Cathy Carpenter, Head of the Georgia Tech Architecture Library

In 2008, the Georgia Institute of Technology Library collaborated with Kathy Roper, Associate Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Building Construction to create the International Journal of Facility Management.  The library hosts the journal and college faculty serve as editors and managers of the journal.  The library journal hosting service is part of the Library’s larger initiative to help advance new forms of scholarly publishing. The journal is published quarterly and devoted to the science, technology and practice of facility management. The audience consists of faculty, researchers, practioners and allied professional organizations. Each volume contains academic papers as well as a case study from a practioner. The most recent volume included three academic papers: Comparison of Thirty Green Building Projects across the US: Common Elements; The Strategic Facilities Management Organization in Housing: Implications for Sustainable Facilities Management; Classification and Climate Zone Greenhouse Gas Inventory Benchmarking in Higher Education and a professional practice paper on Atlanta Botanical Gardens Sustainability Case Study.

The International Journal of Facility Management is an open access, peer-reviewed journal. Articles published in open-access journals provide greater visibility and are cited more often than articles published in for-profit journals.  Researchers can more easily find information and then build upon what has been done, thus enhancing scholarship.  Plus, practioners in the field have access to published university research, which is not the case with subscription based journals. The journal is published using the Open Journals System software for management and publishing support.

More than 14,000 journals are being published worldwide using the Open Journals System.  OJS can be downloaded for free and installed on a local Web server. OJS is a multilingual system, allowing a journal to be published in two or three languages. It covers all aspects of online publishing, from establishing a journal website to operational tasks such as the author’s submission process, peer review, editing, publication, archiving and indexing of the journal. Content is available in PDF or HTML versions and can contain images or audio and video content.  OJC is scalable and can enable a single editor to manage all aspects of a journal or it can support an international team. The software can be used either to transition an existing paper-based or email attachment journal workflow into one that exists solely online or to create a brand new open access journal. For more information:

International Journal of Facility Management:     http://www.ijfm.net/index.php/ijfm
Open Journal System website:    http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
List of journals using OJS:   http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals