The e-journal New Frontiers in Spatial Concepts has been published by
the Karlsruher Universitätsverlag since last week.
I spoke to Regine Tobias of the publisher and asked her who is allowed
to publish his works in the journal.
In the first place, they are not students, but scientists.
They find information on the website how to submit the article.
The article is checked by the publisher and sent to the editorial
board.
They do the quality control and we do the fine-tuning.
We put them on and bring them to the platform.
How long does this process take?
We set a goal to do the quality control, the sentence and the optics
within eight weeks.
Why did the Karlsruher Universitätsbibliothek decide to publish not
only books, but also a magazine in their own publisher?
This is because of the Open Access movement.
Science is moving to market its own results with the Internet.
In the last decade, the publishers have increased the price of their
books.
This led to the magazine crisis, with two-digit price increases every
year.
The libraries have forced them to become active, together with
science.
Five years ago, the Universitätsverlag was born from this movement.
Now, the first magazine, Logische Konsequenzen.
We keep going, we cannot be stopped.
How many publications do you expect?
At the moment, we have almost two handfuls of articles in the journal.
We had a preliminary phase.
In the spring, the publishers talked to many authors.
Now we are getting started.
I can't say how many articles there will be.
I hope it won't be more than two articles per week.
Otherwise, it would be a big flood.
But I expect a steady stream of articles.
We don't publish monthly or quarterly articles.
We publish annually.
The number of published articles depends on the topics we focus on in
the next few years.
At the moment, no one can say for sure.
How do you inform the students that there is something like this in
Karlsruhe?
The university publishing house is connected to the university
library.
That means, there is a big advantage in terms of sustainability and
accessibility of the content.
On the Internet, in the community, because we record the journal in
the international proofs.
It is already indexed in Google.
You can find everything within half a week.
We report it in various virtual specialist portals.
They are currently evaluating the content.
As librarians, we have the advantage that the publishing house works
closely with the library.
What do you think?
Do such journals make the conventional library superfluous, as we know
it?
Journals live in libraries.
Without journals, there would be no libraries.
Not in a scientific sense.
Because the majority of our revenue is only for journals.
Books don't play a big role.
That's why I think it's a very nice activity for me as a librarian to
have a different hat as a publisher.
To make your own input in a library and at the same time to bring the
librarian's know-how.
This is a big advantage for the authors who publish in this journal.
Thank you very much, Regine Tobias from the Karlsruher Universitätsverlag.