Promoting strategic planning in journal development

Purpose

The role of this programme is to encourage journals publishers and editors adopt long-term strategic planning in their journals development. We advise and help them in applying such a strategy.

Thanks to the long-term follow-up of locally published journals we arrived at an optimal strategy for DTES journals development. The strategy urges for journal internationalization, which involves publishing in English, broadening the circle of authors and reviewers, thematic specialization, diversification of publishing forms, and active search for quality articles leading to the enhancement and diffusion of journals impact.

Based on a dozen of historical case studies from the region, we outlined a tentative four-stage model of development that we are recommending, as a start option, to our partner journals:

1. Building identity at the national level: Providing formal status and financial support for timelessness and quality editing;
2. extending scope to cover the region: Broadening author&reviewers base and providing initial international impact;
3. full internationalization phase: Pursuing admission to top international databases and global citation indexes; and
4. phase of spontaneous self-sustained development: Capitalization of high status/impact, for example by adopting the author-pay model or, exceptionally, by annual subscription.

A strong part of the strategy we advocate is the promotion of Open Access (OA) as a publishing model. Permanent online access to papers, free for all and free from various restrictions such as mandatory registration, is in the best interest of DTES journals pursuing international recognition and better treatment by evaluators and supporting institutions. Financial background for such an approach should be secured through models other then subscription and author-pay systems. Chief among those are sponsoring based on appropriate advertising, and abandoning parallel publishing in paper form.

Only after gaining a solid international status (fourth stage of our model), we recommend switching to other models that generate income on the market, but still within the framework of Open Access, for example, by transition to the combination of subscription with delayed OA, or collecting (economically justified) payments from the authors.

Activities

Within this programme the following activities are held on a permanent basis:

• Promoting strategy through professional conference presentations, and CEES forums and CEES webinars;
• Advising partnering journal editors through consultations based on their case studies;
• Publishing CEES editions and working papers in OA regime;
• Organizing conferences and workshops on Open Access; and
• Studying practices threatening OA and publishing research results on this topic.