The Library Publishing Coalition Blog is used to share news and updates about the LPC and the Library Publishing Forum, to draw attention to items of interest to the community, and to publish informal commentaries by LPC members and friends.
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.
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.
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.
Last year, LPC and our strategic affiliate the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) partnered on a very successful cross-pollination program for our two conferences. Two LPC community members received registration waivers to attend the AUPresses Annual Meeting in San Francisco, and two AUPResses members joined us for the 2018 Forum in Minneapolis. You can read the reflections from the awardees on our blog. To keep up the cross-pollinating, we are offering the same program this year! Applications are due March 8th.
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.
Michigan Publishing brings together the University of Michigan Press, Michigan Publishing Services, and the Deep Blue data and document repository into one big publishing team. Our home is in the Buhr Building, which is an old ball bearing factory that also holds a few million library books and could double as a labyrinth. Every year, we publish about 125 books, 30 journals, and thousands of documents and datasets. We’re also the production and distribution arm of Lever Press, an author-fee-free Open Access publisher of peer-reviewed scholarly works that resonate with the mission of liberal arts colleges, and we’ve spent the last few years building a publishing platform, Fulcrum, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We’re pretty busy these days, but we do still find time for the occasional pun battle.
Tell us something you have accomplished with your program that you’re proud of – big or small.
We recently launched the University of Michigan Press’s eBook collection (more than 1,000 books) on Fulcrum, our digital platform. It was a ton of work for folks across the whole organization and we’re really proud of the finished product.
On a more whimsical note, we just published our first board book, Off He Goes! – it’s for kids who have a medical condition called Brachial Plexus Palsy, and was put together by a neurosurgeon at Michigan Medicine. The project brought us our very first plush toy tie-in, Wimbo the Elephant!
Patrick Goussy, Senior Digital Publishing Coordinator, poses with Wimbo the elephant and Michigan Publishing’s first foray into board books.
To accompany the release last fall of its Community Cultivation Field Guide, the Educopia Institute launched a new blog and a series of posts on community cultivation. The series includes a case study of each stage in the community lifecycle, featuring Educopia’s affiliated communities. To illustrate what the “acceleration” stage might look like, I contributed a post on LPC’s recent strategic planning process. Check it out!
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.
This post was written by Sarah Hare and Jenny Hoops.
Indiana University Bloomington has been publishing journals using the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems platform since 2008. The Office of Scholarly Publishing, a strategic partnership between IU Press and IU Libraries Scholarly Communication Department to support publishing at IU broadly, was created in 2012. The program centers on access: journals only need an Indiana University affiliation to participate in the library publishing program. 50 journals currently participate in the publishing program in some capacity. This includes formally peer-reviewed faculty publications, student journals, informal serials like newsletters, active journals, and journals that are no longer active but have an extensive, open access back list. Journals receive hosting and operational publishing services at no cost, with the exception of more resource-intensive services like copyediting and print on demand.
IU Libraries’ journal publishing program is part of a larger suite of services centered on “open scholarship” and ensuring that all IU affiliates can make their scholarly outputs–including journal articles, book chapters, media, data, and learning objects–open, regardless of the level of openness they are interested in. Other services the library provides include data management planning, assistance finding and creating OER, repository deposit, and consultation on demonstrating impact. These services contribute to the journal publishing program, giving IU affiliates a comprehensive support structure for engaging with openness.
Tell us something you have accomplished with your program that you’re proud of – big or small.
We have reached a major milestone of 50 total journal publications. While our journals were initially focused on folklore, history, and education, we now host journals on university administration, public affairs, optometry, art, and several other subjects, with journals published by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students across several schools and departments. We take pride in making our legacy journals with comprehensive backlists more discoverable. For example, recently we have been providing metadata clean up and article-level discoverability, ensuring open access back lists are appearing in searches.
Our program also completed a major platform upgrade last year, updating our instance of Open Journal Systems from 2 to 3. OJS 3 provides our editors with an enhanced, user-friendly interface and customizable editorial workflows. We’ve worked with our editors to help them adapt to the new system and take advantage of the new features while providing support for journal indexing and website design. As we continue to onboard new journals, we hope to publish and support innovative scholarship for a diverse set of editors and disciplines.
Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?
