Forum Info

March 21, 2023

Panel: May 10 12:00

Day/time: May 10, 2023, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. ETD

Title: Stronger Together: The Growth of Open Access Library Hosting in Scotland

Presenter: Rebecca Wojturska, Open Access Publishing Officer, University of Edinburgh

Description: Library hosting services are growing across the UK. In 2018, the University of Edinburgh submitted a proposal to create a shared service governed by the Scottish Confederation of University & Research Libraries (SCURL). The aim of the service was to equip member institutions with a hosting solution to fulfil their Open Access publishing activities, with the development time charged to the University of Edinburgh (which covers costs and is invested back into the service). The service launched with three members – Heriot Watt University, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh – and four years later has grown to include ten partners, with more members interested in signing up.

Although the shared service caters to members engaged in both publishing and hosting activities, we have seen a growth in library partners requesting to join so they can launch their own diamond Open Access library-based hosting initiatives. These initiatives – similar to the one at Edinburgh which is called Edinburgh Diamond – aim to support academics, staff and students in their publishing endeavours by providing a free publishing workflow system, as well as a hosting platform for journal and book content. The University of Edinburgh sets partners up with an Open Journal System (OJS) or Open Monograph Press (OMP) installation and provides full technical support as well as system training and publishing advice and guidance, which the member institution can use to mould their service. The shared service members meet three times a year to shape the service according to user needs and requirements.

This presentation will explain how the shared service grew, explore how and why hosting services are developing within Scottish libraries, and provide conclusions and recommendations for institutions considering creating similar initiatives.

Title: Canada’s Library Publishers: Low-Key Load-Bearing

Presenters:

• Mike Nason, Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian, UNB Libraries
• Sonya Betz, Head, Library Publishing and Digital Production Services, University of Alberta
• Emma Uhl, Publishing Support Specialist, Public Knowledge Project

Description: In Canada, academic libraries occupy a critical role in scholarly journal publishing. Commercial journal publishers rely on institutional subscriptions as a primary revenue source, and Canada’s research libraries expend significant percentages of their budgets to license packages of journals from major publishers. In 2021 alone, CRKN spent $143,083,913 on licensing fees, with a substantial portion of these funds directed to major international commercial journal publishers. It is unsurprising, then, that much of the discourse regarding open access has happened from the perspective of libraries as customers. Through negotiations, they express justifiable concerns regarding unsustainable price increases, lack of ownership and control of the digital content we purchase, and the ever-increasing oligopoly of major publishing companies.

However, recent research has demonstrated a near absence of commercial publishers in the Canadian context – almost all of the journals published here in Canada are affiliated with organizations such as universities, scholarly associations, not-for-profit presses, and academic libraries.

This presentation will explore the critical role occupied by library publishing and hosting programs in supporting the Canadian independent scholarly journals that comprise our national research literature. We’ll quantify the number and nature of journals our libraries support, describe the services and support we’re collectively offering, and position these programs within the broader Canadian journal publishing ecosystem. We hope attendees will leave this presentation with an improved understanding of our journal hosting/publishing programs’ critical role within our broader efforts to ensure that Canada’s research publishing landscape is open, equitable, and sustainable.

Title: Scottish Universities Press: Collaborating across Scotland to Develop a Library-Led Open Access Press

Presenter: Dominique Walker, Publishing Officer, Scottish Universities Press

Description: 18 academic libraries across Scotland, through SCURL (Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries), are collaborating to develop a not-for-profit open access publishing platform that is owned and managed by the participating libraries. The aim of the Scottish Universities Press (SUP) is to provide a straightforward and cost-effective OA publication route for academics across Scottish HEIs, in response to changes in funder policies and Plan S. The Press also wishes to explore alternative approaches to academic publishing that have the needs of the academic community at the core.

In this talk, Dominique Walker will set out the background to the project, discussing how SCURL’s experience of delivering cooperative developments for Scottish HEIs provided the foundation and the framework for creating a collaborative OA press. She will provide an overview of the development of the Press throughout 2022, including how the governance structure of the Press fosters a sense of collaboration and common good across all 18 institutions, our open call for Editorial Board members and how we aim to keep costs as low as possible for our institutions by using the skills available across the SCURL network. She will also discuss next steps, such as plans to help Early Career Researchers publish their work OA and to help smaller Scottish institutions publish content OA where previously they may not have had a budget to do so.

