Library as Scholarly Publishing Partner: Keys to Success

Many academic libraries are looking at new ways to add value when they deliver services to faculty, and one potential area where the library can provide new services is in partnering with academic staff to support the dissemination of faculty research. Librarians have traditionally helped faculty researchers at the beginning of the research cycle, with the discovery and delivery of information sources. However, they are now playing a role at the end of the research cycle, providing services that support scholarly publishing. This paper examines library participation in faculty-led publishing ventures. In particular, it explores the value that smaller research libraries can provide to faculty editors through journal hosting, which will be analysed through an examination of the successful migration of the Australian Journal of Teacher Education , a faculty-administered journal at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, to the University’s institutional repository. This transition provided library staff members at Edith Cowan University opportunities to develop new knowledge and skills in journal publishing, while meeting the journal’s need for a better way to manage a growing influx of article submissions. The resultant faculty-library partnership enabled more effective management of the journal and has contributed to its growing success. The evaluative framework developed to enable assessment of the success of this journal’s transition can help other libraries demonstrate the success of their own journal hosting ventures.


INTRODUCTION
The library at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Perth, Western Australia is responsible for the administration of the University's institutional repository (IR). The IR uses the Digital Commons platform, developed and supported by Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) in Berkeley, California. Digital Commons includes functionality for hosting open access journals and for managing all aspects of the journal publishing process from author submissions, to editing, reviewing and final publication.
When ECU's IR was established in 2007, the senior manager of the ECU Library's technical division recognized the opportunity afforded by Digital Commons for enabling journal hosting. In 2010, the Library approached the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Teacher Education (AJTE) with the proposal that the current online version of the journal be transferred to an IR-hosted site. This paper will explore the motivations and perceived advantages for the Library and the AJTE editorial board that led to the publishing partnership. This exploration of the partnership will describe the steps undertaken to host the journal on the IR; it will examine the resultant success of AJTE; and finally, it will measure the journal's success against a proposed set of criteria which provide an evaluative framework for measuring the success of journal hosting ventures.
The partnership between the Library and the AJTE editorial team represents a single example of a library-led journal publishing experience, which will be examined in the context of the broader emergence of libraries as journal publishing partners, and in particular in the role of journal hosts. Although there are a wide range of new roles and opportunities for academic libraries in journal publishing, journal hosting services offer an opportunity for libraries-particularly smaller research libraries-to provide value to their faculty (and the scholarly communication system) without the significant investment in time and resources required by assuming all publishers' duties. It is hoped that the lessons learned through the ECU Library's hosting experience will aid other libraries both in developing successful journal publishing partnerships and in articulating the value of their own hosting services.

New Roles for Libraries
Librarians play a part in supporting faculty engaged in research, and as noted by Carpenter, Graybill, Offord and Piorun (2011), this has traditionally involved preserving the institution's research output, organising resources, and assisting researchers with locating and accessing information relevant to their needs. According to JISC (2010), this information discovery process is part of the first step in the research lifecycle-the development and exploration of ideas.
In more recent years, academic librarians have begun to move beyond this traditional role and to support faculty researchers during other steps in the research lifecycle. For example, Tenopir, Sandusky, Allard and Birch (2013) highlight the emerging role that academic librarians are playing in data management and in the creation of metadata for research data, both of which are components of the third step in the JISC research cycle (JISC, 2010). Academic libraries are also partnering with faculty in publishing journals (Perry, Borchert, Deliyannides, Kosavic, & Kennison, 2011), which is part of the final step of the JISC research lifecycle (publication of research outputs) (JISC, 2010).
Librarians' roles in the research and scholarly communication system are not the only things that are changing. As discussed by Walters (2012), scholarly publishing itself is also evolving in response to many forces impinging upon the academic landscape, including the emergence of public policies mandating open access to publications arising from government-funded research. These mandates will affect researchers seeking an open access publication outlet. For libraries, who are already promoting open access options to faculty (Carpenter et al., 2011), the changes in the scholarly publishing environment present an opportunity for them to take on the actual publisher role themselves.
Indeed, libraries are already developing the capacity to distribute scholarly literature in a digital environment (Fons, Furlough, Kirk, Luther, & Reid, 2012), and partnerships with existing journals offer one way for libraries to transition into the role of publisher and to add value to those publications. For example, as Elbaek & Nondal (2007) note, there has been concern amongst editors of smaller journals that they will effectively cease to exist if they do not have online content as they will be ignored by current university students (Elbaek & Nondal, 2007). However, journal editors may not have the expertise to transfer journal content to a digital environment, a process that could be undertaken by library staff (Elbaek & Nondal, 2007).

