Forum Info

April 18, 2024

Keynote: Moments, movements, and momentum: What comes next?

Day/Time: May 15, 2024, 8:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.

Room: Memorial Hall

Keynote Speaker: Katherine Skinner, Research Lead, Invest in Open Infrastructure

Description: A decade ago, Educopia, together with 60 universities, seed-funded and hosted the inaugural Library Publishing Forum. In that formation moment, library publishers forged a collective identity and shared crucial information with each other about how their publishing ideas and experiments were becoming institutionalized as new scholarly publishing practices. Over the last decade, we’ve seen library publishing grow into a full-fledged movement that shares close ties to the open access, open source, and open infrastructure movements. This talk will take us back to revisit the vision and aims declared in the early years and look at the ways these have manifested since that time. Skinner will sketch out the story of how that initial moment has spurred the larger movement of “library publishing” and look at its connections to other social movements both past and present. Skinner will also challenge us to think together about our current momentum and plans and will ask us what stories we want to tell at the celebration in 2034 of our second decade together.

April 3, 2024

PANEL: Workflows and Tools

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Title: Piloting Publishing Platforms for Infrastructure and Equity

Presenters:

• Karen Lauritsen (she/her), Senior Director, Publishing, Open Education Network, University of Minnesota
• Jamie Witman (she/her), Open Educational Practices Specialist, Open Education Network, University of Minnesota

Description: The Open Education Network (OEN) supports the development, publishing and distribution of open textbooks through community, programs and services to make higher education more equitable for students. We aspire to support anyone who wants to publish an open textbook. This vision is guiding our development of new pathways and programs, and towards what we hope is a more equitable publishing landscape that includes more voices. That translates into creating multiple pathways and infrastructure to support our diverse community. We want to support people at institutions that may not have access to publishing infrastructure. With that in mind, we are piloting Manifold and Ketida. In this presentation, we’ll talk about what we’ve learned so far. We’ll discuss both the tool tradeoffs and the human process involved.

Title: One Path, Many Tools: Publishing Getty’s Open-Access Journal

Presenter: Greg Albers (he/him), Getty

Description: The path for publishing an academic journal is well established. You collect submissions, manage peer review, edit the articles, prep and organize images and other assets, create the publication, and get it out into the world. This is the standard publishing path, from point A to point B, but the tools you can use to follow it are as varied as the path is straight.

Some journal publishing tools bundle all the pieces together, while others are highly specialized and meant to be chained together ad hoc. Some tools are hosted for you, while others you maintain on your own. Some tools stick to the tried and true process, and others offer unique features and alternate ways of doing things. You might make the tools, you might buy them, or you might get them for free. There are myriad options, each with their benefits and drawbacks, the goal is to find the tools that work best for you.

In this presentation, we’ll share the tools we used at Getty (Scholastica, Microsoft Word, Pandoc and ImageMagick, Quire, GitHub, Netlify) when we relaunched the Getty Research Journal as a self-hosted multiformat publication, under an open-access license. This will include a brief look at each tool, what it offers, and why we chose it, along with some open discussion about the many other options out there.

Title: Platforms, Policies, and Formats of Undergraduate Journals in North America: Preliminary Results from a Systematic Analysis of 100 Journals

Presenter: Christopher Barnes (he/him), Digital Publishing Librarian, Adelphi University

Description: Library publishers are frequently involved with undergraduate journals on their campuses, from providing guidance to editorial teams and technical support when issues arise to serving as their publisher and handling all aspects of the production workflow. While there are many resources available to publishers of undergraduate journals, there are no recent studies of undergraduate journals published in North America that look at their platforms, policies, and formats. Having obtained a list of over 300 undergraduate journals published in North America from the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR), I have developed a rubric which I can use to evaluate various components of the publications themselves, as well as the way they are run by students and faculty members.

I will use the list from CUR to identify 100 undergraduate journals in North America which have been published for at least three years, are spread across the region, and represent a wide range of institution types, from community and liberal arts colleges to large state and private research universities. Technical aspects to be analyzed include the platform used (e.g., WordPress or Weebly), the final format (e.g., PDF or HTML), the presence of a copyright or OA license statement, levels of compliance with web accessibility guidelines, and whether a DOI is assigned to the issue or individual works. I also intend to examine the websites for information about sponsoring departments, structures of editorial boards, the roles played by faculty advisors, and how review is conducted by editors, peers, and members of the faculty. In this presentation, I will share my preliminary findings and discuss the second part of the project in which I intend to contact each journal with a short survey about their internal workflows to inform a follow-up article.

