Barrier-Free: Student Reflections on Open, Collaborative and Student-led Publishing
ivan beck
lindsay van dam
alannah delahunty-pike
juliakontak
Not only is academic publishing an important part of knowledge dissemination, but it is also a requirement for students who aim to progress in their graduate studies and in a career in academia. This reality, colloquially referred to as “publish or perish,” is an intimidating process with a steep learning curve for many post-secondary students. With the support of an Anne Marie Teaching Grant from the Centre for Learning and Teaching, the Healthy Population Journal (HPJ)—a multi-faculty, student-led, open-access journal—extended its support of student learning about the publishing process through a special issue on Interprofessional Health Education (IPHE). The grant provided student guest editors and student reviewers with a small honorarium for their labour and contributed to more applications than spots.
Each issue of the Healthy Populations Journal requires an approximate 8-month timeline from inception to publication. The cohorts of student editors and reviewers experience the whole gamut of journal issue creation, such as designing and distributing a call for submissions; screening submissions following a double-blind peer review process; sending submissions through copy editing and final steps of author approval; and formatting everything into a finished issue. Through regular monthly meetings and completing work in shared online spaces, student members of the guest editorial board develop skills in understanding the publishing process while also being mentored in completing reviews of blinded submissions. To offer some insight on the impact of this learning opportunity, members of both the guest and the standing editorial boards came together to share some thoughts about their experiences.
ivan beck, Co-Editor in Chief
PhD in Health
As a student-run journal that solicits student publications, peer mentorship is baked into the very structure of the Healthy Populations Journal. As such, students from different disciplines, different backgrounds, and with different experiences in academia come together to work on the common goal of academic publishing. For me, this special issue helped me reflect on my role as a Co-Editor, a role I have had since the Fall of 2021, and what the purpose and/or intentions of scholarly publishing might be.
One of the most challenging aspects of assisting with the peer review process as a pedagogical tool has proven to be the software that is used to steward submissions. While tracking the movement of a submission is made easier with the Open Journal Software (OJS), keeping track of the movement of a submission through the editing process required the development of parallel tracking methods. The creation of shared spreadsheets, flowcharts, and how-to guides assisted with mentoring and training students new to the back-end of publishing, while doubling as core documents to inform on-going structural work at the Journal. What has emerged is a bank of training tools that can serve in equipping future editorial board members with the information needed to understand the peer review and editorial processes and the steps of putting an issue together.
Lindsay Van Dam, Guest Editor
PhD in Health
Whether we recognize it or not, we are constantly collecting fragments—of new experiences, ideas, knowledge and skills from the people around us, as we move through our lives. We are our own artistic project, a rich and diverse mosaic of our interactions and relationships with others. Across my experiences as a practicing dental hygienist, oral health educator, and now as a doctoral student, I can say my connections with others have most fundamentally shaped (re-shaped), and guided my identity, values and sense of purpose. Opportunities to learn with, from, and about other people are, in fact, the very experiences that led me to my doctoral studies and area of research, which explores ways in which oral and health professional students are socialized to their professional role, one another, and collaborative practice.
Interprofessional collaboration is widely recognized as a critical component of improving patient-centred care and more effective health systems. When professionals can come together and draw upon one another’s knowledge and skills while working towards a shared goal, enhanced patient care, outcomes and patient perceptions of care received are reported. The power of interprofessional collaboration is not only the topic of this special issue of HPJ but it embodies the very processes that brought this work together. We have drawn upon the knowledge, skills and ideas of students across diverse health and social science disciplines and backgrounds at Dalhousie. My previous experience with academic publishing has been from the position of an author and peer reviewer in my field of oral health. This issue was my first step into an editorial role, and stretched me to engage with knowledge and critical discourses entirely new to me. Doing something new, and particularly outside of your own “scope” can feel intimidating. Yet the intimidation I felt stepping into the role of guest-editor was quickly lifted by my peers and the opportunities to learn with, from and about—the very definition of interprofessional health education (IPHE). The outcomes of our own education in collaboration is represented by this issue. It is a mosaic of the incredible IPHE-related initiatives being conducted at Dalhousie. We hope you find it as insightful, inspiring and meaningful as the work behind it.
