After almost two years brainstorming, planning, and editing the Special Issue: Open Access: Diverse Experiences and Expectations (2024-25), the diamond open access Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (JLSC) announces the issue’s completion with a collection of 15 articles focused on topics such as open access publishing models for journals and books, open access institutional repositories, open access digital collections, open government data, research assessment, open source software, open knowledge, an open GLAM sector, international relations, and inequalities in scholarly communication.

The initiative enhances the discussion on open access initiated 10 years ago via a previous JLSC article, Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe, in which a group of authors discuss the global participation in research and scholarly publishing.

Having set out to represent diverse experiences and expectations in the Open Access landscape over the last ten years, JLSC assembled a team of editors, guest editors, authors, and reviewers from many countries around the globe, making it the most geographically diverse representation on a topic published by JLSC to date. To share these experiences, guest editors launched the issue with an introductory piece, Open Access: Diverse Experiences and Expectations, along with an updated commentary from a subset of the original authors of Bottlenecks, Planet of the APCs: A decade of progress and setbacks in open access.

The special issue “offers a ten-year reflection on progress and persistent challenges in OA publishing, demonstrating the complexity and diversity of OA in practice today and seeks to expand the conversation by foregrounding new voices and local realities from a wide range of regions”, says Janet Catterall, one of JLSC’s Editors-in-Chief.

We thank everyone involved in this process; the authors, the peer reviewers, the JLSC editors, guest editors, and the internal advisory board and  broader committee staff. Also, we hope the readers have enjoyed engaging with these articles, now and into the future. The current JLSC committee also thank those who have contributed to JLSC since its inception in 2012, making it a pioneering diamond OA journal.

Further, JLSC has recently become a signatory to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). This decision has been made to reaffirm our commitment to responsible research assessment (RRA) and the role we can play as a journal in this movement. The editorial team is currently working on JLSC’s public statement that will outline the ways in which the journal is taking practical steps to demonstrate its advocacy for RRA.  

JLSC is always looking to further expand its pool of peer reviewers. The special issue allowed us to diversify our list of peer reviewers by including reviewers from more geographic locations and from expanded areas of interest, and we are committed to furthering this work. We encourage participation from those new to the profession, those new to peer review, and particularly those bringing perspectives beyond expanding Western paradigms to join us! Please register your interest by signing up as a reviewer.

More information about JLSC may be found in our scope statement.