Welcome Caroline Mort, Open Access Journals Managing Editor

The University of North Carolina Press is pleased to announce the hiring of Caroline Mort to the newly created position of Open Access Journals Managing Editor. Mort served most recently in the Library Copyright Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will report to Journals Manager Stacy Lavin. In her new position, she will play a key role in building out two related open-access journals initiatives connected with the Press: The Partnership for Open Publishing (POP) and the Academic Research Community (ARC) Alliance. 

POP is developed and offered by the Press to partner with libraries across the statewide UNC System to support diamond open-access journals. POP’s platform and services are an outcome of the Arcadia-funded Next Generation Library Publishing grant. The tools are built on open-source code and designed to leverage community frameworks to promote discoverability, access, and sustainability. POP’s content interface, powered by Meru, tracks usage, features robust search capabilities, and allows each university to customize its campus’s community portal while remaining connected to the wider System community. Participating campuses benefit from POP’s high production quality, training and support, and built-in tracking, search, and metadata features. Additionally, POP partners can access optional services and tools, such as ISSN registration, DOI assignment, and editorial management software powered by Janeway, to facilitate publishing workflows.  

The ARC Alliance is a community of like-minded scholars supportive of a non-profit, altruistic, high-quality scholarly publishing alternative to standard publishing models. Led by Drs. Cass T. Miller and Bradley M. Hemminger at UNC Chapel Hill, the ARC Alliance seeks to build a multi-institutional infrastructure for new (or newly) open-access journals to operate unfettered by author publication charges. ARC has leveraged part of POP’s platform software to launch its debut journal, ARC-Geographical Research.  

This two-year limited full-time position at the University of North Carolina Press has been funded by the office of the Provost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.