April 3, 2024

PANEL: Open Access

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Title: Flipping to Diamond Open Access: Interviews with LIS Journal Editors

Presenters:

• DeDe Dawson (she/her), Science & Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Saskatchewan
• Rachel Borchardt (she/her), Scholarly Communications Librarian, American University
• Teresa Schultz (she/her), Scholarly Communications & Social Sciences Librarian, University of Nevada, Reno

Description: Librarians are often at the forefront of advocacy for a transition to an equitable open access (OA) publishing system, but many of our own journals remain behind paywalls or charge inequitable author fees to publish OA. About half of Library and Information Science (LIS) journals use such hybrid models or do not offer OA publishing at all. We recently conducted a survey of editors of LIS journals that have not transitioned to a diamond OA model (without fees for authors) and learned that a journal’s financial situation is a barrier and many editors indicated a lack of awareness of their journal’s budget. It was also apparent that editors may not be fully aware of the diversity of diamond OA funding options available to support this transition.

To further investigate these financial and other perceived barriers preventing LIS journals from transitioning to a more equitable diamond OA model, we interviewed 15 lead editors of LIS journals: eight from journals that remain behind a paywall and seven from journals that have successfully transitioned from subscription to a fully diamond OA model. In this session we will discuss preliminary results from this qualitative research, including dominant themes emerging from the initial coding of interview transcripts and our early interpretation of these themes. Ultimately, we hope the results from this research will assist in the development of solutions and supports for LIS journals in making this transition to an equitable diamond OA publishing model. And we anticipate that members of the Library Publishing Coalition may be critical partners in the success of such potential solutions and supports in the future.

Title: Subscribe to Open (S2O) as a DEIA-Friendly Open Access Model

Presenter: Elizabeth W. Brown, Publisher Relations Manager, Project MUSE, Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press

Description: Publishers and authors should seek more equitable and inclusive business models for publishing open access content. Subscribe to Open (S2O) is one such model that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a library subscription model, S2O has no APCs or other costs to authors or publishers and no limits on authors due to institutional affiliation or geographical location. While not limited to any particular kind of publisher, S2O certainly has been a boon for non-profit scholarly publishing, which plays a vital role in ensuring diversity in scholarly publishers. Some S2O offerings have also given a much-needed impetus for journals in humanities, which often do not have the funding streams of other fields such as STEM, to embrace open access.

I will dig further into the DEIA implications of S2O, providing a general overview of the model and current offerings available as well as drawing from Project MUSE’s experience in preparing to launch what is the largest S2O offer of its kind. As one of the first to offer S2O through an aggregation, Project MUSE is not just providing convenience for libraries; through Project MUSE, university presses, societies, academic departments, and other non-profit publishers can now sustainably publish open access journal content, which they could not have done on their own.

Title: Analyzing the Publishing Output of an R1 Research Institution: The First Four Years

Presenter: Elaine Walker (she/her), Scholarly Communications Librarian, The University of Alabama

Description: In 2018, The University of Alabama earned the status of Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity, formerly known as R1, from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education framework. This session will provide an update on the findings of analyzing the institutional publishing output using data from Web of Science, with a focus on open access publishing, in the first four years after achieving this highly regarded status. Open Access publishing allows research findings to be available and accessible to all while advancing the growth of its relative discipline to drive innovation. Some of the key findings included are the top journals and publishers, percentage of publications published under an OA model, and an annual average of funds spent on Gold Open Access publishing. Conclusions drawn from the data indicate the departments where open access publishing is being practiced and identifies areas that would benefit from increased open access publishing. This research will inform the foundation for developing targeted open access awareness campaigns, backing a potential publishing fund, and supporting a campus-wide open access initiative to utilize the institutional repository that will not only benefit individual faculty’s research citations and impact, but will also enhance the university’s overall standing, building upon its current reputation and research output.

