Posts by Brandon Locke

April 21, 2022

Adapting to Employee Turnover

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

By Jason Colman, writing about his experiences at the University of Michigan Library

In my previous blog post for the LPW project, I mentioned that Michigan Publishing was starting the process of migrating our 40 or so open access journals from our old platform, DLXS, to Janeway. I suggested checking back with me to see if the pain we were experiencing in 2020 had been relieved in 2022. (Was I only talking about workflows there? Not sure.) I’m sure the whole library publishing community has been on tenterhooks waiting for an update, so how are things going at Michigan?

I’m happy to report that about 25 of our journals are now publishing their new issues on Janeway, thanks to the efforts of our editors, production crew, conversion vendor, and developers at Michigan and Janeway. As we were approaching the halfway mark, some other happy news happened that cast a bright spotlight on the importance of workflow documentation: Digital Publishing Coordinator (and my partner on the LPW project at Michigan), Joseph Muller, landed a great new job working for Janeway at the Birkbeck Centre for Technology and Publishing. Suddenly, our original Janeway expert was leaving the team.

It’s never easy to lose a hard-working colleague like Joe, but we were incredibly lucky that he had followed the lessons of the LPW project and created excellent process documentation for publishing our journals on Janeway that the rest of the production team were already using actively every day. Now, six months after Joe’s departure, we have a new Digital Publishing Coordinator hired. She’s learning her job in large part from the documentation he started, and that the team has been refining ever since.

Without a doubt, colleagues at our library publishing operations will (and should!) move on to new opportunities when it makes sense for them to. This is even more true now, I think, with so many interesting roles popping up in the community. I’ve discovered that I’m only able to help my team adapt to the temporary absence of a colleague if the workflow that position is responsible for managing is documented very clearly. Like all library publishers, we’ll never have enough redundancy on our teams for this not to be true.

So, if I’ve learned anything as a manager going through this process, it’s that the best time to write workflow documentation is before you desperately need it, because you will desperately need it.

March 2, 2022

Workflow for One

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

By Michelle Wilson, writing about her experiences at Columbia University Libraries

Columbia University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship division publishes around thirty open access journal titles. We publish in a variety of disciplines (including medicine, law, history, bioethics, musicology) and support both faculty and student-led projects. Our program has been around for over a decade and, like many, has undergone a variety of changes in administration, staffing, and mission. At present, that mission, the day to day work, and the workflows we employ are set by me, as the sole staff member who works on journals at our library. But the program wasn’t always a one-woman show, and the shape of our workflow today has been influenced by the systems that came before and my experiences of stepping into a program in transition when I was hired in 2018. 

Before there was a Digital Scholarship division at Columbia University Libraries, there was the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS). Part of a system of four “Digital Centers” on campus, CDRS was the development and publishing hub, the endpoint for the dissemination of research in a constellation that included Digital Science, Digital Social Science, and Digital Humanities centers. Around 2016, the digital centers were dissolved and the services they had provided were transferred to a new Digital Scholarship unit under the auspices of the University Libraries. 

A diverse project portfolio with bespoke services

CDRS was collaborative and experimented widely. The Digital Scholarship division now manages a wide array of projects developed during the CDRS era, including digital companions to books published by our university press, a bibliographic encyclopedia of female film production pioneers, and a digital commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy. CDRS also pioneered the open access journals program at Columbia, which came under my (nearly sole) purview when I was hired as the Digital Publishing Librarian. 

Reflecting the same spirit of experimentation that led to a diverse project portfolio, the journals program I inherited utilized a variety of levels of service and publishing technologies. Most journals were published on WordPress, with a few using OJS as a submissions platform, and one journal fully utilizing OJS as an editorial and publishing software. Journals had varying levels of autonomy or reliance on the program. Most were required to meet only once a year with the journals project manager, while one medical journal was a clear standout in receiving extensive custom development, vendor services and production management, APC processing, and consultation. This particular medical journal was the flagship for the program but, although it was undoubtedly a success in library publishing, the attention and time it required meant that everyone else was lagging behind. 