Alannah Delahunty-Pike, Guest Editor
PhD in Health
As a first-year PhD Health student, and member of the Healthy Populations Journal, I recently discovered Open Journal Systems. Open Journal Systems or OJS is an online, open-access repository for non-peer reviewed writing; it also hosts the Journal. OJS creates an accessible alternative for academics, particularly students, to share their work without paying open access fees and undergoing peer review, creating an opportunity for knowledge sharing with fewer barriers.
Due to the accessible nature of OJS, our Core Seminar, part of the PhD in Health, has created an OJS platform to house our student writing for the course. The aim is to create an accessible repository for student work that reflects engagement with a fundamental idea of our course—that there are dominant ways of knowing and doing that privilege certain ways of doing science over others, and this throws up barriers. This Core course, “Health Research: Ways of Knowing and Doing”, led by Dr. Shanon Phelan, explored a diverse range of health research paradigms (knowing) and methods (doing) through class discussion and written work. We investigated what constitutes science and what constitutes research. We discussed the privileging of certain sciences over others. We considered what the dominant discourse of science, driven by randomized controlled trials situated in a positivistic paradigm, means for health research. We felt that our writing should live beyond the course and chose OJS as our platform. The fundamentals of barrier-free publishing aligns well with this course, as so much of the material challenged the norms and dominant discourses of science, to break down barriers in research.
By providing PhD Health students with the opportunity to post their work on our OJS platform, we are modeling how work is submitted to an academic journal. Like so much in our doctoral program, the journal submission process moves the learning well beyond the classroom and provides a practical space for students to learn a skill crucial to a career in research. Projects like this platform and the HPJ assist graduate students in developing further skills in peer review and the editorial process.
Julia Kontak, Managing Editor
PhD
As a graduate student, the complexity of academic publishing can be daunting—selecting the right journal fit, nightmares of “reviewer 2,” navigating publishing agreements—it is a rollercoaster of emotions with many loops and learning curves to go through. Fortunately, having the opportunity to be part of the HPJ editorial board as the Managing Editor since 2021 has made my entry into editorial roles much more accessible, approachable and enjoyable.
This special issue on Interprofessional Health Education (IPHE) comes at a reflective time for me as I prepare to take a step back from this senior editorial role to focus on the next chapter of my academic trajectory. IPHE is grounded in collaboration, shared decision making, trust and respect and in part echoes the principles that we have worked to embed throughout HPJ. As a multidisciplinary editorial team of students that share a passion and aligned interest in population health and heath equity, interprofessional collaboration has been weaved through our work since its inception.
Of note, I am most proud of our collaborations with partner organizations to produce our three special issues over the past four years in areas of priority interest, including: Indigenous Health (with the Atlantic Indigenous Mentorship Network [AIMN]); Health Equity (with the Canadian Association of Health Sciences and Policy Research [CAHSPR] Student Working Group); and Black Health Outcomes (with the Healthy Populations Institute: Improving the Health Outcomes of People of African Descent Flagship). These collaborations have not only afforded the Journal to expand the suite of knowledge it disseminates but has also allowed us, as an editorial team, to operationally grow, evolve and adapt our peer review process as we take in the knowledge and expertise of our partners. Although the operations of HPJ will always be a work in process, the IPHE principles of collaboration, shared decision-making, communication, trust and respect remain consistent. That said, as I come to the end of my tenure at HPJ, a special issue that specifically focuses on the scholarship of IPHE is a celebratory way to acknowledge the value and importance of how this approach has molded, and will continue to inform, HPJ now and into the future.
Conclusion
This special issue on Interprofessional Health Education and Collaborative Practice called for interprofessional, collaborative meetings amongst the regular and guest editorial boards. These meetings offered an opportunity for more students to learn about the behind-the-scenes labour required to publish an academic journal, while also creating practical opportunities for peer review skill development, such as screening submissions prior to the peer review process and stewarding a submission through the peer review steps. Institutional supports to house the Journal through the Healthy Populations Institute demonstrates the value of this type of learning, while the support from the Centre for Learning and Teaching’s grants allowed for modest compensation of students’ labour during a valuable learning experience. An unanticipated outcome for the regular editorial boards was the creation of documents that outline the general flow of the publishing process that can be used as a communication and training tool for both new board members and guest editors in future publishing partnerships. The development of these documents assisted the regular editorial board in reflecting on their operations and identifying their own needs for further growth and development of the journal.
You can see the HPJ issue on Interprofessional Health Education and Collaborative Practice here: https://ojs.library.dal.ca/hpj/issue/view/1042