Overall, we wish to demonstrate how SUP’s collaborative model can help the development of good and equitable OA practices both in the UK and internationally. The talk will be of particular interest to Institutions or Consortia who may wish to start their own collaborative OA Press

March 21, 2023

Active Session: Book Usage Metric Sharing and Use Guardrails: Developing Ethical Principles and System Requirements to Protect Reader Privacy and Automate Multi-Publisher and Platform OA Book Usage Data Exchange and Aggregation

Day/time: May 10, 2023, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. ETD

Title: Book Usage Metric Sharing and Use Guardrails: Developing Ethical Principles and System Requirements to Protect Reader Privacy and Automate Multi-Publisher and Platform OA Book Usage Data Exchange and Aggregation

Presenter: Ursula Rabar, OA Book Usage Data Trust Community Manager, OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities)

Description: While COUNTER standards and APIs help library publishers access book usage data from multiple platforms and services, substantial staff time is often needed to interpret and aggregate data into a single report for a book, author, or funder. Anticipating increasing demand for holistic and contextual OA publishing impact reporting, the OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAeBUDT) effort has been bringing together stakeholders to improve cross-platform usage data exchange and aggregation.

In this session, the library publishing community will have an opportunity to provide feedback on draft ethical principles, community governance structures, and data trust participation requirements drafted by stakeholders for community review. Participants will explore the importance of book usage data stewardship practices and policies, and why high quality, granular OA book usage analytics and reports may require detailed usage data to be exchanged in controlled environments as opposed to aggregate data harvested from the public web. Issues of privacy, transparency, community governance, security will be explored while considering whether specific use and reuse limitations should exist for book usage data shared across the book publishing ecosystem.

About the OA Book Usage Data Trust

Since 2015, stakeholders have worked through the global OAEBUDT effort to foster the secure, multi-party exchange, aggregation and benchmarking of book usage related data, to increase trust in usage metrics, improve data quality, and reduce reporting and compliance resource-burdens related to OA usage data. Prior work documented library publisher needs for OA usage data reporting and analytics. Now this community is developing secure data exchange cyberinfrastructure to simplify cross-platform usage data aggregation. With Mellon Foundation support, the project is developing ethical data use guidelines to inform OA book usage data sharing agreements and technical requirements to support data exchange between public and commercial OA book usage data creators.

March 21, 2023

Full Session: Building a Publishing Platform Crosswalk: A Documentation Month Case Study

Day/time: May 9, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD

Title: Building a Publishing Platform Crosswalk: A Documentation Month Case Study

Presenters:

• Corinne Guimont, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Virginia Tech
• Cheryl E. Ball, Independent Consultant
• Matthew Vaughn, Indiana University

Description: One of the challenges library publishers face is, with so many new academy-owned publishing platforms available, which one is right for their services or their author needs? We identified several common publishing/digital scholarship platforms — Fulcrum, Manifold, Scalar, OJS, Janeway, and a few others — and researched basic documentation on each of them across a specific set of user-needs criteria. Criteria included publication and content types, what’s possible to ingest or embed, hosting services, preservation and export options, and a few others. We also identified, when possible, what makes one platform stand out from another when they fell into similar publishing realms (i.e., books vs. journals vs. collections). Our presentation covers which platforms we chose, what documentation we looked for for each and why, and how we decided to design the final crosswalk. It also highlights how much we were able to accomplish with one hour a week during LPC’s documentation month. This presentation will include time for interactive user testing of the platform crosswalk.

March 21, 2023

Panel: May 9 2:45

Day/time: May 9, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD

Title: Listening to Our Community: What Does DEI in Library Publishing Look Like to You?

Presenter: Shannon Kipphut-Smith, Scholarly Communications Liaison, Rice University

Description: This session will share initial reflections on a project intended to identify ways the library can center diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the library’s publishing services. Although library staff are knowledgeable about the current state of scholarly communications, we acknowledge that, often, members of the University community better understand–and experience–the numerous challenges faced by authors in today’s scholarly publishing environment. So, rather than develop a set of services and resources informed by what library staff perceived to be user needs, this project was intended to take a step back and ask participants, generally, what DEI in library publishing services looks like to them. This session will provide an overview of participant feedback, challenges, and next steps.

