Retrospect and Prospect: The Creation and Development of an Academic Journal

This article reflects the initiation, establishment, and development of the International Journal of Librarianship (IJoL) , an open access academic journal published by the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA). Sustainability and high quality have been set as the top priorities by the core editorial team throughout the journey of the creation, promotion, and advancement of this journal. The opportunities, challenges, and success are discussed along with the future directions of IJoL . This article contributes to the literature in the creation and development of academic journals, especially the open access publications in library and information science (LIS).


INTRODUCTION
The International Journal of Librarianship (IJoL) is an open access, peer-reviewed academic journal for scholarly communication of research, best practices, and perspectives on all aspects of library, librarianship, and information science, throughout the world (IJoL, 2023;Liu, 2016). It is published by the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA).
Founded in 1973 in the United States, CALA is an affiliate of American Library Association (ALA), International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and Joint Council of Librarians of Color (JCLC). CALA now has ten chapters and more than six hundred active members throughout the world (https://cala-web.org/about/ ).

• enhance communication among Chinese American librarians as well as between Chinese
American librarians and other librarians, and • serve as a forum for discussions of mutual problems and professional concerns among Chinese American librarians. (CALA, 2021) CALA is the largest Asian-American professional library association in North America (Echevarria and Wertheimer, 1997). There has been a growing interest for CALA and its members to have their own academic English journal. According to the Membership Committee 2022-2023, CALA had over six hundred members, among which over sixty percent were academic librarians in the United States or Canada at the end of 2022. Crampsie, Neville & Henry (2020) pointed out that "academic publishing continued[s] to be a prominent expectation for many academic librarians" (p. 248) and "most tenure-earning academic librarians in North America were [are] required to do research, and many non-tenure-earning librarians were [are] expected or encouraged to publish. " (p. 249) In addition to individual members' desire to disseminate their research and scholarly work through academic publishing, CALA, as an organization, demands publishing options for the intellectual work produced through scholarly activities it hosts or co-hosts. In 2014-2019, eleven formal international collaborations were recorded between CALA and library related organizations in mainland China (Ruan, 2019). Such collaborations brought in conferences, seminars, and other academic exchange activities that produced intellectual work by CALA members. These activities call for academic publication venues to share with the CALA community and beyond.
At the end of 2015, there were two academic publications associated with CALA as follows: • Journal of Library and Information Science: a partnership of CALA with the journal publisher, National Taiwan  There were twelve issues in total. Each issue contained one paper so twelve papers were published with this publication. In their report to CALA EC, Liu et al. (2015) indicated that the OPS suspended publishing for about two and half years due to the lack of paper submissions and the full text articles it published were not accessible during the investigation period.
The OAAJTF not only examined the history, landscape, opportunities, and challenges with CALA academic publications, but also consulted with various CALA leaders and related parties, including chairs of CALA Publications Committee and editors of previous and existing CALA publications. The committee recommended to CALA EC to create a new open access, high standard academic journal rather than convert from an old, less academic one. The recommendation was approved by the EC after constructive discussions between the OAAJTF, the EC, and other stakeholders. The following goals were set up as the major responsibilities of the OAAJTF: • Establish a reputable, peer-reviewed, regularly published (biannual), and sustainable CALA academic journal. • Make this journal as a primary publication venue for CALA members and other Chinese librarians in North America, China, and other regions in the world for their academic work (Liu, et al., 2015).