Library Involvement in Publishing
Although Walters (2012) has raised the question as to whether faculty will embrace libraries as publishers of their research outputs, some academic libraries are moving in this direction and publishing open access journals (Perry et al., 2011). Whether libraries' motivation is simply to provide open access venues for faculty and students to publish, or is also a response to increasing journals costs (Chavez, 2010), library-based publishing services have grown over the past decade. Hahn (2008) reports on a 2007 survey involving 80 member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) which found that 44% of respondents were involved in publishing, with 88% of these libraries involved in journal publishing. A later survey conducted with 43 ARL members in 2010 found that 55% of respondents were publishing or interested to do so (Crow et al., 2012).
In Australia there are currently 126 open access journals published across 25 of the country's universities (Australian Open Access Support Group, 2013). 64% of Australian universities are involved in some way in open access journal publishing, with an average of 5 journals per institution. In North America, Crow et al. (2012) found that around 75% of the 43 responding ARL libraries published between 1 and 6 journals. The library at ECU currently hosts 6 open access journal titles.

Library Publishing Models
There are numerous models and technologies that libraries can employ in taking on a publishing role. For example, Lorimer (2013) asserts the importance of libraries collaborating with researchers and university presses, a library publishing model also described by Walters (2012). Perry et al (2011) examine librarybased journal publishing models, and report that one option employed by many libraries involves hosting open access journals in collaboration with faculty. The authors question the sustainability of faculty-published journals and suggest that library-based journal hosting (via an IR) may offer a more stable environment for such journals, thus providing a valuable service to the faculty editors and to the journal (Perry et al., 2011).
There are several tools libraries can use to host journals, including open source platforms like Open Journal System (OJS) and commercial options such as Digital Commons (from bepress) (Hahn, 2008). Largely because of these technologies, journal hosting is a viable option for small research libraries that do not have sufficient resources to dedicate to wider publishing services, such as copyediting, and where library staff members involved have other duties outside of publishing.

Measuring Success
Although journal hosting may not require the same level of funding or staff time as more comprehensive publishing services, it is still important to demonstrate that any resources that are dedicated to hosting services are producing positive outcomes. To that end, Crow et al. (2012) acknowledge that there is a need to develop metrics to evaluate the effectiveness and value of these services. However, it is not clear what criteria should be used to measure the success of a library-hosted journal. Crow et al. (2011) propose that library publishing activities be evaluated using a model comprised of a set of criteria designed to assess the sustainability of the services, including the value proposition of the publishing venture (the content and service available to users) and the income streams set up to generate income from the publishing service (obviously, income streams may not exist for some open access publications). Xia (2009) also emphasizes sustainability, and suggests a number of factors that libraries need to consider when publishing journals, including the degree to which library-based publishing has sustainability and scalability. Measuring both the sustainability and scalability of library journal hosting may help to substantiate whether a journal hosting venture has the capacity to survive and grow in the longer term.
While the sustainability and scalability of library hosting services are important criteria, it is also important to consider the impact that the services have for the hosted journals. A vital precursor to impact is visibility-if a journal is not highly visible, the work it publishes will have minimal impact. Xia (2009) notes that library-based publishing has the capacity to raise institutional visibility, resulting in increased visibility of faculty research. For individual journals, visibility can be measured in terms of the international diversity of journal readership, which can demonstrate whether library journal hosting has improved the global reach of a journal. Download statistics are also a measure of visibility, and Bankier and Smith (2008) assert that these statistics can provide evidence to editors and authors of the impact of publishing through the library.
If a library is able to demonstrate increased visibility and impact of the journals it hosts (via readership reports, download statistics, or other measures of use), there may also be a positive impact on the sustainability and scalability for both the individual journals and the library's hosting services as a whole. Bankier and Smith (2008) propose that releasing the download statistics from a library-published (or hosted) journal to editors and authors can encourage further submissions and help a journal to achieve sustainability. Furthermore, increasing download statistics demonstrate the impact of library-based hosting services and encourage further editors to publish their journals with the library (Bankier & Smith, 2008). In this way the library may acquire new journals and achieve scalability in its hosting ventures. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication | jlsc-pub.org

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Beyond sustainability, scalability, and visibility, successful library journal hosting services must also be able to demonstrate that they are fulfilling the traditional roles of scholarly publishers. Park and Shim (2011) have adapted the four functions of scholarly communication devised by Roosendaal and Guerts (1997) for application to library publishing. They describe these four functions as registration (ensuring that the output clearly establishes the ownership of intellectual property on that output), archiving (preserving scholarly output for the future), certification (demonstrating the quality of research outputs) and awareness (enabling the distribution, discoverability, and accessibility of research outputs). A library hosting service should, at minimum, provide a means for the journals it hosts to perform those functions-and may, in some cases, directly perform those functions itself.

