EKT ePublishing: A successful initiative to support open access institutional publishing

Authors & Affiliation

Marina Angelaki, Dimitris Efstathiou and Irakleitos Souyioultzoglou. - EKT ePublishing

Abstract

The poster presents EKT ePublishing as a suite of comprehensive services to scholarly publishers and an innovative platform for the aggregation and online dissemination of quality-assured research output, the standardisation of electronic publishing workflows and the development of an integrated publishing infrastructure for electronic journals, conference proceedings and monographs.

ePublishing’s operational model is based on the successful collaboration with non-profit research organisations (universities, scholarly societies, research centres), focusing primarily – but not exclusively- on the Social Sciences and Humanities. As of June 2017, ePublishing hosts 26 peer-reviewed academic journals (with more than 8000 articles covering a wide spectrum of topics), 4 series (700 conference papers) of conference proceedings, and 6 monographs. With a growth rate of 25% in content in 2016, ePublishing emerges as the main publishing venue for peer reviewed scientific output in Greece.

Addressing a research community and institutions with no prior experience or open access oriented culture, ePublishing raises stakeholders’ awareness of the benefits associated with the transition to an open scholarly communication context. Thus, ePublishing enables the cultural shift towards open and collaborative scientific practices and the open access/ open science paradigm, by providing economically viable and operationally successful models of transition from print to digital publications. To this end, it is in full alignment with EKT’s strategy of providing to collaborating institutions innovative infrastructures and services - including web hosting, online content management services, training, technical support and consulting services towards the alignment with current international developments.

In addition, ePublishing provides persistent identifiers and indexing services which significantly increase online availability and visibility of high-quality Greek content and enhance the impact of research published in Greece. The publishing platform already meets a number of the technical standards required by OpenAIRE, such as DOIs, harvesting and article-level information provision to DOAJ, and all publications are already harvested by the OpenAIRE aggregators.