Design and Creation
The previously mentioned publications had made significant contributions to CALA and the open scholarship of LIS profession. However, the challenges they faced were noticeable as well, which included the difficulty of obtaining manuscripts of submissions, and building a stable, dedicated editorial team in the long run under the existing CALA organizational structure. Historically, CALA tended to treat journal editorial teams as other committees and appointed new editors every few years. This practice introduced significant challenges for running the academic journal smoothly. Journal editing and publication require a long-term commitment and specialized expertise and experiences from its core editorial team. Compared to other committees in CALA, a journal editorial team needs multiple years' devotion: (1) to foster a culture of collaboration and dedication, (2) to establish talent pools of reviewers, authors, and other contributors through marketing, mentoring and additional support, and (3) to build strong relationships with various partners in CALA and other LIS communities to succeed in the long run. A succession plan shall be in place to ensure the expertise and experiences with the journal operations be carried throughout the process of carefully selecting and appointing new leaders for the journal.
Based on the constructive advice from previous editors, CALA leaders and other professionals, the OAAJTF set sustainability and high quality as top priorities for the new journal. With the support of CALA EC and other leaders, the team developed the journal bylaws to address the challenges experienced by previous CALA publications and ensure the sustainability of the new one. The bylaws named the new journal as the International Journal of Librarianship (IJoL), and defined its scope, publication frequency, along with the structure and responsibilities of editorial team and editorial advisory board. Eligibility criteria, terms, and appointment procedures were determined for the editors, peer reviewers, and advisory board members. The editorial and publication process was established along with the double-blinded peer reviewing process for featured articles and reports from the field submitted to the new journal. Following the approval of the bylaws by the CALA EC, the OAAJTF developed plans for budget and actions, project timelines, and established the inaugural Editorial Board.
The six-member Editorial Board worked diligently and collaboratively. They accomplished extensive tasks towards the official launch of IJoL within about one year. Relevant documents were created for the journal, including ethical and privacy statements, copyright notice, author guidelines, invitation letters for advisory board members, appointment letters for copy editors and layout editors, and call for papers. Although the journal is in English, these letters and call for papers have been translated into Chinese to promote it to CALA members and other information professionals in China. The Editorial Board reached out to various professionals in CALA and other organizations to build the teams for advisory board, peer reviewing, copyediting and layout editing. They also reached out to potential authors to invite manuscript submissions. In the meantime, the Editorial Board fulfilled a variety of tasks including ISSN application, CrossRef membership application, and journal logo design. The Open Journal System (OJS) was adopted to manage the workflow for submission, peer review, and publication. The journal website was developed for registration, paper submission, public access to articles and issues published, announcements and other contents related to IJoL.

Articles, Authorship, and Readership
About one year after the establishment of OAAJTF, the inaugural issue of the IJoL was officially launched in December 2016. It contained seven articles, of which five were peer-reviewed. At the time of writing this article, thirteen issues (two issues per year except the first year) have been published with a total number of one hundred and thirty-four articles of which ninety are peerreviewed. All issues have been published on schedule. Articles published in the journal have designated DOIs and are indexed and freely accessible via EBSCO and ProQuest databases, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and many other online platforms upon publication. They are preserved permanently by the Library of Congress and the PKP Preservation Network (PN) system, a LOCKSS program.
After six-year publishing, IJoL has extended its influence and authorship far beyond the CALA community and has become a truly global journal in LIS field. The 134 published articles are authored by more than 200 scholars from more than twenty countries in five continents. Its readership has also expanded greatly over the years. Up to March 2023, the total abstract views has reached 106,327 and the full-text downloads 46,139, which on average equals to 341 full-text downloads per article. The highest download of the individual article is 1,656, and the highest abstract view of the individual article is 6,123.
Many articles report research and other intellectual work produced by international collaboration, such as the collaboration between Canada and the United States, Canada and China, or China and the United States. Some issues were co-edited via international collaboration by the experts from Canada, China, Finland, or the United States, for example, the special issue on Sustainability and Libraries in December 2020 and the special issue on FOLIO in December 2021.   The journal also welcomes guest editors on specialized topics. By the end of 2022, six special issues had been published on a variety of emerging LIS topics, including data librarianship, linked data, data science and artificial intelligence, sustainability and libraries, FOLIO open-source library services platform, and pandemic and libraries.
Over the years, IJoL has built a community of highly diversified authors, editors, reviewers, and other contributors from various countries and regions, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Ghana, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, the UK, the US, and Zimbabwe. The journal has become a truly international publication that has increased voices from those under-represented regions and cultures in LIS academic publication landscape. Figure 2 illustrates the countries or regions of authors published with IJoL in 2016-2022.

