March 10, 2022
Day/Time: Thursday, May 19, 2:30pm – 3:30pm
The BCcampus Open Publishing Suite: Guides for Your Open Publishing Initiative
Presenters
- Arianna Cheveldave, BCcampus
- Kaitlyn Zheng, BCcampus
Description
Since 2012, BCcampus Open Education has funded and published open educational resources for the post-secondary system in British Columbia, Canada. Over the years, BCcampus has developed a suite of support resources for open access publishing, including the Getting Started Guide; a publishing style guide; the Accessibility Toolkit; and the Self-Publishing Guide.
In this session, we will discuss some of the publishing tasks that are simplified by these guides, such as communication of author responsibilities, stylistic consistency, and technical accessibility. We will give a brief overview of each of these guides and demonstrate how they may be used by publishers and authors.
In a nutshell:
-The Getting Started Guide includes timelines, workflows, and best practices for OER authors.
-The BCcampus publishing style guide defines style guidelines, standard CSS workarounds, and templates for front and back matter.
-The Accessibility Toolkit contains practical information on making web content accessible.
-The Self-Publishing Guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.
The open licenses on our support guides allow anyone to use, modify, and share them. We encourage other publishing initiatives to adopt and adapt these guides.
Introducing Lantern: A Multiformat OER Publishing Toolkit
Presenters
- Chris Diaz, Digital Publishing Librarian, Northwestern University
- Lauren McKeen McDonald, Open Education Librarian, Northwestern University
Description
Lantern is a free and open-source digital publishing toolkit that applies minimal computing principles to the production and maintenance of open educational resources (OER). Librarians play an essential role in the publishing of OER at colleges and universities, often providing technology services for the production, hosting, and archiving of OER. Lantern provides workflows, templates, and instructions for publishing OER without the cost and sustainability concerns associated with repository systems and publishing platforms that are typically used. We use minimal computing as a lens for reducing software dependencies and vendor reliance in order to provide a methodology for using open infrastructure for OER publishing. At its core, Lantern uses Pandoc to produce OER in HTML, PDF, and EPUB formats by providing extensible document templates and shell scripts to fit a variety of common OER publishing use cases. More importantly, Lantern provides an entry point for new users of open source software. No programming or command line knowledge is assumed. Lantern includes step-by-step instructions on taking an OER manuscript in Microsoft Word format and producing a static HTML website with multiple OER output formats on your computer (some software installation required) or entirely online (no software installation required). Lantern was developed with support from the Association of Research Libraries that provided funding for a multi-institutional Librarian Review Panel, whose feedback was incorporated in the toolkit’s initial release. This presentation will provide a high-level overview of Lantern, introduce minimal computing concepts, and invite the library publishing community to use Lantern on their next OER project.
Lightning Talks
Can a Monthly Newsletter Increase Journal Publishing Best Practices?
Presenters
- Kate Cawthorn, Digital Projects Librarian, University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources
Description
This presentation will explore the impact of a monthly newsletter on the adoption of publishing best practices by library hosted journals. As part of the shift from a journal hosting service to a library publishing service, we are promoting the adoption of journal publishing best practices by our hosted journals. A key tool to promote these practices is a monthly newsletter to journal teams that includes at least one best practice in a “quick tip” format that a journal manager could implement within a few minutes. Prior to sending these newsletters, we assessed each journal’s current implementation or lack of implementation of that month’s best practice, and then checked again one month later to see if the level of adoption has increased. The goal of this project is to determine if a library publishing services newsletter is an effective way of increasing journal level adoption of publishing best practices and we hope that this information is useful for other small library publishers with limited resources.
Success, Failures, and the In-Between: Reflecting on a medical-student operated open access journal as it passes its third year in operation
Presenters
- Benjamin Saracco, Research and Digital Services Faculty Librarian, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University
- Amanda Adams MLS, Reference & Instruction Faculty Librarian, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University
Description
The Cooper Rowan Medical Journal, established in November 2018 by a team of eager undergraduate medical students, clinical faculty, and faculty librarians, with little to no back-end scholarly publishing experience, is now approaching the publication of its third volume. The publication is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals with over 106 submissions internationally, yet currently faces some key challenges. From the point-of-view of the librarians involved, this lightning talk will reflect on initial hurdles in getting this project off the ground, establishing consistent workflows, and bumps in the road the team experienced along the way. Senior editorial board staffing, training of early career researchers, and quirks in the publication’s software platform lead to issues around the speed of publication. As medical school operated journals increase in frequency, this lightning talk will help others interested in carrying out similar endeavors learn from our project’s successes and challenges.
Synchronizing the Asynchronous: Working through the Library Publishing Workshop as a Cohort
Presenters
- Jill Cirasella, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- Gail Steinhart, Cornell University
Description
Building on an idea hatched at the 2021 Library Publishing Forum, we created an informal learning community and professional development opportunity centered on the Library Publishing Curriculum Virtual Workshop Series. Our plan was for participants to work through one unit per month, asynchronously, and to meet in groups to synchronize our experiences, discussing and reviewing each unit. We report on the logistics of organizing such a group, the benefits and challenges experienced by both participants and organizers, and recommendations for a successful learning experience.
Inclusive Language in NIST Technical Series Publications
Presenters
- Kathryn Miller, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Description
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Research Library occupies the unique position of serving NIST both as publisher of the NIST Technical Series, and in an archival capacity, responsible for collecting and preserving copies of NIST’s publications. In June 2020, NIST received comments from the public about biased and exclusionary language in our NIST Technical Series publications (e.g., master/slave and blacklist/whitelist). While the authors responsible for the publications in question discussed how they were going to address the comments, the Research Library decided to update our author instructions with a new section on using inclusive language. After researching and developing an internal draft, we solicited feedback from NIST colleagues in July 2020, including those in our DEI offices and groups, and from the public after external release in February 2021. The guidance changed dramatically over this 7-month period, as we pivoted from a table of words to avoid and their preferred alternatives to contextual examples taken directly from historical NIST publications. During this project we learned that there is no template or standard process for developing inclusive language guidelines that will work for all library publishers. However, it is important to recognize that this activity will feel personal, as the words, idioms, and phrases we use are woven into our personalities and experiences. The only way to succeed in providing an inclusive, welcoming space in technical publications is to solicit feedback from as many under-represented groups as possible, and approach conversations about inclusive language with respect and humility. Future plans for this project include reviewing and updating the guidance on a yearly basis, creating a disclaimer for historical publications, and updating our procedures to include editing biased language as a reason for publishing a revision.
