Local Impact, Global Reach: How the Journals Online Project Fosters Community-Centric Research

In our previous blog posts this week, we have discussed the need to serve both local and global communities when it comes to open access publishing. Today, we are exploring how this is achieved through the five Journals Online (JOLs) hosted by ]u[ Ubiquity, each of which is part of the ]u[ Ubiquity Partner Network: Bangladesh Journals Online (BanglaJOL), Central American Journals Online (LAMJOL), Mongolian Journals Online (MongoliaJOL), Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL), and Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL).

The Journals Online (JOL) project was started by the International Network for Advancing Science and Policy (INASP) in 1998, with the aim of increasing the visibility, accessibility, and quality of peer-reviewed journals published in low- and-middle-income countries (LMICs). When the project began, many of the participating journals were only available in print within a single institution, so their reach was very limited. The project worked with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) to find a way to host many journals on a single site so that the research output of a whole country could be hosted centrally and be made accessible to a wider audience.

]u[ Ubiquity became involved with the JOLs in 2018, when founder and CEO Brian Hole decided to support the JOLs when INASP’s funding ended for this project. The ]u[ Ubiquity Hosted Journals service provided infrastructure without the expense of additional editorial and production services. Though ]u[ Ubiquity typically operates as a for-profit publisher, no financial profit is made from hosting the JOLs; Brian and the team saw supporting the JOLs as an investment in the wider open access movement, and as a way for the company to do their part in ensuring truly equitable open access.

As the JOLs continue to go from strength to strength, with readership, citations and submissions all continuing to rapidly increase, the research they publish is enriching the global research ecosystem. Moreover, the JOLs are playing key roles in their local research communities.

Career development

Since the project’s inception at INASP in 1998, each JOL platform has been deeply rooted in its contributing region and its academic institutions. From the very beginning, the project has given researchers, particularly post-graduates, an opportunity to produce academic writing for publication, and has provided a local outlet for career development. In the past, this had involved providing training in publishing best practices, and various other supporting services to the editors of participating JOLs, as well as workshops for early-career researchers and authors.

Prior to the JOLs’ existence, opportunities for publishing research that would reach a global audience were limited to large, international journals. The expense of submitting to these journals, not to mention the inequalities that researchers from LMICs continue to face in terms of prejudice surrounding research quality, means that researchers from these regions face high barriers to having their research published accessibly. Through the JOLs, researchers can now publish for free and their work can be widely disseminated, reused and cited, enhancing their profile as authors and furthering their academic careers.

Local management and diversity of research

Since their transfer to local management, the number and diversity of individual journals on the JOLs have increased greatly (see fig. 1). When the project started, the majority of the JOLs were STEM-focused and based at institutions in capital cities from each region. By contrast, they now cover a wide range of academic disciplines, such as the social sciences and humanities, accounting, management, and education, and are based at institutions from all across each region, including more rural areas. This means a far greater breadth of research is now available, both locally and internationally.

The JOLs have been increasingly publishing more research in national languages; CAMJOL, for instance, is entirely in Spanish, and there are many articles now being published in Nepali on the NepJOL site. The research output is consequently becoming even more accessible to local communities, even outside of academia, contributing more than ever to local governments, inhabitants, farmers, engineers and doctors in their everyday life decisions with sound academic local information and data.

Fig. 1 Journals added to NepJOL 2006–2022

Moreover, being hosted by ]u[ Ubiquity but locally managed ensures that the individual editorial teams can remain in control of their journal. ]u[ Ubiquity Hosted Journals provide full functionality support, with the assurance that journals can retain ownership of themselves and full editorial authority.

Pioneering research with real-world impact

The JOLs have provided an outlet for proprietary research that was previously lacking. Having research from LMIC easily available is not only of benefit to the global academic community in diversifying the research ecosystem, but directly serves the local community. Much of the research published, being concentrated on a specific geographical location, has a real impact on local policy and agriculture, and has therefore had a direct impact on the local community beyond the confines of academia.

As the global readership of the JOLs continues to grow, we shouldn’t lose sight of the role of local communities in informing open access. In removing barriers to publishing, and giving back control of research output and dissemination to institutions, local communities (both the academic and wider society) should be the first to benefit; only then can the global follow.