I really struggled to find my footing within this landscape, where there was so much variation in terms of partner expectations as well as infrastructure management. CDRS had a dedicated staff of developers, project managers, and media production specialists overseeing the development of digital projects. Under the new organization, the developers and project managers were absorbed into centralized IT and digital project management units at the Libraries. This meant that I had to compete with other programs for developer time and be strategic and sparing in choosing the softwares I could support. Even having only two publishing softwares used in different combinations made it challenging to respond to development requests, provide technical support, and train partners. The demands of one journal meant that a hands-off approach needed to be taken with most of the other partners, and that left them vulnerable to inculcating poor practice or, especially in the case of fledgling projects and student-led efforts, frustration and lack of momentum that often ended in the folding of the publication. To address these twin pressure points—concern about labor and workload as well as praxis and equity in distributing library services—I decided to heavily standardize the program.

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February 23, 2022

How it Started, How it’s Going: The Undergraduate Economic Review at IWU

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

By Stephanie Davis-Kahl, writing about her experiences at Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University

It all started with a catastrophic server meltdown in the fall of 2008 that erased IWU from the web.

Most of our student journals, which had resided on our website, disappeared. The sites, the pdfs, images – all gone. After everything came back up (in a matter of hours), many files were corrupted or had just simply vanished into the ether. 

The library had just implemented Digital Commons software from bepress, and we had started digitizing the print journals already, however, there was one born-digital journal that was a near-total loss, the Undergraduate Economic Review (UER). The faculty advisor for the UER, Robert S. Eckley Distinguished Professor of Economics Micheal Seeborg, had attended one of our presentations about Digital Commons and reached out to the library to see if we could help save the journal, first of all, and second, if we could use the journal publishing software in Digital Commons to streamline the editorial process. The answer to both, of course, was yes.

Flash forward thirteen years later, and the UER is still going strong: our student editors continue to do stellar work to review articles, the journal has robust, worldwide download statistics, and we regularly receive submissions from undergraduate researchers in economics from around the world. 

UER Roles & Responsibilities

The UER is run by students majoring in Economics at IWU, and the UER is open to any and all undergraduate researchers. A student is selected and compensated for taking on for editor-in-chief responsibilities, and leads the peer reviewers, made up of students who have taken the requisite econometrics and writing courses in the major. 

Professor Seeborg has been the faculty advisor since the journal began in 2005, and has mentored many undergraduate research students at IWU. The journal has persevered in large part due to his advocacy, passion for undergraduate research, and belief in open access. An indication and testament to his dedication is the fact that he retired a few years ago, but continues to teach our senior seminar and advise the journal, and as the faculty managing editor of the journal, I couldn’t be more grateful for his continued involvement.

The work begins at the start of the academic year, when the new editor in chief, senior seminar and other interested students, and Professor Seeborg meet with me to get an overview of the purpose of the UER, how they will evaluate articles using a set of criteria developed over time, how to work in the Digital Commons software, and how to provide professional feedback to authors. Professor Seeborg works with the students to norm the evaluative criteria by using past published submissions, and the editor in chief then assigns students their first article to review. Professor Seeborg and I are on hand throughout the rest of the academic year to answer questions about submissions or about Digital Commons, but our editor in chief and student peer reviewers do all the editorial work of reviewing and recommending articles for publication. The issue is closed in late April or May, and if submissions come in the summer, I communicate with authors to let them know when our review cycle will restart. A new editor is appointed by the faculty in the department in late spring or over the summer, and they come into the journal with experience reviewing articles as a sophomore or junior, so they are well-versed in the journal’s purpose from the outset.

Library’s Role

The library’s connection with the UER began with a crisis, but has become a natural extension of our liaison librarian services as well as a visible signature experience for students, building on their Shared Curriculum requirements, writing intensive courses, and major coursework in the department of Economics which includes information literacy throughout their time here at IWU, from first year seminar to senior seminar. The fact that the journal is born-digital, peer reviewed, and intentionally open access from its inception is a testament to the students’ continued dedication to the journal over time; they understand and accept the responsibility to use their disciplinary knowledge of economics, economics research, econometrics, and writing to improve and share the work of their worldwide peers. It has been a privilege to work alongside both Professor Seeborg and the students on the Undergraduate Economic Review, and I look forward to reading the journal for years to come.

