Posts by Joshua Neds-Fox

Library Publishing Workflows. Educopia Institute. Library Publishing Coalition. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.
September 30, 2020

Library Publishing Pain Points – Scaling Up

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Pain Points series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on the challenges they face in implementing, running, and sustaining their library publishing workflows.

headshot of Joshua Neds-Fox
Joshua Neds-Fox, Wayne State University
In my contribution to a series of social media posts on pain points for the Library Publishing Workflows project, I wrote that “the sheer volume of articles is a significant challenge for our team” (https://twitter.com/LibPubCoalition/status/1280511836744495108). Upon reflection it strikes me that I’m really describing the discomfort that any successful project brings, as demand begins to grow in response to that success. A new library publishing program can often feel like a start-up: a scrappy entrepreneur in the library has a bright idea, access to the tools for production and a platform for dissemination, and a generalist’s competence in many of the skills and tasks necessary to effect library publishing (LPCPDC 2020). But the entrepreneurial energy involved in an early start-up, which can often be maintained by a few highly motivated individuals, eventually either dissipates or becomes insufficient to the work of producing a successful stable of titles. Even if a library publishing program doesn’t grow substantially in output, the production work that felt exciting at volume 1 issue 1 may start to feel insurmountable by volume 6 issue 4.
Some of this may have to do with the temperament of the library publisher. Lacey and Parlette-Stewart (2017) write about the incidence of imposter syndrome (IS) in the profession, and theorize that the need to appear intelligent about a range of poorly defined responsibilities may lead librarians to overwork a program. The failure to properly delegate tasks, commonly associated with IS, can saddle a small library publisher with an unmanageable workload. Delegation requires identifying what we can’t do well, which can be difficult for academic librarians, who are constantly being asked both to do more with less and to justify our value to the academy.
In my own publishing program, which fits most of the above bill, the entrepreneurial energy with which I began publishing journals is matched in some truly driven faculty editors. Their output can be prodigous, and while I remain committed to the success of their journals, my team struggles at times to meet their production needs given the volume of scholarship they review and publish. Identifying, sourcing, and training the labor necessary to do the technical, tailored and often tedious work of turning manuscripts into published articles is itself a demanding process, which can feel at odds with the imperative to produce. Recruiting volunteer labor or attracting graduate student interest means enhancing the learning and project opportunities of a role in the digital publishing unit, often at the expense of the sometimes monotonous work of production. But the unique skills and detailed requirements of production also often preclude using un- or underskilled labor to prepare manuscripts for publication. And we are very aware of the tendency for academic work-study opportunities to be exploitative and inequitable, and hesitant to continue those practices simply to meet our production schedule.
We have experimented with outsourcing production work to a third party contractor. While this has yielded some possibilities to ease our backlog, it also requires additional manuscript preparation and quality control labor which reduces the total net gain in capacity (not to mention chasing funding). We have worked to increase the quality of the editorial processes and policies in our journals, which results in a more selective acceptance rate and helps create a more sustainable production slate. And as our program grows, so does my commitment to designing a sufficient policy and procedure infrastructure around our publishing activities. Our participation in the Library Publishing Workflows project is part of that commitment, to help create a body of standards that can in turn inform our own practice.
My digital publishing program was the pilot interview of the Workflow project, and the resulting flowchart is one of the two test cases being used to fine-tune the process that will be used to document the remaining data. To be honest, I felt slightly naked seeing our own workflow outlined so starkly in directional arrows and decision diamonds. I recognize my anxiety is really about seeing our process evaluated against other publishing programs’ processes. Will we end up on our own, looking foolish? But again and again, collaborating with other institutions in the Library Publishing Coalition on capacity-building projects like this helps reveal the extent to which our pain is shared, and not an indication of failure. Jason Coleman at the University of Michigan related in another social media post that XML conversion of incoming content can be intensely frustrating (he called it “just a bear”). Knowing something about Michigan’s platform and process, thanks in part to our work in the Coalition, helps me picture that pain clearly, and creating XML from tricky input myself for aspects of our publishing program helps me identify with it. As a small shop in comparison to Michigan, it’s a good reminder that I work in a community of practice with affinities across vastly different publishing programs. That’s something worth sustaining.

References:

Lacey, S., & Parlette-Stewart, M. (2017). Jumping Into The Deep: Imposter Syndrome, Defining Success and the New Librarian. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v12i1.3979

Library Publishing Coalition Professional Development Committee. (2020). L​ibrary Publishing Competencies. A​tlanta, GA: Educopia Institute. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317123

Multi-colored umbrellas on blue sky background
February 26, 2019

Wayne State University: Widening spheres of influence

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In February 2019, we are publishing our second series of member profiles. These profiles showcase the wide variety of publishing work happening at member institutions, and celebrate our community’s contributions to the wider publishing landscape. This series will also spotlight resources the profiled institutions have contributed to the Shared Documentation library. Many thanks to the members who volunteered to answer our questions! See all of the published profiles, and look for a new one each week in February. 

To learn more about their program, check out Wayne State’s latest Library Publishing Directory entry.

Tell us a bit about your publishing program.

Wayne State University Libraries’ publishing program grew out of our commitment to supporting scholarship on campus, to advancing open access in scholarly communications, and to creative service to our scholarly community. The journals that have found a home at the WSU Libraries each have a unique arrangement:

  • a journal in applied statistics that another department could no longer support was rescued because our hosting platform represented a sunk cost that didn’t need to be recovered;
  • because we were able to invite and train collaborators, a medical student journal could design a workflow that incorporates student editors and uses the platform as a pedagogical tool to introduce future doctors to scholarly publishing;
  • and our experience developing hosting policy made it easy to draft an arrangement that opened up the backlist of a long-running fraternity journal.

We very much see these efforts as providing space or support for scholarly work that doesn’t fit in other parts of the publishing ecosystem, and therefore see our publishing program as a vital niche in supporting the overall scholarly endeavor at Wayne State.

Photo of three men, two standing and one sitting in a chair. Text reads: "What is something you have accomplished with your program that you're proud of - big or small? It’s a small but significant story: there’s a literary journal run out of the School of Medicine at Wayne State (Brain Candy: Wayne State University School of Medicine Journal of Arts and Culture, http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/ghhs/), that uses our publishing program as a distributor. When it was languishing, our program pitched in design and production work that helped it bridge the lean years, until the School could re-establish an editorial team. I’m proud that we contributed to the life of this humanist outpost in an intense medical education.
Standing, Joshua Neds-Fox and Cole Hudson, and seated, Graham Hukill, Digital Publishing Librarians in the Wayne State University Libraries. Not pictured: STEM/Digital Publishing Librarian Clayton Hayes, Digitization Technician Beck Caterina, and adjacent teammate Dr. Cheryl Ball.

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