April 3, 2024

PANEL: Student Publishing

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Title: Publishing Pedagogy: How Institutional Repositories Empower Undergraduate Research

Presenter: Dylan Mohr, Syracuse University

Description: This presentation explores the transformative role of institutional repositories (IRs) as pedagogical instruments rather than just platforms for sharing research. While IRs traditionally serve as endpoints for academic work in higher education, this talk challenges this notion by emphasizing the critical inclusion of undergraduate contributions.

Beyond merely housing student work, this discussion delves into why integrating student work into IRs matters and how it can benefit undergraduates. By framing publication as a pedagogical strategy within undergraduate classrooms, the session draws on a growing body of scholarship showcasing the positive impact of publishing student work beyond the confines of a single instructor’s assessment. This approach has demonstrated notable increases in student engagement and performance.

Furthermore, the talk highlights the unique position of IRs in offering experiential learning opportunities across diverse disciplines. It specifically delves into the case of SURFACE (Syracuse University’s Institutional Repository), illustrating how its integration into syllabi across four courses facilitated diverse learning outcomes. The discussion extends to how leveraging different facets of the IR, such as addressing issues in scholarly communication and navigating copyright concerns, supported educational goals within these classrooms. Ultimately, this presentation aims to spark a conversation on harnessing IRs as versatile pedagogical tools.

Title: Dynamic Texts: Student Voices in Course Materials

Presenter: Micah Gjeltema (he/him), Open Education & Affordable Content Librarian, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Description: In contrast to traditional textbook models, Open Educational Practices enable students to engage and respond to assigned materials in order to enhance their own learning while adding the unique context of their experience for future students to benefit from and build upon. This session will explore several student-centered learning materials projects supported by University of Minnesota Libraries. Projects include a STEM textbook assembled and edited by students, student-designed learning modules for K-12 education, and Freshman Seminar materials contributed by students as topic experts. We will explore potential structures for facilitating student creation including collaborative texts, individual contributions, and curated collections while examining ways in which libraries can support these endeavors. These illustrations will allow for a broader conversation on Open Educational Practices and the opportunities and challenges inherent to the solicitation, creation, and use of student-authored learning materials, including representation, motivation, and privacy.

Title: Overdue Knowledge: Teaching & Learning via Student-led Journals in the Library

Presenter: Rebecca Wojturska (she/her), Open Access Publishing Officer, University of Edinburgh

Description: Academic publishing is an area often associated with a lack of transparency. What goes on behind the scenes and how does publishing really work? One of the many merits to Open Access is not only opening up research but the practices that make it possible. Embedding this knowledge from undergraduate level has the potential to help students flourish when it comes to approaching academia or publishing as a career path. But how can librarians help?

Edinburgh Diamond, situated within Edinburgh University Library, provides free publishing services to academics, staff and students of the University of Edinburgh who wish to publish their own Diamond Open Access books and journals. The service currently has eight journals that are led by student-groups across the University, showcasing a variety of research from internal students as well as researchers of all levels worldwide. Edinburgh Diamond aims to grow this offering to increase publishing transparency and to equip students with skills and knowledge in academic publishing, including: launching a journal, managing workflow, facilitating peer-review, coordinating submissions, understanding editorial, production, marketing and promotion processes, and the importance of indexing, metadata and discoverability.

This presentation will demonstrate how the service aims to engage with students to develop their understanding and practical application of publishing knowledge, as well as how the process of running their own journal enhances the learning experience. Furthermore, this presentation will look at Edinburgh Diamond’s history and growth of student-led publishing, highlight student feedback, and share plans for the future.

April 3, 2024

HANDS-ON SESSION: Automated Typesetting: Making Beautiful Textbooks

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.

Title: Automated Typesetting: Making Beautiful Textbooks

Presenter: Dione Mentis, COO and Senior Architect, Coko

Description: Textbooks present unique challenges in balancing pedagogical design, visual appeal, accessibility, portability across devices, and long-term maintainability. Current publishing tools struggle to deliver on all fronts, often achieving one or two goals through manual processes while compromising elsewhere. We need to reimagine solutions.

This presentation reveals an innovative approach to textbook publishing combining Ketty and Paged.js for streamlined creation of standards-driven, visually designed content able to gracefully transition across digital and print mediums.

Ketty offers a browser-based editor where authors can write richly formatted narrative which is stored as structured HTML. Its workflow-centric collaboration features bring instructional designers, subject matter experts and multimedia producers together in real-time to jointly create and refine textbook content.

