Day/time: May 7, 2025, 12:00 p.m. to 1 p.m. EDT
Title: A Global View on the Evolution of Open Book Publishing
Presenter: Zoe Wake Hyde (she/her), OMP Coordinator, Public Knowledge Project
Description: This presentation explores global open book publishing trends, considering the movement to diversify how we define a ‘book’, an assessment of the book production software landscape, a map of developing support structures, and other insights informed by research conducted by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) into use of Open Monograph Press (OMP). OMP, an open source tool developed by PKP and adopted by 400+ publishing initiatives globally to publish monographs, edited volumes and other kinds of long-form scholarship, has recently been subject to an in-depth strategic review to ensure responsiveness to community needs. While crucial to our collective knowledge, book publishing has seen a slower uptake of open practices than journal publishing, evident in the vast difference in adoption between OMP and PKP’s journal offering, Open Journal Systems (OJS), which supports 50,000+ journals worldwide. However, in line with their commitment to making research a public good, PKP is investing in support for open book publishing and growing our collective understanding of how knowledge creators worldwide are sharing all forms of long-form scholarship. Presenting case studies based on OMP users across North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, this session seeks to shine a light on how book publishing practices are evolving, how that is informing the next generation of book publishing infrastructures, and how library publishers can develop more book-oriented pathways to contribute to our collective knowledge, without the need to implement a traditional press structure.
Title: Beyond Journal Publishing: Adapting OJS for internal grant applications
Presenters:
- Priscilla Carmini (she/her), Digital Repositories Librarian, University of Waterloo
- Israel Cefrin (he/him), Information Technology Specialist / Developer, University of Waterloo
Description: Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal publishing system that has enabled scholars worldwide to share openly access scholarship outside of the confines of the traditional journal publishing landscape. The thoughtfully created review process, the array of plugins, and variety of customization options have allowed journals across all disciplines to facilitate a reading experience on their journal website that is unique to their brand. The adaptability of OJS has also allowed it to be developed for other use application use cases, including to facilitate the application of internal grants at post-secondary institutions.
In 2015, Israel Cefrin, the Information Technology Specialist/Developer, at the University of Waterloo, collaborated with a department of post graduate studies to develop a grant application process using OJS 2.0 for post graduate research grants at Universidade Estadual do Rio Grande do Sul (UERGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Since transitioning to his role at the University of Waterloo, Israel Cefrin and Krista Godfrey, Head of Digital Initiatives, successfully piloted a grant application process using OJS 3.3 for an internal grant at the University of Waterloo called the Graham Seed Fund. During the 2024-2025 academic year, Priscilla Carmini, Digital Repositories Librarian, and Israel Cefrin have since added four more grants to the pilot, in addition to the Graham Seed Fund, and will likely expand the program further during the 2025-2026 term. During this session, the presenters will describe the lessons learned from the initial pilots, the development of the grant service, and the ways in which OJS can be adapted out of the box (i.e., no changes to core code) to support grant application processes.
Title: Taming the Beast: Leveraging A Large Scale Platform Migration for Strategic Program Goals
Presenters:
- Lisa Schiff (she/her), Associate Director, Publishing, Archives, and Digitization, California Digital Library, University of California
- Justin Gonder, Senior Product Manager, Publishing, California Digital Library, University of California
Description: The phrase “platform migration” can strike fear into the heart of any team, especially if the platform provides the complex workflows of journal manuscript management systems. CDL’s recent experience migrating its 90 eScholarship journals from OJS to Janeway, though no small task, ultimately converted that dread to enthusiasm! Facing a daunting migration scale, the team leaned on the time-honored strategy of running a pilot to manage complexity; we identified a small cohort of journals to work in close consultation with in order to surface any unidentified gaps in the new platform and our migration plan. We intended initially to follow this pilot with a refined, formulaic migration of the remaining journals, moving them to the new platform as quickly as possible. However, we discovered, in the course of the pilot, that this hands-on approach opened up all kinds of opportunities to more deeply engage with our editors and advance our publishing program in ways that have nothing to do with technical infrastructure. By extending our timeline and continuing with our original consultative strategy, we built stronger connections between journal editorial teams and eScholarship staff and made space for:
Securing participation by the editors in DEI training
Increasing adoption of CC licenses within our publications
Ensuring journal author agreements met our current practices and were being properly used
In this session, CDL staff will discuss our consultative journal migration strategy, tools, and templates, and the unanticipated, significant positive outcomes that this approach to platform migration enabled.