Celebrating Open Access Success: The Journal of Nursing Doctoral Students Scholarship

For the last eighteen years, the scholarly community has championed the increasing equitable access to information for the common good through a series of events that have evolved into the recurring “International Open Access Week.” This year, from October 19th through the 25th, Penn Libraries joins other institutions around the world in a weeklong celebration of initiatives that inspire movement toward increasing the open and freely accessible sharing of knowledge for the purposes of equity and societal betterment. OA Week 2026 challenges participants to consider the topic “The Cost of Knowledge,” and asks what those costs might be, and who might be bearing them? As part of the celebration of OA Week, Research Data and Digital Scholarship (RDDS) in collaboration with many other units of the Penn Libraries, have planned a slate of activities and events. To kick-start these events, Hannah Chang, the RDDS Digital Projects and Publications Consultant, interviewed several editorial members of the Journal of Nursing Doctoral Students Scholarship, which recently published its inaugural issue on the RDDS-hosted Manifold platform. Manifold provides Penn affiliates the opportunity to publish their scholarship Open Access and under many OA-friendly open licenses at no cost to either reader or author. 

For more information about Manifold and RDDS’s digital publication hosting services, please see the libraries’ guide, or contact libraryrdds@pobox.upenn.edu

After eleven editions of living in a single PDF file and a gap year of finding solutions, the Journal of Nursing Doctoral Students Scholarship (JNDSS) found a new home, launching its 12th edition on Manifold this month.

The peer-reviewed and student-led journal, founded by 3 nursing PhD students in 2013, was created for nursing doctoral students to publish their research and engage with others’ work in the hope to advance nursing science.

The publications were in one PDF file on the Penn Nursing website for years, and the editors realized that this setup limited accessibility. According to Oonjee Oh, the editor of the 12th edition, they wanted to “find a platform that would be free and also easy for us to manage. And Manifold was the best fit.”

The journal’s faculty advisors, Sarah Kagan and Katelin Hoskins, wrote, “The student editorial team made this decision, arguing that an open-source platform offered important value to them and their prospective authors, widening access to the journal beyond the makeshift access on a page within the School of Nursing. … Their acumen and foresight really impressed us!”

Moving JNDSS to Manifold gave each article its own DOI address, made the journal easier to navigate and manage, and allowed its research to be open to nursing students outside of Penn. According to an author satisfaction survey sent out to 300 US nursing schools, Oh said that “being open access and free of charge was one of their motivations to submit their work to JNDSS.” 

“It’s moving towards a more formal journal compared to what it was,” Oh added, “Just the fact that JNDSS now has its own platform separate from Penn Nursing, I’m very proud of that achievement.”

Among the other projects on Manifold, JNDSS stands out because it is primarily run by students. 

“A student-run journal is quite rare in nursing,” Kagan and Hoskins wrote, “We cannot overstate the power of creating an accessible journal by and for students. This journal is generative and truly special. The students who volunteer their time on the editorial team and in peer review create a legacy for others before they even finish their degrees.”

Oh personally experienced the challenge and growth being an editor of a student journal provided her. Being a peer reviewer requires feedback and critique that goes deeper than “‘Oh this needs to be fixed’ or ‘This sucks’” that is passable in a classroom.

“They need to write it in a way to make their feedback actionable,” she said, “And as for editors like myself, I get to learn what’s happening on the other side of the journal.”

As editor, she learned to consider the valuable feedback and make her own decisions.

“It’s really communication between the author and the peer reviewer and the editor in between as a mediator,” she said, “So I think that type of communication is very different and it’s hard to gain in just a single classroom setting.”

Kagan and Hoskins emphasized how the decision-making and leadership of putting a journal together allow students to “[bolster] their success across their varied careers.”

Oh, who will be moving on from her position as editor, has high hopes for the journal as the editorial team plans its 13th edition.

“I think moving forward…expanding international[ly] and recruiting peer reviewers from other countries could help increase the diversity of our papers,” she said.

Now that they found the right platform to showcase their work, the editorial team has the freedom to expand and further refine its research in a way that it wasn’t able to do before. Kagan and Hoskins are aware of the unique opportunity JNDSS poses and are determined in helping doctoral students continue their work.

They wrote, “Many nurses around the world lack funds to read materials in many journals. JNDSS makes a small and notable difference in rebalancing this inequity.”