OA Lab

Welcome to the OA Lab!

We provide advice and support for researchers who wish to publish in Diamond Open Access (DOA), independently of commercial publishers: as editorial board members, editorial teams, or authors of academic journals.

For Editorial Board Members

Together with you we design:

• new OA journals
• innovative features for your OA journal
• strategies for the further development of existing OA journals

We support you in:

• deciding on formats (HTML, PDF, XML), publishing platforms (e.g. OJS), hosting solutions, and software
• transforming existing print or online journals to OA/DOA (Flipping)
• including your OA journal in relevant databases and metric-based indices (e.g. DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, EBSCO, ERIH PLUS, WorldCat, etc.)
• deciding on suitable OA licenses (Creative Commons)

For questions about:

• funding options for open access publications
• open access requirements of funding organisations (SNF)

please contact the Open Science Team of the University Library of Bern UB: openaccess@ub.unibe.ch

For Editorial Teams

We share our expertise on the following topics:

• designing OA-journal workflows
• editorial process: guidelines for peer review, proofreading, stylesheet…
• production process: formatting, typesetting, proofreading, publication…
• best practices: workflow in OJS, image management (image rights and image editing)
• communication with authors and editorial board, time management…
• plagiarism check: software and handling of plagiarism
• marketing strategies (Social Media)

We offer:

• regular consultation and training for editorial teams of OA journals
• assistance in optimizing editorial workflows

For questions about:

• technical infrastructure for scholar-led open access journal projects such as BOP Serials, Open Journal Systems (OJS), SciFlow Publish, and identifiers (DOI, ISBN, ISSN, GND)

please contact the Open Science Team of the University Library of Bern UB: openaccess@ub.unibe.ch

For Authors

We advise you on:

• image management (image rights and image editing)
• communication with museums, libraries, archives, etc.
• communication with editorial teams of OA journals
• legal questions (copyright)

We provide you with tips on:

• innovative presentation of image material
• embedding multimedia features into texts (video, audio, etc.)

For questions about:

• funding options for open access publications
• open access requirements of research funding institutions
• Article Processing Charges (APC) and Book Processing Charges (BPC)

please contact the Open Science Team at University Library of Bern UB: openaccess@ub.unibe.ch

About Us

The OA Lab is a service of Digital Humanities at the University of Bern. Katharina Böhmer (director) and Alessandra Fedrigo (collaborator) played a key role in establishing the successful art history Diamond OA journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual as editors, are experts in the field of OA publishing for academic journals and specialists in digital image management. They are happy to share their in-depth editorial expertise and practical experience with everyone interested.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Contact:
Katharina Böhmer
Alessandra Fedrigo
oa-lab.dh@unibe.ch