/) and after a while the the “Pasithee” e-publishing platform (xantho.lis.upatras.gr/pasithee/) . A year later LIC has started the pilot operation of the Directory of Greek Digital Resources (www.lis.upatras.gr/Libworld/collections/search.php), which indexes and presents digital publishing initiatives in Greece and aims to become a formal registry for Greek scientific resources in digital format.
In this presentation we try to give a detailed description of LIC and UoP OA and e-publishing initiatives, as well as comments on a series of managerial, institutional, financial and technical key issues came out of these efforts, while at the same time we examine the results and the impact of such efforts within the Greek Scholarly Communication environment.
Today more than 10 OJS installations are active in Greece.
the Library During the last years, the dramatic changes in electronic publishing landscape have created new roles and changed the traditional ones. Libraries nowadays have capitalized their experience and knowledge in information technology and electronic publishing to undertake such activities, while they spearhead the campaign for Open Access spreading within academic communities. The Library & Information Center (LIC) of the University of Patras (UoP), Greece, has been playing an active role in promoting Open Access in Greece the last years. Since 2007, LIC has been experimenting with OA publishing practices and tools within the framework of various R&D projects. Two out of the major results of these efforts are:
- the “Pasithee” e-publishing platform (xantho.lis.upatras.gr/pasithee/)
- the “Dexameni” digital archive for Greek scholarly journals (xantho.lis.upatras.gr/dexameni/)
Both platforms are based on OJS-Open Journal Systems e-publishing software. The two installations are appropriately modified to meet LIC’s publishing and archiving requirements respectively. Currently two journals are being hosted in each platform, all of them belonging in the Humanities, while LIC is in negotiations with more publishers and editorial teams to host their journals in LIC’s services accordingly.
In this presentation we focus on the:
- technical and managerial key issues of the development and operation phases,
- services and procedures,
- adopted business model of the services,
- interesting technological, procedural and legal issues and problems that were raised from working together with publishers, editors and authors, and
- future plans for improving and upgrading our e-publishing services in an integrated institutional platform to cover all kinds of publications and data types (monographs, conference proceedings, teaching material, bulletins, magazines etc.)
