A New Era for Digital Commons Journals

Journals currently publishing with Digital Commons have an exciting new option: Modern Journal Designs are available free for Digital Commons journals that wish to update their look and present a streamlined experience for today’s visitors.

Modern Journal Designs offer a next-generation, responsive interface for enhancing the visual impact and usability of your scholarly journal. The functionality will receive ongoing updates on our active roadmap, with more display features and editor customization options dedicated to supporting Diamond open access publishing. 

Key Benefits and Functionality

Some of the key benefits:

• An updated interface empowers administrators and editors to effectively market their journals and institutions to more audiences and helps to tackle a crucial issue: attracting journals run by campus faculty and newer researchers.
• Responsive and flexible designs enable editors to innovate within the academic journal format while maintaining a polished look. Readers benefit from effortless navigation to engage deeply with content across devices.
• Built-in professionalization features inspire editors to improve key markers of journal quality and credibility, such as robust policy and ethics pages that are essential for indexing.
• Customization options for editors make it simple to adjust content display or highlight current topics without requiring Consulting Services or extensive technical knowledge.

What's on the landing page:

The landing page is the first component of Modern Journal Designs to be released. It includes the following customizable sections that provide a clean and intuitive layout for the journal's content. In the initial release, links in all sections will go to the appropriate classic journal page.  

• Current Issue: Highlights the most recently published issue including an optional cover image.
• Featured Content: Displays the two most recently published articles by default, and can be customized to show any two live articles from your journal as well as optional image cards. 
• Current Articles: Lists the current articles from your DC classic landing page, including document type headings if these are used in the classic journal.
• Most Popular Articles: Shows a card grid with the top six most downloaded articles, based on total downloads. 

The navigation bar, the banner, and the footer will appear on all Modern Journal pages once released.

Is a Modern Journal Design Right for Your Journal?

Most Digital Commons classic journals will benefit from an upgrade to a Modern Journal Design, which delivers valuable new features for showcasing your journal’s scholarship. Journals that utilize mostly standard configurations with limited customization are a great fit for a Modern Journal Design. So are journals that are interested in exploring new, adaptive alternatives to the current configurations and user experience.

For some journals, valued features or customizations available in classic journals might not be replicable yet in a Modern Journal Design. Currently, some of the options not yet supported in Modern Journal Designs include:

• Nonstandard numbering such as double issues; hiding either volume or issue numbers; or custom sorting of volumes/issues.
• Volume and issue format variations such as using “Number” instead of “Issue” or showing volumes only.
• Customizations to the list of articles such as displaying additional metadata or a custom article sort order.

With a steady release schedule underway, we will continue to add new functionality. We are happy to keep you up to date on new releases that include options comparable to your current settings. In addition, Consulting Services is available to help you identify Modern Journal Design alternatives to existing setups in classic journals.

What to Look Forward to 

The next round of features and enhancements are already in the works for Modern Journal Designs, and much is in store as we develop and extend the platform. After the initial release of the landing page, journals will gradually move to the new interface in phased releases for all journal content, including article pages and expanded image display options.

If you are interested in learning more about moving to a Modern Journal Design, please contact your consultant and they can provide further orientation tailored to your journal’s needs.