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.
Check out our latest Quarterly Update! It includes:
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.
As participation in library publishing grows, the development of a strong evidence base to inform best practices and demonstrate impact is essential. To encourage research and theoretical work about library publishing services, the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) gives an annual Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Library Publishing. The award recognizes significant and timely contributions to library publishing theory and practice.
The LPC Research Committee is delighted to announce that this year’s award recipients are Rebecca Nelson and Becky Thoms, for their article “The practical and the aspirational: Managing the student employee experience in library publishing efforts.” The committee was impressed by the article’s discussion of approaches to managing student work to improve both the experience of students and the quality of their work, and they felt it had applicability to a wide variety of library publishing programs that use both undergraduate and graduate student employees.
Nelson, R. & Thoms, B. (2021) “The practical and the aspirational: Managing the student employee experience in library publishing efforts”, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.12913
The authors will be formally recognized at the Library Publishing Forum and will receive a cash award of $250 and travel support for one author to attend the Forum (one complimentary registration and a $500 travel stipend).
Please join us in congratulating Rebecca Nelson and Becky Thoms, as well as all the other nominees on their valuable contributions to our shared body of knowledge.
The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.
This Kudos recognizes members of the 2021-2022 Professional Development Committee for their excellent work on Documentation Month and the Peer Mentorship program:
Congratulations to the Professional Development Committee for another successful Documentation Month and the successful launch of this year’s Peer Mentorship program. Neither program is an easy lift, but the committee continues to provide meaningful workshops, documentation, support, and connection to the LPC community. Thank you for all your hard work, especially in a year where everyone is extremely busy outside of LPC work and committee membership continues to shrink.
This Kudos was submitted by Jessica Kirschner.
The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.
This Kudos recognizes members of the 2021-2022 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for their excellent work on updates to the Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice and organizing this year’s anti-racism community call:
Many thanks to the members of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee (including Isabel Espinal, Harrison Inefuku, Yumi Ohira, and Angel Peterson) for their tireless efforts to keep our community focused on the crucial work of dismantling systems of oppression in our organization, our community, and our field. Their recent release of an updated snapshot of the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice and hosting of an Anti-Racism Community Call offered an opportunity for the entire LPC community to stay up to date on this work and to participate directly in shaping it. This small committee has a big charge: balancing its own projects with a wider leadership role that embeds the work of inclusion and anti-oppression throughout the LPC. Kudos to the five members for their recent and very visible progress!
This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser.
The Library Publishing Coalition invites Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) library publishing BIPOC workers or BIPOC interested in library publishing to a virtual meetup. This call will be a BIPOC-only space to build community and network, and will be hosted by Harrison Inefuku and Isabel Espinal on behalf of LPC’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.
Community building and supporting BIPOC library publishing workers are major initiatives of the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. The Library Publishing Coalition is committed to supporting BIPOC library publishing workers and welcoming more BIPOC into the library publishing field.
When: Wednesday, May 4th, 2022, 3-4:00 PM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time
How to register: Fill out the brief registration form. Call-in information will be sent out before the call.
Code of conduct
All LPC events are subject to LPC’s Code of Conduct, which aims to create a harassment-free community for everyone regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. See the full Code of Conduct.
For more information, email contact@librarypublishing.org.
Thank you to everyone who voted in this year’s LPC election. We know that things like this can seem small and insignificant in our busy schedules, but submitting a ballot ensures that the LPC can continue functioning smoothly to support library publishers like you!
LPC Board Election Results
Thank you to everyone who ran for the LPC Board this year. The incoming Board members, with terms running from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2025, are:
They will join the returning Board members:
The Library Publishing Coalition Board oversees the governance, organizational structure, Bylaws, and the review and direction of the membership of the Library Publishing Coalition. As your elected representatives, you are welcome to contact them at any time with questions, comments, or suggestions for LPC.
LPC Bylaws Update
This year’s election was especially important as we worked to update the LPC Bylaws to ensure they are in accordance with our current organization, activities, and values in practice. The Bylaws are our organizational governance document, outlining what the organization is and how it is run. While the Board reviews the document annually, proposed changes accumulate until they reach a significant quantity or bear a significant impact on the daily activities of the organization. The LPC Bylaws were last updated in May 2017.
Thanks to everyone who voted, we surpassed the required 75% threshold of member institutions voting in favor. Thus, the proposed changes are approved and have gone into effect. You can find the new bylaws on the LPC Website’s About page.
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.
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.
In the spring of 2021, the LPC Board developed and approved a process for responding to racist behavior by other organizations in the field of librarianship and publishing. This process was created after being identified as an action item by the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. It is the hope of the Board that all organizations across libraries and publishing remain vigilant and vocal against racism and work to enact the expressed values of diversity and inclusion.
The process will include the following steps:
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.
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.
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.