Topic description
As one of the largest employers of students on university and college campuses (Maxey-Harris et al., 2010), libraries are increasingly taking on a publishing role. The work now available to library student workers has blurred the line between a traditional publishing internship and normal library student work (Lippincott, 2017). There are two typical viewpoints for internships and student labor: an austerity measure for decreasing library budgets (Cottrell & Bell, 2015), or a road to learn the necessary skills and provide career roadmaps (Maxey-Harris et al., 2010). This balance between austerity and skill sets is at the intersection of the role and ethics of student labor and library publishing. Within the library, these programs can overlap with many different disciplines of librarianship and include a variety of staff, such as scholarly communication librarians, digital scholarship librarians, subject liaisons, and copyright librarians, bringing various levels of experience to library publishing, from prior work in publishing to no previous experience.
Library publishing programs have been focused on expanding their services, including the number of journals published, to create opportunities for authors with diverse viewpoints to share their scholarly and creative work and to develop open access publishing models. Existing literature has focused on balancing publishing additional journals or expanding the number of services offered with the themes of sustainability, scalability, staffing challenges, and project management. However, there are few studies on how open access journals operate and organize their editorial boards to ensure success and sustainability and the impact that budgets have on staffing and program scalability.
Further research into the connection between labor and library publishing is needed to identify publishing knowledge gaps among library publishing programs and investigate their labor makeup. Libraries must also understand their own hiring practices, the skill sets of those currently working in library publishing, and the nature of paid and unpaid work within the open access publishing field.
Research questions
- Do library publishing labor practices perpetuate inequalities among library workers, and if so, what would better labor practices look like?
- Are there specific labor issues within the field of library publishing that echo (or challenge) systemic inequities within the traditionally white, male, Anglophone elite experience of the academy in the Global North?
- How do library publishing labor practices impact the diversity of voices represented in published works?
- From student labor to peer reviewers to editorial positions, OA scholarship requires expertise, time, and talent to publish. How should this work be supported and sustained without article processing charges (APCs) or subscription revenue?
- Who gets paid in library publishing and who does not? What ethical questions are raised by the use of unpaid labor? How does this tie in with sustainability, turnover, and burnout if we depend on temporary labor?
- How does the workload of the library publisher compare to that of the traditional publisher?
Relevant resources
Clarke, R. I., Stanton, K. L., Grimm, A., & Bo Zhang. (2022). Invisible Labor, Invisible Value: Unpacking Traditional Assessment of Academic Library Value: College & Research Libraries. College & Research Libraries, 83(6), 926–945. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.6.926
Cottrell, T. L., & Bell, B. (2015). Library savings through student labor. The Bottom Line, 28(3) 82–86. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl-05-2015-0006
Lange, Jessica, and Sarah Severson. 2022. “Work It: Looking at Labour and Compensation in Canadian Non-Commercial Scholarly Journals”. KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 6 (2):1-21. https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.151.
Lippincott, S. K. (2017). Library as publisher: New models of scholarly communication for a new era. ATG LLC (Media). https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9944345
Maxey-Harris, C., Cross, J., & McFarland, T. (2010). Student workers: The untapped resource for library professions. Library Trends, 59(1–2), 147–165. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/407811/summary
Nataraj, Lalitha, Holly Hampton, Talitha R. Matlin, and Yvonne Nalani Meulemans. 2020. “‘Nice White Meetings’: Unpacking Absurd Library Bureaucracy through a Critical Race Theory Lens”. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 6 (December):1-15. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v6.34340.
Nusbaum, A. T. (2020). Who Gets to Wield Academic Mjolnir?: On Worthiness, Knowledge Curation, and Using the Power of the People to Diversify OER (1). 2020(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.559
Seale, M., & Mirza, R. (2019). Empty Presence: Library Labor, Prestige, and the MLS. Library Trends 68(2), 252-268. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2019.0038.
Wildenhaus, K. (2019). Wages for intern work: Denormalizing unpaid positions in archives and libraries. Journal of critical library and information studies, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.88