Jessica Bay

The Lethbridge Journal Incubator is a joint project of the University of Lethbridge Library, School of Graduate Studies, and Faculty of Arts and Science. Its goal is to address the issue of the sustainability of gold open access journals by aligning the publication process with the educational and research missions of the public University. In this way, the open access publication, which is more commonly understood as a cost center that draws resources away from a host university's core missions, is transformed into a sustainable, high-impact resource that improves retention and recruitment. It does this by providing graduate students with early experience with scholarly publishing (a proven contributor to in- and post-program student satisfaction and career success), highly-sought after research and technical skills, and project management experience. This article provides a background to the problem of financing gold open access publication and reports on the experience of the researchers responsible for establishing the incubator as it leaves its experimental phase and becomes a center of the University.

A defining feature of life in academia is the degree to which we get to decide what is important to us. In many fields there is broad agreement as to what must be taught or what the major research questions are. But there are, outside some certification requirements in the professional faculties, no provincial or national curricula we are required to follow. Likewise, in our work as researchers, we decide what topics and approaches are interesting and appropriate to pursue. We set our own research agendas and through our citation and publication patterns decide collectively what our generation considers to be the most important questions and results. Many of us end up on the editorial boards and agency panels that select the research that is to be funded and published. If we are lucky enough to be tenured, we serve on the committees that decide who our colleagues will be. Not everybody shares in this autonomy, of course, including a growing number of adjunct faculty. And even for those of us who do share in it, a few brilliant exceptions aside, the exercise of our freedom is constrained by our need to work within the consensus we have helped establish. But for the most part the working lives of tenured researchers and teachers, at the very least, are marked by a remarkable degree of autonomy.