Title: The Gender Gap in Job Status and Career Development of Chinese Publishing Practitioners

Presenter: Yawen Li, School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Normal University

Description: Among Chinese publishing practitioners, there is a significant difference between the number of males and females. To investigate the gender gap among Chinese publishing practitioners, we surveyed 3372 valid questionnaires from April 30 in 2020 to December 31 in 2020. This research mainly adopts the Chi-square test and the T-test to analyze the gender gap in publishing practitioners’ career choices, career plans, career promotions, etc. The results show that although females occupy nearly 70% of the samples in the data, males perform more competitively in multiple indicators such as salary and career development. There is also a significant gender gap in terms of career plans and career perception. However, our research shows that the gender gap is not obvious in terms of workload and willingness to change jobs. This research provides a strong factual basis and data support for the current gender status in the Chinese publishing industry and discusses the possible healthy development of gender structure.

Title: Reintroducing the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, V2.0

Presenter: Joshua Neds-Fox, Coordinator for Library Publishing, Wayne State University Library System

Description: Conceived at the Library Publishing Forum in 2017, the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing was a first-of-its-kind document for the LPC and the library publishing community. But remarkable social upheaval in the ensuing years, along with the continued maturation of our discipline, prompted the LPC to convene a task force to update the Framework for our current environment. What the task force developed, to our surprise, looks very little like the original document. This session will introduce the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing Version 2.0, a true framework to help library publishers set an ethical baseline for their programs and activities. Consisting of four basic Frames, each with their own set of Statements and Guidance, the Framework gives the reader a scaffolding for ethical thinking in library publishing. Attendees should expect a basic overview of the Framework, insight into the people and processes that produced it, and a provocative approach to professional ethical development.

March 21, 2023

Full Session: Consortium Models for Open Education Resource Publishing

Day/time: May 9, 2023, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. ETD

Title: Consortium Models for Open Education Resource Publishing

Presenters:

• John D. Morgenstern, Copyright and Scholarly Communications Librarian, Emory University
• Jeff Gallant, Program Director, Affordable Learning Georgia
• Ellan Jenkinson, Member Engagement & Training Librarian, Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries
• BJ Robinson, Director, University of North Georgia Press
• Yang Wu, Open Education Resources Librarian, Clemson University

Description: Academic libraries play a key role in publishing open education resources (OER), but limitations on budget, staffing, and publishing expertise threaten the sustainability of efforts at any single institution. This panel showcases two trailblazing collaborations between statewide library consortia and university presses that leverage inter-institutional resources to publish high-impact, professional-quality OER sustainably.

A decade ago, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia launched Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) with a mandate to reduce the cost of course materials for students and enhance the discovery of library materials through GALILEO, Georgia’s virtual library. A grant program through ALG underwrites the adoption, adaptation, and creation of OER. The University of North Georgia Press partners with this program, offering grantees such services as peer review, project management, and production.

Inspired by Georgia’s pioneering approach to sustainable OER publishing, Clemson University Press recently established an imprint to publish open textbooks in collaboration with the Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries (PASCAL), the statewide library consortium. Named after PASCAL’s affordable-learning program, SCALE (South Carolina Affordable Learning), the imprint provides an avenue for authors from any of the consortium’s fifty-six member institutions to publish open textbooks through Clemson.

This panel brings together representatives from both sides of the Georgia and South Carolina OER publishing initiatives, who will recount how the collaborations came to fruition, identify the challenges they encountered (in areas such as getting initial buy-in, advocating for funding, and maintaining sustainability), and offer practical guidance for overcoming them. Ultimately, these partnerships offer replicable models for open textbook publishing in states lacking dedicated OER funding based around engaging a larger community of librarians and university presses in collaboration.

March 21, 2023

Active Session: Collaborative Administration of DIY Publishing Tools

Day/time: May 9, 2023, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EDT

Title: Collaborative Administration of DIY Publishing Tools

Presenters:

• Corinne Guimont, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Virginia Tech
• Caitlin Bean, Publishing Services Specialist, Virginia Tech
• Anita Walz, Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Virginia Tech

Description: For many library publishing programs, part of the program is providing do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing tools to the campus community. These tools may include PressBooks, Overleaf, Journal Management Systems, and Institutional Repositories. Every institution has their own policies and procedures in how they administer these tools, and every tool may have its own guidelines within an institution. In this presentation, we will spend the first twenty minutes introducing the tools we provide to our faculty, staff, and students at Virginia Tech, how we collaborate with each other and others on campus to administer access, and policies and procedures we have applied in doing so. We will discuss why we offer these DIY options alongside our more traditional publishing practices and why other programs may want to consider doing so as well. We will note cases where tools are administered differently and why we have made those decisions and how in some cases we have decided to mediate users. Additionally, we will discuss how we encourage users to utilize accessibility features and standards through consultations and workshops.

