\section{Discussion}



It is often presumed that publishing in libraries can be an inexpensive, efficient means of reaching local scholars with alternative pathways to promote research and scholarship, especially openly. Large library publishing operations demonstrate the capability of such programs to scale up and meet demand (the work of publishing programs at the California Digital Library, University of Michigan Libraries, and University of Pittsburgh Libraries supply ample testament). The experience of producing \textit{Tremor} at CDRS provides a view from another angle, where investment into a single productive partnership with a member of the campus faculty is prioritized. Even so, several unexpected challenges presented themselves as detailed in the report. Dependencies on external groups (e.g., vendors, indexers, even allied intra-library offices) can be difficult to manage to the satisfaction of all partners, especially in the fledgling stages of a new publication where expediency is essential. Even when the work in question is managed directly by the libraries using library staff, project requirements can dictate a difficult path, the extent of which may manifest only after sunk costs inhibit course correction, such as occurred here in platform development.

From the outset, the goal of the partnership has been to produce a journal that becomes entwined in and essential to a particular scholarly community. Recent dialogue between editorial and authorial perspectives playing out on \textit{Tremor}'s pages suggests that goal is in sight.\footnote{\href{http://cdrs.columbia.edu/cdrsmain/2014/06/open-scholarly-discourse-in-flagship-journal/}{http://cdrs.columbia.edu/cdrsmain/2014/06/open-scholarly-discourse-in-flagship-journal/}} Other milestones and signifiers of quality and community embeddedness have lit the way for the partnership to make selective investments and advance the project; having moved on from persistent identifier assignment; PMC publisher status; and search engine indexing, the team shifts its gaze to the challenges in impact analysis, content recruitment, journal data policy, and platform performance review. The potential in the project, however, is driven in the first place by the presence of a particularly motivated and engaged editorial partner, and enabled in the second place by a risk-tolerant production environment, where research and development can proceed apace, throttled primarily by the demands of the other scholar-focused digital projects across the center.

Throughout its journals publication program, CDRS seeks efficiencies and scale. For the majority of the center’s 20+ publication partners, modest platform investments can be realized quickly across titles by design. At some level, this makes \textit{Tremor} an outlier, perhaps due to the idiosyncratic needs of its disciplinary orientation. From another vantage point, however, it is expected that \textit{Tremor} is emblematic of the first-of-a-kind philosphy that drives all investment and innovation in the center. Work on the journal has pioneered processes for custom Google Scholar indexing, for identifier service interfaces, for scholarship fund setup and maintenance that are already being applied to other journal partnerships. Revenue surpluses, such as those reported here, speak to the viability of the funding approach taken and invite conversations around adjustment or reduction of APC and novel application of the scholarship funds to further drive growth of the journal and engagement of the scholarly community to which it supplies venue. 