PROMOTION, PARTNERSHIP AND ADVOCACY Promotion, Presentations and Library Visits
Marketing is important to a newly created journal like IJoL. Since its inception, the Editorial Board has posted calls for papers, new releases issues, and other announcements to CALA listserv and other library related networks. They wrote articles about the new journal for ALA and CALA publications, such as the International Leads and the CALA Newsletter. (Ren, 2016;Ren et al., 2017) They also presented to a number of national and international library conferences introducing the journal to CALA and wider LIS communities, including 2016 CALA Annual Conference, 2017 American Library Association Annual Conference, the 83rd IFLA General Conference and Assembly, and the Shanghai International Library Forum (SILF) in 2018 (Liu et al., 2016;Liu and Wang, 2017a;Liu and Wang, 2018).
The Editorial Board also embraces opportunities to promote this journal in collaboration with other CALA leaders or projects to online or in-person webinars and library conferences, such as the online Spring 2022 Augusta Baker Diversity Series hosted by the University of South Carolina, the 2022 IFLA WLIC Conference in Dublin, Ireland, and the 4th National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color in St. Pete Beach, Florida in 2023(Gao et al., 2022Yao et al., 2022;Yao et al., 2023).
Via CALA and other networks and opportunities, the Editorial Board visited libraries and other organizations to introduce this journal and provided instructions on the academic journal article writing and publication to librarians, library school students and other information professionals in China, including the New York University Shanghai and Fudan University (Liu, 2018;Liu and Thompson, 2018).
During the pandemic, the Editor-in-Chief of IJoL hosted online conversations with librarians, library school students and professors from Canada, China, and the United States about publishing journal articles (Liu, 2021). She also shared experience with publishing journal issues and working with international authors from all over the world at the Library Publishing Forum Virtual Conference in 2021 in collaboration with a guest editor of IJoL (Pun and Liu, 2021).
Through these efforts, the journal has been recognized by many CALA members and beyond. According to the third membership survey conducted by the CALA Assessment and Evaluation Committee at the end of 2017, over half of the participants responded that they have heard of or have used the IJoL. This journal is ranked the first place among all three academic publications of CALA listed on this survey question although it was launched for only one year during the response period of the survey (Xiong, et al., 2019).

Working with Authors
Many librarians and other professionals in the LIS field do not have formal training or experience with academic writing towards journal article publishing. The Editorial Board takes the role of working with authors to bridge the gap.
When they find innovative projects fitting to the journal, the Editorial Board will reach out and provide individual consultation to potential authors as needed. One example is the publication of the article titled "The State of Library Makerspaces" by Wang et al. (2016). The authors are academic librarians at a Canadian university who have done an excellent project related to makerspaces. However, they were not sure about how to report the project as a journal article. The editor-in-chief provided suggestions to the team via telephone meetings. The paper was published in the journal and later was recommended by the NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition as a resource for further reading on makerspaces (Becker et al., 2017). Another example is with an author from an institution in China who never published in an English journal. One editor of IJoL provided him guidance on the academic writing in English and additional copy-editing service to the manuscript submitted. This article was published in 2017 as a featured article on the preservation of the culture of Yi People, an ethnic group in China, which is rarely reported in English publications (Li, 2017).
IJoL also fostered the collaboration between editors and authors. In the special issue of Data Librarianship, through discussions on the special topic the guest editor in Canada formed a partnership with a professor in China to publish an article comparing the development of academic data services at universities of Canada and China (Thompson and Yin, 2017).

