An overlay journal performs all the activities of a scholarly journal and relies on structural links with one or more archives or repositories to perform its activities. 

This paper offers a briefing on the contribution overlay journals can make to scholarly communication. It explains what ‘overlay’ services are, how overlay journals have evolved and what makes their contribution to scholarly communication so valuable

Brown, J.

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UCL Discovery

1An Introduction to Overlay JournalsJosh Brown, SHERPA-LEAP Project Officer, UCL. (Josh.Brown@ucl.ac.uk)IntroductionAn overlay journal performs all the activities of a scholarly journal and relies on structural links withone or more archives or repositories to perform its activities.This paper offers a briefing on the contribution overlay journals can make to scholarlycommunication. It explains what ‘overlay’ services are, how overlay journals have evolved and whatmakes their contribution to scholarly communication so valuable.What is “overlay”?Overlay is a modern version of an old phenomenon. We are all familiar with the idea that a librarycontains books, creates descriptive records for them, and then links the records together to create asearchable catalogue. Essentially, a union catalogue, which draws together the records from anumber of libraries to create an extra service layer, is an overlay on this information structure.Overlays are today everywhere and have never had a greater impact on scholarly communication.They are useful because they: Create services that can cut through the mass of online data Save researchers time and effort by pointing them to a particular kind of information Offer new ways of packaging and exploiting informationExamples of successful overlay services:OAIster1 is an overlay which provides a unified access point to online Open Access (OA)content in digital repositories.RePEc2 is an overlay which draws together bibliographic information about publicationswithin the subject of Economics.These services are basically concerned with bibliographic data. They do not address the quality ofthe content they describe or locate.Some overlay services can address issues of quality. Citation indices (such as Scopus3, or Web ofKnowledge4) are overlay services on bibliographic databases. By measuring citations, they claim to1 http://www.oclc.org/oaister/2 http://www.repec.org/3 http://www.scopus.com/home.url4 http://www.isiwebofknowledge.com/2be measuring a proxy for quality, namely ‘impact’. However, this claim is not uncontroversial5 whichis why there is still a premium on research that has been directly quality assured using peer review.Research has shown that most researchers regard peer review as the single most importantactivity of academic journals (Polydoratou and Moyle, 2009, p185).What distinguishes the overlay journal from other overlay services is its active participation in qualityassurance: it either offers peer review of its content or offers an additional layer of qualityassurance, based on relevance or significance.The history of overlay journals shows that they are neither ‘just another service’ nor ‘just anotherjournal’, but a distinct and interesting phenomenon within scholarly communication.The evolution of overlay journals.There are various ways of defining or describing overlay journals:“An open access journal that takes submissions from the preprints deposited at an archive...and subjects them to peer-review” Peter Suber (2003)“A quality assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more openaccess repositories” Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) project6definitionThese definitions emphasise the relationship with Open Access (OA) repositories. Other definitionspoint to different models:“An overlay journal is a journal that does not publish any original articles but rather selectsarticles that exist elsewhere, adds certain value to the selection, and publishes the results asa service to its user base” Herbert Van de Sompel et al (2006)What these models share is: an overlay structure, in which the journal forms an information service built on existingservices and data the idea that the journal imprimatur, just as in a traditional scholarly journal, acts as aguarantee of quality of its content.What makes a service an ‘overlay’ is its structure, the way it relates to other services.What ‘makes’ a journal is its activities. These are:1. Registration (of an idea as one’s own),2. Certification (of the quality of the idea),5 See the discussion that led to the current Research Excellence Framework proposals. The InternationalMathematical Union weighed in with a good account of the limits of citation analysis, which is available athttp://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf6 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja/33. Raising awareness of the idea,4. Archiving its expression and5. Rewarding the author by affording them the benefits of citations and ensuing recognition.(Cavalli (2008); Rosendal and Guerts (1997))It is clear that an overlay journal offers all these services, either on its own or through interactionswith OA repositories.The timeline below shows some of the defining moments in the evolution of overlay journals:Discussion of the concept of overlay journals began with Paul Ginsparg (1996). Also in 1996, the first‘partial’ overlay journal, Physical review D, began to use arXiv to disseminate a ‘preprint version’ ofits content (Cassella & Cavali, 2009). In 1999, the potential of overlay journals was explored furtherby John Smith (1999) with his paper on ‘deconstructed journals’. The turn of the century saw thefoundation of the first ‘true’ overlay journals, such as the Journal of High Energy Physics7, LogicalMethods in Computer Science8 and Geometry and Topology9, all clustered around the arXivrepository.The accessibility of pre- and post-peer review versions of the articles in these journals by theirrelationship with arXiv created further discussion about the potential role of overlay journals inopening up peer review (Ginsparg (2002) and Kuperberg (2002)). The importance of overlay journalsto the potential for institutional repositories to contribute more actively to scholarly communicationwas outlined by Clifford Lynch (2003), an assessment echoed by Melissa Hagemann’s (2006)suggestion that overlay journals could be a ‘next step’ towards achieving open access.7 http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/1126-67088 http://www.lmcs-online.org/index.php9 http://www.msp.warwick.ac.uk/gt/2010/14-01/4Overlay journals in practice.Overlay journals and repositories:Institutional or subject repositories perform four out of the five functions of a journal listed above.They do not assure the quality of the content they make available. However, by adding an overlay totheir services, in which peer review is performed, they can participate in academic publishing andextend the services they afford to the scholarly community.Overlay journals and repositories can interact in many different ways, for example: The repository is used for submissions and archives preprints e.g. Annals of Mathematics The repository handles submissions