BACKGROUND Edith Cowan University (ECU)
ECU has its origins in several former teachers colleges located in Perth in Western Australia. The oldest college, the Claremont Teachers College, was established in 1902 (Bolton & Byrne, 2001, Appendix I). The colleges became Edith Cowan University in 1991 (Bolton & Byrne, 2001, p. 124).
ECU has a long history in teacher education, extending back more than 100 years, so the profile of the Australian Journal of Teacher Education fits well with the institution and its present position as the largest provider of teacher education in Western Australia.

The Australian Journal of Teacher Education (AJTE)
AJTE began as a subscription-based print publication in 1976 and was managed and published by academic staff at the former Graylands Teachers College (Bolton & Byrne, 2001, p. 98). It continued as an in-house, subscription-based print publication until 2008, when the journal's editorial board moved the journal from its existing print form to an open access in-house managed online platform.
Members of the editorial board noted that by 2008 the print format journal had "become moribund" (T. Fetherson and G. Campbell-Evans, personal communication, April 16, 2013). Furthermore, at that time the income from subscriptions was less than the cost of producing the journal, resulting in a reduction in financial resources. Article submissions were also waning.
With diminishing funds and a scarcity of content, it was time for AJTE to change direction and move to an open access online platform (T. Fetherston and G. Campbell-Evans, personal communication, April 16, 2013). Accordingly, Associate Professor Fetherston constructed a journal website, which was a series of static HTML pages, hosted on a faculty server. He was responsible for maintaining the site, formatting new articles, and manually publishing them online. ECU faculty staffed the editorial board and the peer review process was conducted via email.
Despite its rudimentary online journal management system, once AJTE went online it started to be discovered by Google and other search engines. The journal then came to the attention of an international audience, including researchers in Turkey and North America. With search engine discoverability and growing internationalization came a growth in journal submissions. During the 32 years of the print journal  an average of 2.1 issues per year were published, while there were 6.6 issues between 2008 and 2010.

Edith Cowan University Library and Research Online
ECU's institutional repository, known as Research Online (http://ro.ecu.edu.au/), was established in 2007. Since then, Research Online has grown into a repository that holds a diverse range of research outputs produced by ECU academic staff, researchers, and postgraduate students. As of September 2013 there were more than 11,600 metadata records in the repository along with over 3,300 openly accessible full text documents, which have attracted more than 1.25 million downloads.
Research Online holds theses, photographic galleries, conference papers, and ECU research publications. Full text documents, including open access journal articles, are integrated into the Digital Commons Network (http://network.bepress.com), which provides access to documents from all institutions using the Digital Commons platform.
As noted by Mr David Howard (the University Librarian), it was "Digital Commons' functionality to publish peerreviewed journals that stood out when selecting repository software" (D. Howard, personal communication, May 1, 2013). The Library was aware that Digital Commons could assist ECU journal editors with the difficulties they were experiencing in manual peer-review workflows (D. Howard, personal communication, May 1, 2013).