Partnership and Advocacy
IJoL has established partnership with the SILF since its inception. SILF conferences help promote the journal while the journal reports SILF activities and invites paper submissions from the presenters or other speakers to the SILF conferences.
In collaboration with Shanghai Library, IJoL hosted a concurrent session titled "Academic Publication and Professional Communication -Collaboration, Openness and Moving Forward Together: The International Future of Academic Publication in Library and Information Studies" in the Ninth SILF conference in 2018 in Shanghai, China. This well-attended session consists of five presentations on topics of academic journal and monograph publications, tips and experiences about publishing in English academic journals, international collaboration of publications between Chinese and American or Canadian authors, and the current topics in LIS publications. At the end of the session, Shanghai Library and the National Library of China co-hosted a round table titled "International Communication and Sharing of Library and Information Academic Achievements" in which editors and representatives of academic journals from China, Canada, and the United States shared their perspectives on the future of LIS academic publications. A joint initiative of the LIS journals advocating open access and international collaboration was endorsed by twentythree participating journals including IJoL and other core LIS journals in China such as Journal of the National Library of China, Library Journal, and Library Construction . The initiative "calls for promoting the rapid and wider dissemination of research results in LIS and making the research results in this field freely available to the public" (Huang and Liu, 2018, p. 109-110).
IJoL has also made significant contributions to the IFLA Library Publishing Special Interest Group (SIG), a global library publishing community promoting open access for full and immediate access to scholarly output. Since the SIG was founded in 2018, the editor-in-chief of IJoL has been heavily involved in its establishment and development. She has chaired the Communications subcommittee, served as the SIG representative to the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) Board, and led an international team, including other IJoL Editorial Board members to create the IFLA Library Publishing Map of the World in collaboration with LPC (O'Neil, Liu & Shibaeva, 2022). This further promoted IJoL to the wider community of LIS open access academic publications.

DISCUSSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
As IJoL enters its six-year anniversary, a new leadership for this journal has been formed. The two new co-editors-in-chief appointed in July 2022 have been the founding members of IJoL and contributed to every aspect of the journal's development. The new leadership strives to continue upholding the journal's principles of sustainable development and the pursuit of high quality.
IJoL's primary goal for the next several years is to further streamline the publication process and enhance the control for quality. IJoL should align its publishing practice with longestablished professional standards and operate more efficiently and smoothly. To accomplish that, the first step is to make sure the journal has high-quality volunteers at every step of the process including peer reviewing, copyediting, layout designing, and more.
IJoL has been using its online and open access features to its advantage by adopting the pre-publication practice to speed up the dissemination of information and reduce the unnecessary delay during the process. It is currently experimenting with the quarterly publication frequency to determine whether that arrangement better suits the stakeholder's expectations and the allocation of the workload for editors and reviewers than its previous biannual publication frequency. The ultimate goal is to streamline the process and increase efficiency.
As CALA's official publication, IJoL continues to provide a unique venue for CALA members and other librarians to publish. It provides an inclusive platform for quality reports on library practices and studies done by librarians from various countries and backgrounds.
Going forward, IJoL will focus on identifying its niche and strength areas and become more distinct and reputable in the LIS publishing industry. To achieve that, it requires the editorial team and leadership to constantly go back to its original intentions in the summer of 2015 in BaoShan, China when a group of CALA delegations faced the challenge of language barriers. IJoL will continue to serve as the primary publication platform for CALA members, and subsequently for librarians around the world. Moreover, IJoL will improve the communication among authors and publications in different languages, especially between English and Chinese by translating and introducing to the English world more literature published in Chinese language.
Another important issue or challenge facing the publishing industry in general is how to avoid and detect plagiarism and the AI-generated submissions. IJoL must be keenly aware of the latest trend and apply the best practice to ensure the integrity and high quality of the journal. The plagiarism detection application called iThenticate used by IJoL lacks the detection function for AI-generated content. It is hoped that that function will be developed in the near future. Once the function is available, IJoL will implement it.
Last but not the least, IJoL will work hard to make the journal website more user-friendly and to add more useful and attractive features and functions, such as How to Cite, Most Downloaded Articles, etc.