For Open Access Week 2018, we held a workshop on starting an open access journal with IU Libraries. We also interviewed editors of journals we currently publish and our new Open Scholarship Resident, Willa Liburd Tavernier, to learn more about their passion for open access. We hope to continue to use these materials when promoting the program but we are also excited to start to promote our program more systematically. We’re currently working with marketing and communications experts within the Libraries to create more promotional and informational material about our journal publishing program. Right now, editors learn about our program by word of mouth or by interacting with our team through another service. More systematic promotion will enable us to reach IU affiliates that are unaware of our program and are interested in creating or “flipping” a journal to open access.
Pictured from left to right: Willa Liburd Tavernier, Richard Higgins, Jamie Wittenberg, Jenny Hoops, Sarah Hare (top row), Allison Nolan, and Brian Watson (bottom row)
Elections for the Library Publishing Coalition Board open today and will continue through Friday, March 1st. Instructions for voting will be sent to each member institution’s voting representative. The candidates are:
Jennifer Beamer, The Claremont Colleges Library
Karen Bjork, Portland State University
Christine Fruin, American Theological Library Association
Sarah Hare, Indiana University
Annie Johnson, Temple University
Mark Konecny, University of Cincinnati
Each candidate has provided a brief biography and an election statement:
Editor’s note: This blog post is LPC’s official contribution to Academic Led Publishing Day (ALPD), a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives. LPC is participating in ALPD because it presents an opportunity to have a multi-stakeholder discussion about an issue of growing importance to libraries, and to call attention to the lack of a shared vision in this critical area. Our goals in this post are to highlight some of the unresolved questions in this space and to call on libraries to grapple with them.
This post was co-authored by Melanie Schlosser (LPC Community Facilitator) and Catherine Mitchell (Director, Publishing & Special Collections, California Digital Library; Past President of the LPC Board).
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There is no question that we are facing significant challenges and opportunities as the traditional publishing model begins to falter. How the academy positions itself at this moment will have consequences for years to come.
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“Academy-owned” seems to be the descriptor du jour in scholarly communications circles. We talk increasingly about academy-owned infrastructure, academy-owned publishing, academy-owned publications, etc. We find ourselves at meetings and conferences where we explore the challenges of supporting new forms of scholarly research, new modes of publication, new communities of readers — and there it is again — “academy-owned,” lurking in the conversation. We write grants whose very premise is that the academy will rise to claim its rightful place as the source, the maker, the distributor, the curator of its greatest asset — knowledge. There is definitely a movement afoot.
Why has this phrase taken hold lately? The landscape is increasingly dominated by large, multinational corporations that are vacuuming up tools and platforms throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle. Although many of these corporations are familiar to libraries as content publishers, they are expanding their reach well beyond publishing to control both upstream and downstream activities: pre-print servers, OA publishing platforms, current research information systems, etc. A rebellion is stirring among those who worry that we are increasingly abdicating control of the academy’s intellectual property, its data, its ability to share information — even its values — to for-profit companies. The more we rely on licensed resources to read, distribute, and measure the impact of our research — as well as to determine the success of our researchers and the value of our institutions — the more in thrall the academy is to a set of values that are derived from a profit-driven marketplace founded on restricted access to information and abstract performance metrics.
And yet this noble impulse to claim a space for the academy in the exchange and evaluation of scholarly research is also rife with linguistic confusion. While the drive toward “academy-owned” solutions is pervasive, the language we use to articulate this drive lacks precision. Sometimes we talk about “academy-owned” projects, but just as often we describe them as “academic-led” or “community-led” or any number of other permutations. [1] These phrases are not synonymous — their distinctions are actually quite important — yet we use them interchangeably and nod to each other, as if we know what we mean. What, exactly, do we mean? It’s time to ask ourselves to identify the big issues and difficult questions embedded both in the terms themselves and the vagueness with which we use them.
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.
The J. Murrey Atkins Library Digital Publishing Services was established in 2012 as part of the then Digital Scholarship Lab. The service currently resides within Technology and Digital Strategies and is staffed by two full-time employees. The two positions that report directly include the Head of Library Technology and Innovation and the Special Collections and Digital Projects Assistant. In addition, the library draws upon the expertise of the Copyright and Licensing Librarian and Graphic and UX Designer for guidance and technical assistance. The mission of Library Digital Publishing is to support the publication of scholarly works, including online journals, ebooks, digital exhibits, and conference proceedings for researchers and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The services are built on robust publishing platforms that promote open knowledge exchange, wide scholarship discoverability, and innovative dissemination of scholarly communication. We utilize Open Journal Systems, Open Monograph Press, Open Conference Systems, and Omeka to support open access publishing for the campus. Since its inception, Atkins Library Digital Publishing Services has published five open access journals, five ebook titles, one conference, and four Omeka exhibits. All of our publications are sponsored by a faculty editor and are available freely online. The library provides the mechanism to launch new OA titles and the infrastructure for long-term access and preservation. In summation, we offer technical support, platform-specific software training, graphic design assistance, and one-on-one consultations to increase awareness and adoption of open access publishing.