BUILDING THE LIBRARY-FACULTY PUBLISHING PARTNERSHIP
As noted above, ECU's choice of Digital Commons as its IR platform was influenced by Digital Commons' journal publishing capabilities and, in 2007, the IR manager began to seek out suitable content: What we needed was to find academics who were producing a journal who would be willing to try our platform and to showcase the capabilities of the system. We tasked our faculty librarians to seek out these publications from the academic community. The editors of AJTE were approached with the proposal that they move the journal to Research Online. Around this time the journal had received a noteworthy "A" ranking in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2010 ranked journal list. Mr. Howard stated that "The AJTE was perfect for us. It was a well-established and long standing journal and it was not being published by any commercial publisher" (D. Howard, personal communication, May 1, 2013).
The approach to the editorial board was timely: the existing online in-house journal had been very successful in growing the number of submissions, but there was a downside to this growth. Having a single member of the editorial board responsible for journal publishing and website maintenance was unsustainable. Consequently, the editorial board welcomed the Library's proposal to transfer the journal to the IR, Research Online.
Mr. Howard demonstrated to the editors the benefits of IR hosting: We pitched the idea by showing them other open access journals that used the software. We talked about the streamlining of their workflows to enhance their ability to deal with the workload. We highlighted the advantages of the system's ability to index their journal within Google and other indexing services. (D. Howard, personal communication, May 1, 2013) The editors had some questions concerning the finer details of hosting the journal in the repository, including what the journal homepage would look like. However, they responded very positively overall to the potential of the Digital Commons tools to ease the burden of managing the journal, and to alleviate current workload issues. The ability of Digital Commons to manage the peer-review process was particularly advantageous given that the existing method, involving email correspondence between editors and reviewers, was unsustainable in light of growing article submissions. Eventually, the full editorial board agreed to move the journal to Research Online. The next step was to undertake the actual transfer of the journal from its existing faculty website to Research Online. The articles published during the time the journal had been online (2008-2010) were in PDF format and these were imported from the faculty server into Digital Commons via a batch upload. Several library staff members then completed scanning print issues over about two weeks (L. Billingham and C. Burnop, personal communication, Aug 19, 2013). The library digitized and uploaded the available print back issues from 1976 onwards. The digitization was of particular value for AJTE as it would represent the first time in the journal's 34-year history that all content would be discoverable and accessible online. This kind of digitization service can be particularly valuable if journal editors do not have resources or experience to undertake this digital migration (Elbaek & Nondal, 2007).
Although this digitization process was unproblematic, there were difficulties experienced in inputting metadata because the OCR software employed was often unable to read the digitized text, resulting in the need for manual data entry. Furthermore, a number of AJTE authors had existing records in Research Online and it was difficult to link the brief author information provided on AJTE article manuscripts (first initials, surnames and affiliation) with the correct authors within Research Online. This problem was compounded by the affiliation changes associated with the amalgamations of ECU's precursor Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication | jlsc-pub.org JL SC institutions (L. Billingham and C. Burnop, personal communication, Aug 19, 2013).
Library staff collaborated with the journal editors, as well as with bepress, to establish the look and feel of the journal site and worked with bepress to ensure that all email correspondence templates were changed to the editors' specifications. It was also essential for IR staff to liaise with bepress in order to learn about the limitations of the system. This knowledge is critical for managing editors' expectations and for advising them on whether particular features can be implemented. In the case of AJTE, editors asked for features that were found to be unavailable within the Digital Commons system (L. Billingham and C. Burnop, personal communication, Aug 19, 2013).
Library staff met with the journal editors several times to provide them with training on the journal management software. Editorial responsibilities were spread across a group of members, and not everyone found the Digital Commons interface intuitive or easy to use (T. Fetherston and G. Campbell-Evans, personal communication, April 16, 2013). As a result, library staff needed to provide ongoing support and training to those editors who required it (L. Billingham and C. Burnop, personal communication, Aug 19, 2013). However, over time the editors became comfortable with the journal management tools and were less dependent on the Library.
While the AJTE editors are now almost entirely selfsufficient with regard to managing the journal's editorial and publication process through Digital Commons, the Library continues to be available to support the editors and provide expertise where required-for example, with regard to database indexing, the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs), and the implementation of a bepress-supported tool for tracking social media impact of articles (the Almetric widget: http://www.altmetric. com/). At the editor's request the Library recently applied to Thomson Reuters for AJTE to be indexed in Web of Science. The Library also undertook a major project to register DOIs for all AJTE articles using the CrossRef system. IR staff members investigated the CrossRef DOI registration process and set up a workflow for the registration of back issues, as well as one for registering all new articles and issues. To maximise the efficiencies of each workflow, a DOI generator was developed using Excel VBA, and an XSLT style sheet was created to enable automated transformation of IR metadata into a CrossRef compatible format. The Library then completed the DOI registration of all back issues and will continue to register DOIs for all new issues as they are completed. It is hoped that in the long term the addition of DOIs will improve the discoverability of journal content and the visibility of journal articles. Once the DOIs were established, the Library then requested that bepress implement the Altmetric widget so that mentions and bookmarks of AJTE articles within the online social media space would be tracked and counted. This journal hosting model-providing access to a publishing platform and training editors to use the platform independently-allows the Library to use our limited resources to focus on providing valuable added services to AJTE, such as indexing support and DOI registration, and helping the editors explore new tools like altmetrics. By focusing our time and resources in this way, we are able to free staff to seek out new hosting opportunities and to support more journals than if the Library were solely responsible for all aspects of the publishing process (e.g. copyediting, article formatting, marketing, etc.).

