Lund Virtual Medical Journal Makes Self-Archiving Attractive and Easy for Authors

Abstract

This article highlights the importance of communication and collaboration with units outside the library to make self-archiving attractive to authors. The monthly electronic publication, Lund Virtual Medical Journal (LVMJ), published by the Department of Strategic Communication of the Faculty of Medicine at Lund University, started as a response to the need to increase the visibility of ongoing research by the Lund University faculty, and with the aim of showing all published faculty-authored articles. At the time the journal was launched, Lund University Libraries Head Office had set up their institutional repository for the university, LU:research. This article describes features of LVMJ and the synergistic relationship between LU:research and LVMJ. It also discusses some of the challenges in producing LVMJ and future plans for the journal.

The Open Access Divide

“…Among other concerns, faculties usually do not know how to handle the copyright, version control, and many other related issues of an article when depositing it to a repository, e.g., which rules are applicable in which disciplines and which journals, etc. or the faculties simply do not have time to make the contribution no matter how easy a self-archiving process is [91][92][93][94]. Early career faculty members are particularly concerned with tenure and promotion and cannot envision a logical connection between participation in OA and assessment of scholarship, as there is not an intrinsic reward in the existing academic structure to accommodate their efforts in the experiment [1].…”