We are going to have a series of posts from the editors, so we can explain some of the vision and rationale behind the founding of the journal.  The first post comes from Joseph Kraus, who is the facilitator of the editorial group.

1) Who are you?

I am an academic librarian at the University of Denver (DU) Penrose Library. DU is a medium sized private university in Denver, Colorado. I have been active in the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics and the Sci-Tech Divisions of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). I am also a member of ALA/ACRL. I have written many articles and have presented on topics ranging from social networking resources, unconferences and collection development.

2) Why are you involved in the new journal?

I have been following the Open Access movement and new publishing models for many, many years. I would like to see more LIS practitioners take advantage of new web-based publishing systems to communicate their research and data to a wider audience. I really don’t understand why librarians and information professionals continue to hide their scholarship and research in journals and books that have paywalls. This journals aims to provide another outlet for authors who wish to support greater access to their writings.

Since 2009, I have been involved with the journal Collaborative Librarianship which uses OJS software and the articles are licensed CC-BY-NC-ND. However, I know that there are many open advocates who consider CC-BY to be the open access standard. This article “Point & Counterpoint: Is CC BY the Best Open Access License?” (http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/5/) in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication captures much of the essence of the debate. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association also provides a nice overview (http://oaspa.org/why-cc-by/), and SPARC explains the difference between Gratis and Libre Open Access (http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/articles/gratisandlibre.shtml).

I have also been following the rise of PLOS ONE as a publishing model in the sciences. They note that the journal’s “peer review process does not judge the importance of the work, rather focuses on whether the work is done to high scientific and ethical standards and is appropriately described, and that the data support the conclusions.” They let the reader determine the importance of the work for their information needs. I would like to see more LIS journals take a similar stance, and I will recommend that the peer-reviewers for the Journal of Creative Library Practice use a similar standard. We plan to publish content when the items are ready; the articles do not need to wait for an issue to be published on a quarterly or monthly basis. We hope that these practices will speed up the publication process.

In addition to the journals listed above, there are also several other journals in LIS that are worth some investigation.

• The Journal of Library Innovation. The articles are licensed CC-BY_NC_ND
• Practical Academic Librarianship: The International Journal of the SLA Academic Division. The articles are licensed CC-BY.
• In the Library with the Lead Pipe. This source uses blog software to publish the articles, and “all content posted on In the Library with the Lead Pipe, including comments, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.”
• The Urban Library Journal had a special issue on creativity in libraries in 2008.

There are many other LIS journals that are doing interesting things, but the above titles are just a few examples.

3) What would you like to accomplish as an editor?

I would like to offer up this journal as an alternative to the stodgy and staid publication formats that some other LIS sources provide. In addition to the peer-reviewed content, we will provide a platform for reasoned opinions, reports, reviews, and other types of content concerning creative librarianship. I do not expect the journal to publish hundreds of articles a year, but we would like to publish articles from a variety of viewpoints and perspectives.

Libre Open Access is one of the key features. The editors plan to publish high quality content that readers find interesting and useful. The journal may work with a variety of altmetric systems to demonstrate the usefulness of the Open Access material.

I would also like to see this journal experiment with different writing styles. As a publishing experiment, we may also consider implementing open peer-review for some or all of the content as well as post-publication review of the articles and reports. We may encourage authors to provide multimedia content within the articles. If an author would like to provide an embedded YouTube video to demonstrate a creative practice, that would be fine with us.

4) Anything else you would like to add?

I know that there are a number of good journals in library and information science, but I hope that you will consider submitting some of your work to us. We are committed to providing high quality Open Access scholarship.