ASSESSING THE SUCCESS OF THE LIBRARY-FACULTY PARTNERSHIP
The Australian Journal of Teacher Education has been hosted on Research Online since 2010 (http://ro.ecu. edu.au/ajte/) and in this time it has thrived. Nevertheless, as noted by Crow et al. (2012), it is important to have methods in place upon which to substantiate the effectiveness and value of our library hosting services.
An evaluative framework was developed to assess the success of hosting AJTE on Research Online. This framework includes the four functions of scholarly communication, as defined by Park and Shim (2011)registration, archiving, certification, and awareness-as well as the criteria derived from Xia (2009), sustainability, scalability, and visibility. These seven areas can be addressed by describing the specific functionality and tools provided by the hosting service and examining metrics such as article downloads, readership demographics, and journal submission and rejection rates. This evaluative framework is general enough in scope to be used by any library involved in journal hosting.

Registration
Although AJTE has always provided a registration function for authors, the Library's hosting services provide additional efficiency and functionality in this area. The incremental publishing model that is available through the Research Online system, as well as the general efficiency of the platform, facilitates a faster turnaround time for the processing of articles and makes it possible for the journal editors to more rapidly register research outputs, which provides authors with more timely recognition of their scholarly contributions.
By providing DOI registration as part of the host service for AJTE, the Library also contributes to a consistent, and persistent, means of citation for authors' articles, which makes it easier for readers to identify and access AJTE authors' unique ideas (articles).

Archiving
Once a scholarly contribution is registered through publication as a unique journal article, it is important to provide long-term, persistent access to that work. One important result of moving the journal to Research Online from an independently managed faculty site is that it ensures the long-term archiving of all current and future AJTE articles. Digital Commons has mechanisms in place to address the safe storage and preservation of repository content (Bepress, 2013), including backup storage on database servers, daily backups of file systems, and weekly backups of data with an archival services vendor, Iron Mountain (Bepress, 2012). They also have mechanisms in place for format migration of content to enable future accessibility of present content, specifically content in PDF format (which AJTE uses for its articles) (Bepress, 2012). Through the digitization of all back issues, the editorial board can be assured of the long-term preservation and accessibility of all content dating back to the first issue in 1976.

Certification
Registering and providing persistent access to journal content has little value if the quality of the content itself is not appropriately certified. Traditional markers of certification/quality include the use of an appropriate peer review process and a journal's submission/ rejection rate.
Hosting AJTE in Research Online has made it easier to manage the review process. Editors can now build and manage a list of reviewers, assign reviewers to a given submission, determine how many previous reviews a reviewer has completed, and keep track of each reviewer's response time.
Another indicator that the library's hosting of AJTE has had a positive impact on the certification offered by the journal is the improvement in both the quantity and quality of articles being submitted to AJTE. According to the editors, since migrating to Research Online, they are now rejecting more submissions (see current rejection rate in Figure 1) (T. Fetherston and G. Campbell-Evans,   SC personal communication, April 16, 2013), and this is a result of receiving more quality submissions and being able to be more selective.

Awareness/Visibility
It would not be possible for AJTE to receive an increasing number of submissions-and for the editors to be increasingly selective-if the journal were not highly visible. Hosting AJTE with the Library has helped to improve the discoverability of content and grow readership levels and submissions since 2010. Search engine optimization has almost certainly contributed to an exponential growth in the number of article downloads in its time on the IR platform (over 345,000 cumulative downloads as of May 2013) (Figure 2). In addition, awareness of the journal within the international community is particularly strong, as indicated by the geographic visitor profile provided by Google Analytics (Figure 3, following page). 1 1 Because usage data (i.e. downloads and visitor demographics) are not available for the initial years of the journal's online presence (on the faculty website), it is not possible to make pre-and postmigration comparisons. However, by hosting AJTE, the Library is now able to help the editors demonstrate the current use and impact of the journal (since 2010) by providing this type of data.
The internationally diverse array of article submissions first observed by the journal editors with the facultyhosted online platform has been sustained since they began publishing through the IR in 2011. 2 Since this time, the journal has published 96 peer-reviewed articles from authors based in 17 different countries (Figure 4, following page).