The structured HTML can then feed into Paged.js – an open source typesetting engine able to renditionally split content into elegant paginated outputs for screen and print. Generated PDFs achieve professional typesetting automatically with optimized reading layouts.

Accessibility is prioritized across the workflow – with structured data supporting transcripts, logical reading order, and semantic enrichment to enable adaptation.

By combining publishing tools purpose-built for openness, customizability and using web standards, this new paradigm lowers overheads, accelerates timelines, and creates textbooks ready for the multi-modal future while retaining quality, aesthetics and device flexibility.

Join us to learn how Ketty and Paged.js can revolutionize textbook publishing through web-based collaboration, automated typesetting, and a structure-first ideology able to dynamically adapt content for the needs of OER.

April 3, 2024

FULL SESSION: “Make it so”: Sustainable, Academy-Owned Publishing Infrastructure with CDL, Michigan, & Janeway

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.

Title: “Make it so”: Sustainable, Academy-Owned Publishing Infrastructure with CDL, Michigan, & Janeway

Presenters:

• Amanda Karby (she/her), Publications Manager, California Digital Library
• Jason Colman (he/him), Director of Publishing Services, University of Michigan Library
• Lauren Stachew (she/her), Senior Digital Publishing Coordinator, University of Michigan Library
• Andy Byers (he/him), Director of Publishing Technology, Open Library of Humanities
• Katherine Parker-Hay (she/her), Publishing Development Officer, Open Library of Humanities

Description: Both the California Digital Library (CDL) and Michigan Publishing are migrating their journal publishing programs away from aging open source systems to the relatively new Janeway platform, also open source and developed by a team at the Open Library of Humanities. What does Janeway offer that has prompted this move? How might these migrations align with broader efforts to develop sustainable models for academy-owned OA publishing programs? How can library publishers, operating in a space dominated by the large commercial publishers and the platforms they own, help ensure that academy-owned, open infrastructure like Janeway is sustainable in the long term?

In this session, CDL and Michigan will discuss their distinct approaches to platform migration, Janeway’s capabilities as a platform for both journals and preprints, and how all three of these organizations are committed to long-term sustainability and collaboration with each other. The Janeway team will also offer thoughts on how development of the platform is driven by its community of users and how they are approaching both financial and technical sustainability as staff of an academic institution.

April 3, 2024

HANDS-ON SESSION: Behind the Text: What Do YOU Think Faculty Should Know Before Diving into OER Textbook Creation

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.

Title: Behind the Text: What Do YOU Think Faculty Should Know Before Diving into OER Textbook Creation

Presenters:

• Amanda Larson (she/her/hers), Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, The Ohio State University
• Karen Lauritsen (she/her/hers), Senior Director, Publishing, Open Education Network, University of Minnesota

Description: In 2019, the Library Publishing Forum and Open Education Network (OEN) cohosted the preconference Opening the Classroom: Publishing Open Educational Resources. That event evolved to become the OEN’s Publishing 101 (Pub101) curriculum and facilitated workshop series for librarians and others who support faculty authors. Now, five years later, and after refreshing the existing curriculum, the Pub101 committee is asking the following questions:

• What would this curriculum look like if it were revised for a faculty author audience?
• What gaps are there?
• What do we want faculty to know before beginning an open textbook project?
• What expertise is missing from conversations about open textbook publishing for faculty?
• How do we address AI considerations?

In this workshop session, we will facilitate a discussion about the Pub101 refresh for a faculty audience. We will walk the audience through the existing curriculum, and use Padlet to collect feedback from the audience about what they’d like to see in a faculty version. We want to know what those of you who support OER publishing programs would love faculty to know about creating an open textbook. What advice and guidance do you often give? What hurdles or stumbling blocks do you consistently encounter with authors and textbook production in your programs?

April 3, 2024

HANDS-ON SESSION: Reframing the Library Publishing Research Agenda

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Title: Reframing the Library Publishing Research Agenda

Presenters:

• Karen Bjork (she/her), Head, Digital Libraries and Publishing, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries
• John Morgenstern (he/him), Copyright & Scholarly Communications Librarian, Emory Libraries

Description: In 2020, the Research Committee released the Library Publishing Research Agenda. Designed as a living document that will develop and evolve, the Research Agenda focuses on areas in which research is needed to support practices in the field of library publishing. The agenda includes six research topics: Assessment, Labor, Accessibility, Non-Traditional Research Outputs, Peer Review, and Partnerships. The dual aims of this session are: 1) to reintroduce participants to the Research Agenda and 2) to identify how the Research Committee might revise the Agenda to integrate DEI perspective and considerations.