From left to right: Christin Lampkowski (Special Collections and Digital Projects Assistant), Somaly Kim Wu (Head of Library Technology & Innovation) with Special Collections and University Archives staff, Rita Johnston (Digital Production Librarian) and Olivia Eanes (Reading Room & Archives Assistant) at the book talk for Miss Bonnie’s Nurses.
There’s an article about the Library Publishing Coalition in the Fall 2018 issue of Library Trends! If you’re not familiar with it, Library Trends is a quarterly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Each issue is guest-edited and focused on a single theme. This issue’s editor is Lewis G. Liu (City University of New York), and its theme is “The Role and Impact of Commercial and Noncommercial Publishers in Scholarly Publishing on Academic Libraries.” Dr. Liu reached out to me in late 2017 and invited a contribution to the issue on the LPC. The resulting article, “Building Capacity for Academy-Owned Publishing through the Library Publishing Coalition,” explores the history, current activities, and future directions for the LPC.
A note about rights: Library Trends is a subscription journal that asks for a full copyright transfer from its authors. While LPC’s Board and I were excited about this opportunity to share the work we are doing with a broader audience, openness is a central value of the LPC community, and we were not comfortable contributing to a journal under these terms. With the support of the Board, I asked for and received an alternative author agreement that allowed me to retain copyright ownership of the article (the issue-level copyright statement on the PDF notwithstanding) and share it openly.
With thanks to Dr. Liu for the invitation, the Library Trends staff for their flexibility, and LPC’s Board for their support and suggestions on the manuscript, here is the final article!
Citation: Schlosser, M. (2018). Building Capacity for Academy-Owned Publishing through the Library Publishing Coalition. Library Trends, 67(2), 359-375.
The issue also includes two other articles related to library publishing, one of which is written by a number of LPC community members!
Li, Y., Lippincott, S., Hare, S., Wittenberg, J., Preate, S., Page, A., & Guiod, S. The Library-Press Partnership: An Overview and Two Case Studies. 319-336.
Moulaison, H., & Bially Mattern, J. Academic Library-Based Publishing: A State of the Evolving Art. 337-358.
The Educopia Institute and the Library Publishing Coalition are pleased to open registration for the last set of pilot workshops for the IMLS-funded Developing A Curriculum to Advance Library-Based Publishing project, based on the Policy Module. For our last two workshops, we are piloting two entirely new formats: an asynchronous virtual workshop and an in-person “Policy Lab.” Both workshops will be taught by Library Publishing Curriculum project leads Melanie Schlosser (Library Publishing Coalition Community Facilitator) and Katherine Skinner (Executive Director, Educopia Institute). The workshops have been designed as a series, and participants are encouraged to take both if they are able.
In March, we will hold a completely asynchronous, 4-week virtual workshop based on the four units of the Policy Module. Each week, participants will watch a recorded lecture, explore a reading or other related resource, and participate in a discussion on Slack. The virtual workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to explore topics in depth and to build a foundation for policy development at their institution.
Registration is free but attendance is capped at 40 participants. Our previous virtual workshops have filled up within days, so register as soon as possible!
On May 7 (the day before the 2019 Library Publishing Forum), library publishers will have the opportunity to participate in a “Policy Lab” workshop. The day will be focused on discussion and hands-on activities, and each participant will leave with two draft policies for their library publishing program, related to copyright, legal agreements, diversity, or preservation. To help participants get the most out of the lab, they will be given access to the recorded lectures from the virtual workshop ahead of time. The workshop will be held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre campus in Vancouver, BC.
Registration is US$75 for the full-day workshop (including breakfast, lunch, and coffee breaks) and participation is capped at 20 attendees.
The Policy Module of the Library Publishing Curriculum covers how library publishers develop policies that guide specific areas of their work. Its initial release was focused on policies related to copyright, diversity, and digital preservation, and guidance on creating legal agreements.
Authors: Sara Benson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Harriet Green (Washington University St. Louis), Merinda Hensley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Janet Swatscheno (University of Illinois Chicago), Melanie Schlosser (Educopia Institute), Katherine Skinner (Educopia Institute)
