V.O.L. Journals Guide

Overview of Responsibilities

This page outlines the responsibilities of 1) UT Libraries and 2) publishers of V.O.L. Journals. With the exception of the journal Gamut, the UT Libraries is not the publisher of any V.O.L. Journals. The library is a partner that supports access to and distribution and preservation of these journals. Publishing and editorial decisions reside with the publishers.

Libraries' Responsibilities

• Provide the necessary systems and structures to make the content available online, freely accessible to all
• Provide access to the appropriate software and establish a unique account to allow the publisher to transfer journal content to the appropriate server.
• Use its best efforts to protect the content from damage, alteration or defacement, and to maintain an archived version of the content in such form as may be used to restore the content to its original condition online in the event of such damage, alteration or defacement
• UT Libraries will continue to host the journal if the editorship and/or other personnel connection to UT relocates to another institution provided there are personnel dedicated at that institution to work long distance with UT Libraries' staff.
• Mint and register DOIs for journal articles after at least three issues of a journal have been published, with the publisher's approval

Publishers' Responsibilities

• Be fully responsible for the content of the journal, including all editorial decisions
• Be fully responsible for the copyright management of the journal
• Be fully responsible for all aspects of the creation, transfer and updating of journal content to the appropriate
  V.O.L. Journals system
• State the above responsibilities in the Policies section (or a similar section) of their journal
• Publish all content open access under a Creative Commons license
• Request an ISSN through the Library of Congress
• When articles receive DOIs, follow DOI requirements and best practices
• Grant the University of Tennessee the non‐exclusive right to reproduce, translate (to any medium or format for the purpose of
  preservation without changing the content), and/or distribute journal content worldwide in print and electronic
  format and in any medium, including but not limited to audio or video. These rights do not include the right to sell the
  content or sell access to the content.

Publishers are Encouraged to:

• Work with the UT Libraries to register DOIs for journal articles
• Require authors to provide author identifiers (ORCID iD)
• Follow Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, including the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing
• Seek inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals
• Ask authors to share data openly
• Make publications accessible (Additional information about accessibility and file formats is on the "Preparing Files for Upload" page, which is part of the user guide for the Libraries' TRACE open repository)

Many of these responsibilities are taken from Indiana University's MOU with publishers for IUScholarWorks Journals.