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The International Journal for Water, Equity and Justice (IJWEJ), an open access, digital publication of The Water Center at Penn and the Global Water Alliance (GWA), recently relaunched with a new scope, name, and digital platform, with the support of the Penn Libraries. With sustainability as a core concern the journal has just navigated an initial cycle of publication on a new digital platform.
In summer 2023, the Penn Libraries undertook a migration to a new management system for Scholarly Commons, the open access institutional repository for gathering, indexing, storing, and making widely available the scholarly output of the Penn community. The new platform provides more options for publishing research, such as data sets, but does not provide the editorial systems or support necessary for publishing journals. The need for a new publishing plan—including new workflows for managing submissions and peer reviews, formats for essays for publication, and setting up a new platform—resulted in a multi-year collaboration between the Penn Libraries and the editorial teams of several journals. One of those journals was the International Journal for Water, Equity, and Justice, a publication of The Water Center at Penn.