The National Science Association for Carinthia created a new journal in cooperation with the Carinthia University of Applied Science: Carinthia Nature Tech. It serves as Part 3 of the Carinthia II publication – a series existing since 1811 (until 1891 together with the Historical Society for Carinthia).
Carinthia Nature Tech is a digital-only publication and because of that I wanted to report and comment on its characteristics (Note: I’m a member of the National Science Association for Carinthia). In the editorial of the first issue it is mentioned that the preparation phase took three years. It is not surprising that this took quite some time because it is a cooperation which had to be setup first and most of it is likely volunteer effort even if the association has some experience as a publisher. The first issue already looks like a good start – with some potential for improvement in the coming issues.
Content, Target Group and other Characteristics
A digital-only English language publication would be considered a bit risky for a public science association in Carinthia with a bit higher average member age. Leaving out print saves costs but also restricts the recipient group. But since the target group is the scientific community in the Alpe-Adria region this seems like a good choice. Limiting the journal to German does make little sense in a region with Italian and Slovene/Croatian language regions nearby.
I’m not really qualified to comment on the content so I won’t, but the title describes the content in a good way already: Carinthia Nature Tech. The journal aims at representing advances at the intersection of natural sciences and digital techniques and will be published twice a year. Another novelty for the Carinthia-based journals I know so far is that submissions are subject to double blind peer-review. The gold standard in research publication review limits the influence of the editor and editorial board and ensures high quality. In turn you also have to have a sufficient amount of reviewers and in a smaller scale environment like this one it is a bit hard to conceal identities because the researchers working on certain areas as well as other experts in that area are generally known to the community.
The journal features full articles, short articles, short notes and book reviews. Short notes are not subject to double blind peer-review which also gives novice researchers or lower quality/preliminary content a good chance of publication which is a good thing. The journal comes with the ISSN of Carinthia II (online version). Full articles shall receive a DOI which is apparently not ready yet or at least the articles in the first issue do not have one yet.
Good start – and room for improvement
I will now look at the journal from the perspective of digital publication and the principles of Open I advocate on this website. First of all, it comes with „all rights reserved“. I would have liked it more if it would have used some sort of Creative Commons license but that is obviously in the discretion of the publisher and it not being pay-walled is already a good thing. Then the journal did come in one PDF resembling the digital version of the book you would get in print. I do not find this very useful for different reasons. First, with a digital-only publication you do not really need the „book experience“ and second, it makes accessing individual content harder. The PDF did come with links in the table of contents which is a Plus but it would be a lot better if the individual content would be individual PDFs as well. Since they do this on Zobodat for other issues of Carinthia II I’m not sure if it is because this is the first issue.
Splitting up the content is also important regarding the persistent identifiers (PIDs). The full articles should have DOIs, but to which page would the individual DOIs resolve to? All to the same page if you have everything in one PDF? This does not seem very useful. Unfortunately, persistent identifiers in references in the articles did not seem to be linked and also other URLs in references did not have links. This would be one of the primary advantages of a digital publication to be able to follow those references with links. I would recommend to use one of the general-purpose resolvers like identifiers.org for such PIDs.
DOIs are somewhat the standard for PIDs in scientific publications. They cost money to obtain and maintain. This is likely the reason why only full articles will receive a DOI. I would find it important that every type of content would receive its PID. Since the journal is published in a partnership with the Carinthia University of Applied Science their library might be able to assign URNs which could be a cheaper alternative. Another possibility would be to use ARKs which I use on this website and they are completely free of charge.
Let’s focus on the submission process next. According to the author guidelines submissions should be sent via e-mail to the work e-mail address at the university of one of the members of the editorial office. This is not optimal for several reasons. What if this person leaves the university? A new address would need to be communicated. There should be a dedicated submission address at the National Science Association for Carinthia where mails are then forwarded to the appropriate persons. With that the address does not have to change if persons change. In the long run it might be beneficial for the author and editor experience to use a digital submission system. With that the whole submission process can be managed and it is easy to keep track on submissions. There are plenty of FLOSS software solutions that could be used for that.
Summary
For the volunteer-driven National Science Association for Carinthia this digital publication is a great milestone and work well done. The cooperation with a university was the right choice. The fact that there is no big science publisher involved is a big Plus for the openness of the publication. Although there are still quite some things that can be improved for a great digital publication experience the publication can already serve as role model for other periodicals in Carinthia like e.g. Carinthia I.