Copyrights! Licensing! Academic Publishing!

So, our latest project with Fafnir has been retrofitting our new layout and design to our two 2018 issues (i.e., the issues since Laura and I joined the team); part of the job has entailed creating a new -- and the first -- cover design, front matter, plus a Table of Contents template.

 In addition, I've taken on the self-appointed task of registering Fafnir with the Directory of Open Access Journals in the hopes of raising our academic street cred and visibility.

 Well, the process has been eye-opening.

 First off, all due credit to the people who originally founded Fafnir, who prepared much of the information being directly required by the DOAJ. That makes things radically simpler. As I'm going through their lengthy application, though, I'm discovering that there's so many things I had no clue could be a part of academic publishing, especially for open access journals. 

 For example:
  • The name of our platform or hosting service. (Our what?)
  • any software/spiders crawling through our website. (Spiders? Like Shelob?)
  • Download statistics. (I knew things like this existed, but no idea how to access them for Fafnir.)
  • A plagiarism policy and checker (which, while seemingly obvious, I never imagined necessary for an academic journal).
  • A Deposit Policy Directory (only a vague idea what this is). Also not yet sure if this is the same or different from a digital archive independent from our publisher (something we don't have yet).
So, many of these things I've only just now learned about, thanks to the DOAJ applications, and realized would be necessary and helpful. And that doesn't include all the professional organizations besides DOAJ that I realized are available in support for academic journals.
  • Council of Editors of Learned Journals
  • The Keeper's Registry (for digital archive information, although this is about to close)
  • Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
  • SHERPA/RoMEO
 However, the only thing absolutely confounding me at the moment is the language for copyright and licensing. Apparently, Fafnir already has Creative Commons licensing, although I had to troll through several websites looking for  the machine-readable licensing information. But I'm also starting to suspect that our CC licensing is contradicting Fafnir's retention of the copyright for academic articles -- apparently, "best practice" is that copyright remains with the author, but our original editors were obviously concerned that authors might someday decide to abrogate our open access policy somehow. So, that's the current debate. In the meantime, I've learned more about licensing, pre-print & post-print rights, and whatever else than I ever wanted  to know.

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