Adios JIME!
As I mentioned in my last post, it’s my months of lasts, so you may want to mute the blog for a few weeks. This week I chaired my last meeting as co-editor of JIME. The editorial board pulled together some nice data of my time at the helm:
I became co-editor with Ann Jones, in 2013. In that time the journal has published 197 papers with 604 papers being submitted in that time. As well as editing general issues, I have been the editor of 8 Special Collections, and I’ve encouraged guest editors to curate another 9 Special Collections over the last decade.
I think the most significant thing I achieved while co-editor was the shift from hosting a version of OJS ourselves, to working with Ubiquity Press. We never had enough OJS demand to allocate technical support at a reasonable amount of time, and so we didn’t really stay on top of updates and changes sufficiently. By effectively this to Ubiquity, while covering the APCs from an internal fund, it smoothed things over and meant we spent less time as a board dealing with process and technical issues. Ubiquity have been excellent to work with, they really believe in open access. This model pre-empted the Diamond Open Access model, which has now become a desired approach.
Actually, I’ll amend that – the most significant thing I, and the board realised during this time, was to keep going. Running an open access journal on the edges of people’s time with a small budget is not always the most rewarding thing to do. I always wanted to do more with it, to innovate more, to publish more, to use it as a vehicle for change more. But sometimes doing the work is the real victory, and we’ve published a lot of interesting articles, supported a lot of early career researchers and global south researchers.
I was pleased that the excellent special collection edited by Katy Jordan and Mark Carrigan on Social Media came out as I was departing. And it also looks as though JIME will be part of the agreement with Jisc which means authors from institutions signed up to this will have their APCs paid by the institution. This puts the journal on a good footing for continued publication, and with Rob Farrow coming on board to join Katy Jordan as co-editor, it’s in excellent hands.
