Panel: Customizing Technology to Meet Editorial and Production Challenges

Description: Michigan Publishing Services, a division of Michigan Publishing within the University of Michigan Library, provides publishing services to the University of Michigan community, including faculty, faculty emeriti, students, and others campus-wide. After an approval process, when a monograph is accepted and moved into production, how do we determine the best workflow for the book—and author’s—needs?

Serving the Niche: Choosing Monograph Production Workflows to Suit Library Publishing Needs will outline various production workflows utilizing different resources and expertise: external production vendors, internal tools and partnerships, and collaborative publishing platforms, using example monographs from our open access Maize Books imprint. In examining our workflows, we will discuss determining a book’s complexity, associated production costs, and managing expectations and timelines.

We hope that this presentation will encourage other library publishers to consider operating their own service-based monograph publishing division. For libraries who already publish monographs, we hope that sharing our production workflows will be helpful in determining and/or streamlining their own workflows going forward.

Migrating Journals: Working with Editors

Presenter: Johanna Meetz, Pacific University

Description: In 2019 Pacific University migrated all journals published via Digital commons to Ubiquity Press’ journal publishing platform. This presentation will discuss that process, with a focus on working with faculty editors who are both located locally as well as across the country. It will focus on:

• Communicating with stakeholders about the migration, including journal editors (timing, testing the new platforms, and deciding when to go live)
• Training editors to use a new platform (this was a challenge because I never use the same features of the site as the editors do)
• Working with editors on site designs (some editors were very particular with the design, others were less invested and both present unique challenges)
• Working through growing pains (general dissatisfaction with platform idiosyncrasies)

In addition to these issues, I will also briefly discuss some of the more technical/logistical obstacles, like:

• How we chose to handle articles that were still in review in the old platform after the new platform went live
• How we chose to handle training for an editor who came on board as we were transitioning to the new platform
• Making changes to article templates (including cover sheets) to reflect new information (titles, websites, etc) of journals