LPC Blog

March 2, 2022

Workflow for One

By Brandon Locke

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.

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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

By Brandon Locke

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.

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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.

 

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February 16, 2022

Fewer Steps for Fewer Journals: Sunsetting a Journal Publishing Program

By Brandon Locke

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.

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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).

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