February 16, 2022

Fewer Steps for Fewer Journals: Sunsetting a Journal Publishing Program

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

By Isaac Gilman, writing about his experiences at Pacific University Libraries

Over the two years of the Library Publishing Workflows project, our documented journal publishing workflow for Pacific University Libraries has become much leaner. This is not because we’ve learned to do the work more efficiently—rather, it reflects the fact that we are doing less journal publishing overall now. For someone who, over six years ago, proclaimed that publishing should be considered a core service for academic libraries, and even said (insert wry smile here) that “Journal publishing has a [low] threshold to entry,” this feels sadly ironic to admit. So, what has changed for Pacific?

While I still believe that small-p publishing (in the small-c catholic sense) should be a core service for libraries, what has become clear to me over the last several years is that “low threshold to entry” has the corollary of “high threshold for maintenance”: it’s easy to start publishing journals, but to do it well, continuously, requires a significant investment of time and resources (primarily people). Pacific’s involvement in this project has reminded me just how well many of our colleagues—at institutions small and large—are doing this work, and of the necessity of committed, ongoing stewardship to ensure that a journal remains a vibrant and visible home for a community of scholars and learners. And as we have tried to keep doing more with less (or the same) within the University Libraries in general over the past five years, I have been forced to admit that we don’t have the capacity to provide that type of ongoing stewardship for the journals that we were hosting and publishing, and that they would be better served at other institutions. With that in mind, we have migrated the majority of our journals to new homes at other libraries or non-profit publishers, keeping only two with close ties to academic programs at Pacific that require relatively low levels of support from the Libraries.

Shifting focus to monographs

As we have effectively wound down the journal publishing program, we have—perhaps counterintuitively—continued to invest time and resources in publishing work that could be perceived as having a higher threshold to entry: monograph publishing. While publishing books is in some ways more complex than publishing journals, and the scope of individual book projects can occasionally be daunting, each book is a finite project that doesn’t require the type of ongoing stewardship, year after year, that a journal requires. Books can be individually budgeted for and scheduled; if we don’t have resources or capacity to publish a book in a given year, we can decide not to—with no detrimental impact on the books that we’ve published before or the books that we will publish after. This is not to say that books don’t require some ongoing obligation; among other things, permissions may need to be renewed after several years “in print,” and author royalties for any revenue need to be tracked and paid. But in general, our book publishing program is able to roll with any financial or staffing interruptions we experience; it’s our publishing version of an earthquake-proofed building…it may shake a bit when things get rough, but it returns to its original shape and position.

There are tradeoffs, of course, to focusing our publishing program almost entirely on books. Our overall publishing output is lower—which means we aren’t creating as many opportunities for as many different authors to share their ideas and knowledge as we were before, and we aren’t contributing to the body of openly available scholarship as extensively as we were before. But my hope is that the quality of our engagement with each work we publish will be better—that we are able to take the time to focus on helping each book take its ideal shape in the eyes of its author(s) and its intended audience(s). And, while this is currently an aspiration and not a reality, I also hope that our focus on monograph publishing will directly support the creation of more free, open textbooks by Pacific’s faculty—ultimately benefiting both Pacific students and others across many institutions. As the Libraries increase our focus on affordability and open educational resources initiatives, I see greater opportunity for us to have a positive impact on student costs and student success through open book publishing than we did through our limited journal publishing program (if only for the perhaps simplistic reason that it is currently far easier for students to get free articles through library subscriptions or interlibrary loan than it is for us to license an unlimited user copy of a required textbook or otherwise provide access to similar required monographic course readings for every student).

What library publishing looks like

When the question of whether libraries should be publishers was beginning to be more broadly discussed a decade ago, common questions were about what ‘library publishing’ should look like and whether libraries in general were equipped to (or should even aspire to) maintain the same processes and standards as traditional publishers. It was within that context that Pacific started our journal publishing program—with the goal not only of contributing to the fight against the increasing commodification of scholarship but of creating publishing venues and publications marked by the quality that authors and readers expected. As we sunset our journal program and turn our focus more fully to books, I am proud to be able to say that our goals remain that same, and that those former questions have been definitively answered. The participants in this workflows project are prime examples of the extent to which libraries have been able to meet the standards established by our publishing peers and forebears, and Pacific is one of many examples of what ‘library publishing’ should look like: whatever we want it to (or, less succinctly: whatever we determine will best meet the needs of our communities and allow us to be responsible stewards of our authors’ work).