Sustainability & Scalability
Although moving to Research Online has helped improve the visibility of the journal, and has likely contributed to increased submissions (particularly from international authors), it is important to note that AJTE was a successful publication prior to the transition. However, the migration to the IR platform has helped ensure that its continued success will be both sustainable and scalable. As noted by one editor: "when the volume of the submissions climbed the software was needed to manage the journal, which made it critical to move to an online system" (T. Fetherston and G. Campbell-Evans, personal communication, April 16, 2013). The journal 2 Although AJTE migrated to the IR in late 2010, the faculty editors did not begin using the full functionality of the site until mid-2011.

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has continued to undergo rapid growth since its move to the IR. The average number of articles published per year on the faculty website (between 2008 and 2010) was 41.3-this number has grown to 85.5 articles per year published through the IR (an increase in the annual publication output of 107%), and the number of annual issues has almost doubled from 6.6 (between 2008 and 2010) to 12 (in 2011 and 2012) since the journal's migration. The journal has continued to publish one issue per month throughout the first half of 2013. Because of the efficiency of the Library's IR-based publishing platform, AJTE has been able to effectively scale up its publication output in a sustainable manner.
While the Library's hosting services have enabled sustainable and scalable growth for AJTE, the Library has simultaneously demonstrated the sustainability and scalability of the hosting services themselves. By providing a system that allows journal editors to become largely self-sufficient, the Library is free to seek and develop further publishing projects. And by sharing the positive impact for AJTE-through download statistics and readership reports-it will likely be easier to encourage faculty participation in new publishing ventures.

LESSONS LEARNED
The experience of ECU's small research library embarking upon journal hosting for the first time should provide lessons for other libraries contemplating this process. There will be a range of issues to consider such as metadata integrity and the features and limitations of the publishing platform. Through the experience of setting up a journal, library staff will become aware that the editors of each journal have their own particular needs and, as noted by Elbaek and Nondal (2007), library staff must learn to listen to these particular needs. Setting up each hosted journal does not simply involve following a pre-fixed template, but requires working with editors and journal platform owners to meet the specific needs and expectations of the journal editors and editorial board.
The service provided by libraries should not end with the set-up phase, and it is through ongoing service to the journals it hosts that a library will continue to add value, and build knowledge and skills to support scholarly publishing. For example, at ECU, librarians learned to set up an automated, efficient, and sustainable workflow for registering DOIs, and have also learned more about journal indexing and altmetrics.
Following the success of the AJTE partnership, several new faculty-led journals have recently been launched at ECU (http://ro.ecu.edu.au/peer_review_list.html): • Australasian Journal of Paramedicine • Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Literature • eCULTURE

• Design Process Investigation
As each of these journals has been added to its portfolio, the Library has been able to demonstrate to the institution that its journal-hosting services are scalable and sustainable.
In addition to seeking new publishing partnerships, ECU Library will continue to add value and build upon its existing publishing partnership with AJTE. For example, it is hoped that the indexing of AJTE in Web of Science in the future will help to improve the visibility of the journal, certify the quality of content, and increase awareness of the journal internationally.

CONCLUSION
The Australian Journal of Teacher Education venture has demonstrated that a small research library can successfully host a journal and develop a sustainable journal hosting model. The partnership between the Library and the editors of AJTE has been mutually beneficial. The journal has raised its international profile and grown its readership. Several articles from the journal are in the top ten most downloaded items of all time in the repository and older articles that would have otherwise been relatively inaccessible to the international research community are now online-and one article from 1988 is in the top ten most downloaded items in the IR. For library staff, the knowledge gained from the AJTE partnership has been invaluable for informing the growth of the Library's hosting services. ECU Library plans to continue to build on the success of this initial publishing partnership and seek out new opportunities to further promote research and researchers within the institution and beyond.
As ECU Library and other academic and research libraries continue to develop journal hosting services in order to engage in the publishing process and contribute to faculty research and scholarly communication, it will be important to continue to demonstrate the value of these services. As evidenced through the application of the evaluative framework presented here, library journal hosting can help improve the sustainability of faculty journals and add value that extends beyond the provision of storage space. Journal hosting can provide faculty with efficient journal management tools, which can enable faculty editors to capitalize on the potential of online publishing and improve the scalability of their journals. Publishing tools, such as those of Digital Commons (or OJS) can also optimize the discoverability and visibility of journal content. In addition to offering these tools and platforms to faculty, hosting libraries can apply their growing knowledge of publishing in order to provide additional support to editors, such as helping to arrange the indexing of the journal in databases and registering DOIs for the journal content. Journal hosting can represent an ongoing relationship between the library and faculty that can continue to improve the sustainability, scalability, and visibility of faculty journals into the future.