and hosts the final versions e.g. Symmetry, Integrabilityand Geometry: Methods and Applications. The repository is used as the basis for the journal’s online presence e.g. Logical methods inComputer ScienceOverlay journals can be open access, or can use a subscription model for their final versions. ThearXiv repository supports overlay journals that use these differing interactions and business models,which shows the flexibility of the overlay model. Different levels of interaction between a journaland a repository are possible, up to ‘full’ overlay in which the two are linked at every stage of thepublication process.Other overlay services:Van de Sompel’s definition of an overlay journal describes an existing group of journals and services.These include the Virtual Journals in Science and Technology series10 and the Current Cites11 service.These services act as lenses on the current literature, with editors gathering together the bestarticles in their specialism from the range of scientific journals in each issue.These examples are certainly true overlay services, and they certify the quality of their content, sincethey form a second, additional layer of peer review for the literature in the field in which theyoperate. This kind of current awareness service is of great value to the communities that benefitfrom it, but it can be argued that they do not fulfil all the roles of the academic journal listed above.They certify quality, raise awareness and reward authors of work, but they do not register or archivethe work, and as such could be called ‘quasi-journals’.However, it is worth looking at these services because their activities make it clear that a singlerepository can interact with multiple journals (e.g. arXiv) and that a single journal can interact withmultiple repositories (e.g. the Virtual Journals). These options mean that the partners in an overlayjournal can pick and choose the level and nature of their contribution to a greater degree than with‘traditional’ journal models.10 http://www.virtualjournals.org/vjs/11 http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/5Exploring overlay journals:Various Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded projects have explored and enhancedoverlay journals: The RIOJA project explored the attitudes of academics in physics and astronomy to journalpublishing and the overlay journal model (Polydoratou and Moyle, 2009). RIOJA developed aset of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to link journal and repository software insupport of the peer review of papers stored in Repositories, and demonstrated them usingthe Open Journal System (OJS)12 software and arXiv. The Overlay Journal Infrastructure for the Meteorological Sciences13 (OJIMS) project createdthe basis for a subject repository for meteorological science and a peer-reviewed datajournal overlaid upon it.The work of these projects has: shown that a number of business models are applicable helped repositories to fulfil their potential as scholarly resources developed technologies to support new mechanisms of peer review shown that the model can be academically and financially viable created new forms of journal using the overlay model. demonstrated that the overlay concept enhances repositories by increasing their usefulnessto researchers and improving their sustainability with value-added services.Overlay journals and publishers:Casella and Calvi (2009, p8) describe numerous ways in which publishers could exploit the overlaymodel to offer innovative services and products, including extending peer review, adding navigationor semantic discovery services, supporting archiving and administration, bibliometric services andimpact and usage analysis. They could charge for these services individually or as a package. Thiswould mean libraries and scholars could build more flexible services with their subscriptions.Conclusion: opportunities and challenges.There are certainly obstacles to overcome in building new overlay journals. Repository managersand journal editors will have to find suitable arrangements for dealing with versions of articles, togive just one example. However, there are practical solutions already used by existing overlayjournals and tools that have been created by overlay projects to address these potential problems.Even allowing for the challenges that remain, the many possibilities offered by overlay journals couldbe positive for stakeholders across the scholarly spectrum. James Hendler (2007, p3) described12 http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs13 http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/ojims6overlay journals’ impact on scholarly communication as ‘Win-win-win-win’, for publishers,repositories, authors and readers. As he went on to remark: “How often do you see that?”References and further reading:Cassella, M. And Calvi, L. (2009) New journal models and publishing perspectives in the evolvingdigital environment. World Library and Information Congress: 75th Ifla General Conference andCouncil, Milan, Italy 23-27 August 2009 [online] Available at:http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla75/179-calvi-en.pdf [Last accessed 4/12/09]Ginsparg, P. (1996) Winners and losers in the global research village. Invited contribution forconference held at UNESCO HQ, Paris, 19-23 Feb 1996, during session Scientists’s View of ElectronicPublishing and Issues Raised, Wed 21 Feb 1996. [online] Available at:http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/pg96unesco.html [Last accessed 8/12/09]Ginsparg, P. (2002) Can peer review be better focussed? Science and Technology Libraries, 22(3-4),pp5-18.Hagemann, M. (2006) SPARC Innovator: Melissa Hagemann (December 2006). [online] Available at:http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/hagemann.shtml [Last accessed 8/12/09]Hendler, J. (2007) Reinventing academic publishing: part 2. IEEE Intelligent Systems, Nov/Dec 2007,pp2-3.Kuperberg, G. (2002) Scholarly mathematical communication at a crossroads. Nieuw Archief voorWiskunde, 5(3), pp3262-4.Polydoratou, P & Moyle, M. (2009) “Exploring aspects of scientific publishing in astrophysics andcosmology: the views of scientists” in Sicilia, M & Lytras, M. (Eds) (2009) Metadata and semantics.Springer US, pp179-90.Roosendal, H.E. & Guerts, P.A.T.M. (1997) “Forces and functions in scientific communication: ananalysis of their interplay” in Proceedings of the conference on ‘Co-operative research ininformation systems in physics’, University of Oldenburd, Germany, September 1-3, 1997. [online]Available at: http://www.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/conferences/CRISP97/ [Last accessed 12/12/09]Smith, J.W.T. (1999) The deconstructed journal: a new model for academic publishing. LearnedPublishing, 12(2), pp79-91.Suber, P. (2003) Guide to the Open Access Movement. [online] Available at:http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm [Last accessed 10/12/09]Van De Sompel, H.; Rodriguez, M.A. & Bollen, J. (2006) The convergence of digital libraries and thepeer-review process. Journal of Information Science, 32(2), pp149-159.

An introduction to overlay journals

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