February 9, 2022

Library Publishing Values: Collaboration, Capacity, and Control

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

By Robert Browder, writing about his experiences at University Libraries at Virginia Tech

The opportunity to take a step back from one’s own work and get perspective on it with the help of others in the field is an experience of incredible value. This can certainly be true for those involved in publishing open access journals from within a library. The LPC created just such an opportunity with the Library Publishing Workflows Project. The opportunity to participate in the project alongside other library publishers large and small has expanded my view of what is possible in the field. The opportunity to document, compare, and contrast workflows across institutions is invaluable and has helped me dial up my understanding of what works and why. It’s a privilege to be able to share the outcomes of this project with the world.

So, what is the best workflow for libraries who wish to publish journals? It depends. While our documented workflows provide a progression of steps that describe the production work performed by publishers, the greater context within which a particular workflow succeeds is much tougher to represent. The LPC’s Library Publishing Directory is probably the best resource available for gathering context. For best results, I recommend using these workflow documents in combination with the Library Publishing Directory entry for each institution. Together, these documents form a clearer picture than either of them do on their own. However, even with both of these documents in hand the picture may still not be completely clear. 

While both the workflows documents and the Library Publishing Directory entries hint at it, neither of them address in depth the values of the communities that library publishers serve. I believe understanding and interfacing with those values to be key in shaping successful workflows. While a commitment to open access brings with it a fairly predictable set of shared values, the values conversation does not stop there. Beyond open access, those in library publishing may encounter another set of values that apply to the control of editorial and production processes. We can broach the topic with a simple question: who should be in control of editorial and production processes, publishers or scholars?

Editorial and production process control can be seen as existing on a continuum. Let’s imagine that scholars exist at one end of the continuum and publishers exist at the other. Who holds control of publishing processes determines how the productive capacity of publishing departments is spent. 

The less control publishing departments have, the more of their productive capacity is spent in supporting the choices of scholars who do have control. This grants scholars more freedom to experiment and make choices about editorial and production processes. In this paradigm the act of producing a publication is a learning experience for the scholar. Facilitating this experience is a valid way for a library publisher to create value for one’s community. 

At the other end of the continuum, the more control publishing departments have, the more they are able to standardize their production processes, thereby creating the ability to publish higher volumes of scholarship. In this paradigm the act of publishing is more about sharing scholarship, ideas, and research. This too is a valid way to create value for one’s community.

In the context of a publishing department that does not exert control over publishing processes, productive capacity is initiated through budget and staffing, but capacity is ultimately determined by the scholars the department chooses to support. The productive capacity of such departments is subject to the skills, experience, and time that scholars bring with them to the collaboration. Thus, partners must be chosen carefully and they should be helped to understand the levels of responsibility and stewardship they are taking on as a collaborator with the publishing department.

In the context of a publishing department that does exert control over publishing processes, productive capacity is initiated through budget and staffing, but maintained through carefully chosen workflows and a commitment to strictly adhere to those workflows. When publishers hold control and enforce a systematic process, opportunities for creativity and experimentation in the publication process are diminished for scholars. However, opportunities for producing and sharing a greater volume of scholarship may be increased.

In practice, scholars and library publishers are interdependent and, though it may not be explicitly addressed, share control of editorial and production processes based on what is feasible given available resources. The balance of control may be tilted to either side based on the values of the community of scholars which the publisher serves. The balance of control in either direction may also shift over time with the capacities of those involved or with changes in budget and staffing. The balance of control has profound impacts on the type of work that library publishers do and the workflows they use to achieve results. 

Viewing control of productive capacity in this way begs the question: do library publishers exist to facilitate experiential learning in the field of publishing or do they exist for the purpose of producing publications? In many cases, I believe it’s some of both, and that is just fine. But, making conscious decisions about how the capacity of a publishing department is spent is essential to being able to predictably deliver services. It’s fine and dandy to publish scholarship and/or facilitate the publishing experience for scholars. But, it’s important to know the difference between these two facets of library publishing and the capacity implications that come along with them.

