May 2, 2018
Syracuse University: Building capacity for open access and open publishing
By Amanda Page
As we gear up for the Library Publishing Forum and the start of a new membership year in July, we are publishing a series of member profiles. These profiles will showcase the wide variety of publishing work happening at member institutions, and celebrate our community’s contributions to the wider publishing landscape. Many thanks to the members who agreed to answer our questions! See all of the published profiles, and look for a new one each week until the Forum.
Check out Syracuse University’s latest entry in the Library Publishing Directory!
Tell us a bit about your publishing program.
In 2017, Syracuse University Libraries created Open Publishing Services formally. (I started in June, and we just hired a project coordinator). Within the department of Research and Scholarship, our menu of services includes support for various needs relating to scholarly communications, research support, education, and the Institutional Repository. We currently take on library publishing projects selectively as time allows but do not have a full-blown library publishing program (yet!) Projects we are involved in include hosting numerous open-access journals, the institutional repository, and our Syracuse Unbound imprint. Syracuse Unbound is an imprint to foster library publishing of open-access works through collaborations between the Syracuse University Libraries and the Syracuse University Press that was created in 2013, through which we complete occasional ad hoc publishing projects. Digital Commons, Open Journal Systems, WordPress, and Ensemble are the main platforms in our publishing workflows. We have a varied program that is growing capacity.
Over the last year, our publishing projects and institutional repository (SURFACE) work focused on enhancing quality publishing practices and specifically on increasing accessibility (ADA) standards, usability, and discovery for the Digital Commons platform, our websites, and content. This is ongoing and we are continually striving to improve. For example, a re-design of our institutional repository website, SURFACE, was completed in February, and we are implementing new ingest processes for accessibility standards, and integrating accessibility into our open-access educational work.
Tell us something you have accomplished with your program that you’re proud of – big or small.
One project I am proud of is Triple Triumph: Three Women in Medicine, a monograph we published through Syracuse Unbound in August 2017. I am proud of this project because it focuses on three female physicians, who have had remarkable careers and lives. I am proud to have been a part of the process in making the work openly available for anyone to read because I found inspiration and hope in the stories. Besides that, we started the project right after I came onboard in June, and it was a lot of fun to jump right into the work.
