Dear AJL members,
I have a short apology and a long explanation for you regarding the delayed publication of Judaica Librarianship’s new issue (#21). As you know, producing AJL’s scholarly journal is based on voluntary work. In 2018, I was first grappling with a new day job position and then went on a semester-long sabbatical. In 2019, I had a lot of post-sabbatical catch-up to do and while working on the content of issue #21, I was also engaged in a search for a new hosting service for the journal. Since we transferred JL to electronic publishing in 2013, we have hosted the journal content on the Digital Commons platform, owned and operated by bepress, a company that was established by academics to promote open access publishing and library repository solutions. We teamed up with bepress because they accommodated our needs, including the management of our delayed access publishing model (a 12-months exclusive access for AJL members) – but that came with a cost. In addition to the big-ticket annual fee, as all bepress costumers we learned from the media in early August 2017, that the company was purchased by Elsevier, one of the most aggressive commercial publishers in scholarly publishing (see the Scholarly Kitchen post: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/08/02/elsevier-acquires-bepress/). Many of bepress customers moved away from Digital Commons since then and JL Editorial Board agreed that we should do so, too as AJL should not contribute to the for-profit publisher. Due to the reasons stated above I was not able to dedicate much time for this project until 2019, but now I am happy to report that we found a new hosting service for JL. The journal will move to its new home in a few weeks, after we migrate its structure, metadata, and articles; and the new issue will be published on the new platform. This move constitutes a major saving for AJL and would contribute to the sustainability of our organization. Furthermore, as many scholarly journals have done, I am happy to announce that JL Editorial Board and AJL Council unanimously approved my proposal to move the journal to complete open access publishing.* This initiative would expand the reach of JL to global readership even further than it did so far: Since the journal moved to electronic publishing, the 250 articles posted online were downloaded almost 39,000 times(!) and in 2019 alone, almost 7,500 downloads were recorded. Advancing to open access publishing is not only the right thing to do, as declared by an AJL Council member, but it also epitomizes the AJL Mission: The Association of Jewish Libraries is an international professional organization that fosters access to information and research in all forms of media relating to all things Jewish. The Association promotes Jewish literacy and scholarship and provides a community for peer support and professional development. I thank the JL Editorial Board, and AJL Council and Board for their strong and enthusiastic support and look for the continued support of AJL members in AJL and its scholarly journal. Please let me know if you have any questions. Stay tuned for the new issue and new platform announcement! Happy New Year, Rachel * “Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research” (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; https://sparcopen.org/open-access/). Rachel Leket-Mor, MA, MLIS Associate Librarian Curator, Open Stack Collections IsraPulp Collection Arizona State University Library Phone: 480-965-2618 <(480)%20965-2618> Editor, Judaica Librarianship Association of Jewish Libraries https://ajlpublishing.org/jl/
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