This session will begin with an overview of the Library Publishing Research Agenda and introduce the current committee’s priority to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) research. Rather than establish a separate topic for this work, the committee envisions reframing existing prompts developed for each topic of the Research Agenda to encourage the integration of DEI perspectives. For the remainder of the session, participants will be divided into small groups according to their preferred research topic to consider how DEI principles could enrich relevant research and inform best practices in library publishing. Within these groups, participants may take a number of approaches, including some combination of the following:

• Identify how DEI (or lack thereof) informs current practice in library publishing.
• Reframe prompts developed by the Research Committee to promote work on their preferred topic such that they integrate DEI perspectives.
• Identify individuals with shared research interests and brainstorm potential collaborations.
• Provide constructive feedback to incorporate into future iterations of the agenda.

While the goal of this session is to provide an opportunity to work with or build on the Research Agenda, participants are under no obligation to produce “deliverables.” We want attendees to learn from one another and contribute to library publishing research.

April 3, 2024

BOAF: Student Publications

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Title: Student Publications

Presenter: Charlotte Roh (she/her), Publications Manager, California Digital Library

Description: This session is a follow up to informal Zoom conversations that were held in 2023 by LPC members working with student publications. We found in these conversations that we had many of the same challenges: trouble with sustainability because of editorial turnover, lack of educational resources (including people to teach and guide students), and changing expectations on student output.

During this session, we plan to discuss the following topics:

• What is driving the creation and/or growth of student journals on your campus?
• What is being left by the wayside in the drive toward professional-level publication?
• What difficulties are you having with student journals? Sustainability? Labor? Faculty investment?
• What practical tips can you share with others that have helped your student publishing program?

The goal of this session is to draft a guiding document for a library publishing student program that would provide a template for expectations, policies, and room for a menu of options. We suggest that attendees review the ProPublica article “The Newest College Admissions Ploy: Paying to Make Your Teen a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Author” and the notes from the previous discussions for a better understanding of the topic.

April 3, 2024

FULL SESSION: From OER to Open Press and Open Impact: The Evolution of Large-Scale Open Education Initiatives

Day/Time: May 16, 2024, 8:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.

Title: From OER to Open Press and Open Impact: The Evolution of Large-Scale Open Education Initiatives

Presenters:

• Stefanie Buck, Director, Open Educational Resources, Oregon State University
• Anita Walz, Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Virginia Tech
• Allison Brown (she/her), Digital Publishing Services Manager, SUNY Geneseo
• Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Iowa State University
• Julie Curtis, VP Growth & Strategy, Pressbooks (moderator)

Description: As open education initiatives gain momentum, they mature and often evolve beyond their original scope and purpose. They work to operationalize and scale their efforts to meet goals and optimize available resources. They seek to demonstrate the impacts of open education in ways that align with institutional priorities. The Open Press is an agile operational model that provides an efficient, centralized mechanism for creating, publishing, managing, sharing, and sustaining the use of open learning materials and scholarship.

This session begins by introducing a maturity model for open education initiatives that spans start-up, growth, integration, innovation, and movement towards OER sustainability, including the “Open Press” model. It then leads into a thoughtful discussion with campus champions who have directed open education initiatives through stages of maturity. They will share insights about how moving towards the Open Press model has helped them grapple with questions of scope and mission as they seek to build sustainable OER and impactful open education projects.

This interview-style panel discussion will delve into questions such as:

• How have your goals evolved over time in alignment with broader organizational priorities, and what has this meant for the open education work you direct?
• As your initiative has evolved, how have you answered the questions of, “What are we? What is our mission?”
• What are you trying to do to blend the best of publishing with the best of open access in your Open Press initiative?
• How have you navigated the question of what to say “no” to, as well as what to say “yes” to?
• What tools or approaches have been particularly helpful to support your initiative and make it sustainable?
• How do you approach the relational aspect of working with authors and creators?
• What guidance would you offer colleagues trying to build sustainable, impactful open education initiatives?