February 2, 2022

Doing more with less, and making it good

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

By Vanessa Gabler, writing about her experiences at The University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh

Do more with less, and make it good. That’s how I think of our publishing program, and it informs many of our decisions about workflows at the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh (ULS). This is evident in our publishing workflows, as you can see in our Library Publishing Workflows documentation. We provide our journals with training, tools, resources, support, and a final metadata quality control check at the time of publication, but they are doing the editorial and production work themselves. With this approach, we can publish a significant number of journals with limited library resources. That same ethos has guided the development of a workflow for evaluating and accepting new journal partners.

Expanding the publishing program

In the early days of our publishing program (2008–2011), we were flipping Pitt faculty print subscription journals to online with delayed open access, starting new open access journals with Pitt Faculty, and then taking on new and existing open access journals from non-Pitt partners around the world. We were so excited! And we still are, but we learned some lessons along the way. Some of the early journals we accepted weren’t completely aligned with our mission to support open access to scholarly research, lacked the staff resources to support timely ongoing journal publication, or presented some other mismatch between the goals or structure of our program and the nature of the journal. These partnerships weren’t allowing us to do more with less, and make it good; they were taking up our limited resources (the less) with activities that weren’t completely aligned with our mission (to do more), and the results weren’t always good.

Focusing on mission alignment

So, we created selection criteria for our program and began asking prospective journals to complete a journal proposal form (2011). The selection criteria are a first pass to determine whether a journal fits with our mission. The journal proposal form is a deeper dive into the journal’s scope, people, policies, resources, and other pieces of information that help us to determine whether a partnership will be a good match. A journal proposal is the beginning of a collaborative process, and journals often learn for the first time what kinds of things they need to have in place to make a journal successful.

We also formed a Publications Advisory Board to review these proposals and make recommendations about whether to accept a journal (2012; it also provides input on our program policies and general direction). That process has also been collaborative, with Board members offering valuable advice to journals entering our program. We began soliciting external peer reviews by subject experts of journal proposals to assist the Board with making their recommendations (2019).

So how do selection criteria, a journal proposal form, a Publications Advisory Board, and external peer reviewers help us do more with less, and make it good? We standardized our service offerings and some journal policies to those that support our mission across journals, which promotes efficiencies for our staff (the day-to-day more). We partner with journals that are aligned with our mission to have an impact on the Open Access movement (the big more). We educate prospective journals about the resources, skills, and staffing needed to successfully run a journal in the long term, particularly in our program (how we do what we do with less). And we trust that our evaluation process, the program’s structure, and the ongoing relationships we cultivate with our journals will…make it good.

January 20, 2022

Sustainable and Thoughtful Growth

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

By Jennifer Beamer, Ph.D., writing about her experiences at The Claremont Colleges Library

In 2012, The Claremont Colleges launched an Open Access journal publishing program. Through its institutional repository, Scholarship@Claremont, we now have nine active journals that the library hosts and supports. The journals must be edited or sponsored by a faculty member of one of the seven Claremont Colleges campuses. The Library helps onboard and set up the journal, onboard the editors, and offers some minor services like ISSN registration, assigning DOIs, and training on peer review. 

Our strongest journals, the ones that have had the most longevity have been CODEE, the Community of Ordinary Differential Equations Educators, and the Mime Journal. Recently, our newer journals like Envirolab Asia have been very interdisciplinary, and focus not only on articles, but also on events that coincide with the papers. 

Over the past year of working with the Library Publishing Workflows partners and Educopia, I have realized three things: 1) our workflows are really simple! 2) this means we have a lot of room for growth, 3) we don’t want to grow too much! 

Some simple things that we have planned to do this year to make our workflows more sustainable—that I have humbly and am so grateful to have learned from the other partners—are that is necessary to set up a journal proposal form for faculty to apply to, to have some selection criteria, and to form a Publications Advisory Board. In the past, we have been a “boutique publishing model,” and we have standardized our service offerings and some journal policies to those that support our mission across journals, which will promote efficiencies for our staff (as there are only 2 of us). As well, the most important is we need to partner only with faculty that have journals that are aligned with our mission to have an impact on the Open Access movement.  

In the coming year, I would also like to keep having discussions about the library as a publisher and its role as a gatekeeper in the publishing process. If we are to be “different than traditional” publishers, we need to understand the role we play, and offer services that are better and distinct from those of the closed journals and that will make faculty WANT to publish with us!