Welcome to the final ]u[ Ubiquity newsletter of 2024!

We have several updates to share, including a major milestone for UPLOpen.com, some exciting job openings at some of our journals, and expansion of our partner presses’ canon. Read on to find out more…

In this newsletter…

• Several positions open at Ubiquity journals
• UPL Open reaches a new milestone
• New partner press books
• New Journal: The Journal of Peer Learning
• 94.5% of active journals on the Ubiquity platform have no form of author fees
• Where to find us — ]u[ Ubiquity’s upcoming conference schedule
• Upcoming books and books published this quarter

The Journal of Peer Learning is now live and accepting submissions!

The Journal of Peer learning has recently transitioned to a new platform as part of Virginia Tech Publishing, and we are very pleased to announce that they are now accepting new article submissions! You can find more information and details on how to submit on our website: Journal of Peer Learning.

The next volume of the journal is currently being prepared — we look forward to sharing new insights into the field of peer learning.

Of around 1000 active journals on the Ubiquity platform, 94.5% have no form of author fees

Did you know that whilst the Ubiquity platform offers the option of the APC model, the majority of journals on the platform have zero author-facing article charges? This is because most journals on the Ubiquity platform operate under the diamond model, many of which are published from regional hubs in the developing world such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Central America.

The Ubiquity platform hosts more than 1000 active journals, with 94.5% of them having no form of author fees. Ubiquity is proud to be supporting a diverse and flexible publishing ecosystem.

UPLOpen.com surpasses 6,000 books

UPLOpen.com, the community-driven hosting initiative founded by the De Gruyter eBound foundation and hosted by ]u[ Ubiquity early this year, now has more than 6,000 books hosted, with more on the way!

At launch, UPLOpen.com hosted more than 350 books from over thirty high profile university presses. Not only has this increased more than tenfold, but the page views for the site have also been increasing by over 50% month on month. This means UPLOpen’s mission to enhance the findability of the open access books it hosts is being realised. Find out more.

Vacancies at Ubiquity Journals

We are excited to announce some vacancies at three of our journals! These are exciting opportunities to join the open scholarship community.

The Journal of Open Research Software is calling for both a new Editor-in-Chief and Assistant Editors.

The Open Quaternary Journal is also calling for a new Social Media Editor.

The Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies is looking for new Section Editors and Copyeditors.

Praise for Ubiquity Journals

Are you thinking about submitting work to one of Ubiquity’s Journals? Ubiquity consistently receives excellent feedback from authors:

“The entire process was efficient, supportive and professional.”

“Although the publication process is extremely fast, the journal policy maintains the high editorial standards.”

Upcoming books

Ubiquity has now launched its Coming Soon page, which details our upcoming titles, such as ‘The Ultimate Case Guide’, set to be released in November, and ‘Innovation language teaching practices in higher education in a post-Covid era’, set to be released in December.

Find out more

Where to find us — ]u[ Ubiquity’s upcoming conference schedule

So far this quarter, we have attended conferences like The Frankfurt Book Fair, with our partners at Paradigm Publishing Solutions, where Brian, our CEO and Natalia, our Head of Sales were available to chat about open access solutions for academic presses. Our Product Director Tim attended the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Sprint earlier this month, a great gathering of some of the open source community in Turin. You can click here to read his account of the event.

Late in October, Bin, our Open Access Advisor, is attending AUNILO (Libraries of ASEAN University Network), held in Thailand.

If you missed these, Bin will be in attendance at the Charleston Conference in the US and the Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium, a virtual event held in at the end of November, so look out for him there!

If you want to get in touch with us to find out if we are attending a specific conference, or to set up a meeting with us at one, you can always get in touch via info@ubiquitypress.com.

Ubiquity’s Community Portal

Have you signed up to Ubiquity’s Community Portal? It’s the go-to meeting place for connecting with like-minded leaders in the open access community. It’s easy to sign up — just click here to create an account. There you can connect with journal editors and keep up to date with what’s going on in the open access world.

Ubiquity’s contributions to Open Journal Systems (OJS)

Over the last quarter, Ubiquity has worked on upgrading some OJS plugins to the latest version of OJS, 3.4. Our contributions to the open source plugins are always public — see below for specifics and where you can find them:

• “Form honeypot” now compatible with OJS 3.4
• “Quicksubmit” plugin is now compatible with OJS 3.4 thanks to a fix to the OrcID plugin
• “SWORD plugin” fixes for OJS 3.4 compatibility
• “Funding” plugin fixes for OJS 3.4 compatibility

Ubiquity has also contributed to the core OJS code with the following improvements/fixes:

• Display submission authors list on add-reviewers modal
• https://github.com/pkp/ojs/pull/4004
• https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/pull/9090
• https://github.com/pkp/ui-library/pull/275
• fixed a bug with the DOI table when upgrading from 3.3 to 3.4

We have created and released the following open source OJS plugins:

• Site Usage plugin
• Download Reviews plugin

We are pleased to further the Open source mission by continually contributing to community code.

We will be back in touch in the new year with the next ]u[ Ubiquity newsletter. In the meantime, you can always keep up to date with us in the real time on X, Mastodon and LinkedIn.

See you next year!

- The ]u[ Ubiquity Team