Then we will provide discussion questions to facilitate a conversation about how other institutions and publishing programs administer similar or different tools to their communities. Questions will focus on what DIY programs other institutions are using, policies and procedures implemented, mediation around users of tools, and more. During this discussion period, we will break up into three groups, each led by a presenter. Each group will take notes on each discussion question in their own PressBooks chapter to generate a small guide on DIY publishing tools as we go. After the session, the presenters will clean up this guide and share with session attendees.

March 21, 2023

Panel: May 9 12:00

Day/time: May 9, 2023, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. ETD

Title: A Fresh Take on JATS: Book Reviews as a Simple, Immediate, and Accessible Gateway to Full-Text Publishing

Presenters:

• Matthew Vaughn, Open Publishing Librarian, Indiana University
• Richard Higgins,  Software Engineer, Indiana University

Description: Even as JATS XML has become the standard format for academic publishing, the challenges involved in implementing a JATS XML-based publishing workflow have prevented many library publishers from moving beyond PDF-based publishing. The complicated apparatus of even the most basic scholarly articles complicates XML production considerably. In addition, most existing workflows are reliant on XML conversion tools or paid vendors to convert author submission documents into JATS XML. In either case, these XML documents are time-consuming to produce and often require additional editing and correction before publication. Book reviews, on the other hand, provide a less burdensome format for library publishers who wish to transition to XML publishing. With minimal training, editorial teams can format JATS XML book reviews in-house without resorting to paid vendors or conversion tools. This presentation outlines the successful onboarding of a JATS-only book review journal to the Open Journal Systems platform. To facilitate this, we created a simplified JATS XML template using the DAR tag subset specification to optimize machine readability, avoid redundancy, and ensure reusability. The onboarding process also required customization of the OJS interface and the creation of detailed documentation and training materials for the editorial team. Although the editorial team had no prior experience with OJS or JATS XML, they are now publishing full-text, machine-readable books reviews. As the result of our work, these book reviews will now be more easily indexed and permanently stored as markup in a digital preservation archive. The semantically tagged content will facilitate keyword searches and increase discoverability over the long term. Finally, as a machine-readable format, JATS XML is inherently accessible and includes elements that allow for accessibility tagging and for the creation of interfaces that are both Section 508 and WCAG compliant.

Title: Curing Law Review Link Rot with DOIs

Presenter: Valeri Craigle, Head of Technical Services, James E. Faust Law Library, University of Utah

Description: An accessibility crisis is looming for one of the most vital sources of legal scholarship in the world. Law reviews are the primary vehicle for scholarly communication in the legal academy, but the URLs to law review articles are generating more 404 messages than ever due to shoddy publishing practices and an absence of digital asset management policies for online law review content.

The use of persistent URLs, specifically Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), offer a low cost, easy to implement remedy. DOIs are ubiquitously deployed in the publications of almost every other discipline in the sciences and humanities, with law being one of the only exceptions. Absent any guidance from the legal academy, law librarians are taking the lead in raising awareness of this important issue and are in the process of developing DOI implementation strategies in partnership with their own law review societies.

In this short presentation the current problem, its significance to law review publishing, and an easily implementable solution will be provided. Though the focus in on law review publishing, the takeaways will benefit any librarian working in library and/or academic publishing.

Title: Thoth: Open and Trusted Metadata for Open Access Books and Book Chapters

Presenter: Rupert Gatti, Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge

Description: This presentation will showcase Thoth Open Metadata (https://thoth.pub/), a non-profit open metadata management and dissemination service for OA books and book chapters. Using detailed case studies, it will demonstrate how library publishers may benefit from utilising Thoth for their own publishing programs.

The difficulties associated with book and chapter metadata are well recognised. Each distribution platform/service maintains its own metadata, which is not – or is only partially – shared between platforms, and is often not well equipped to incorporate metadata for open access content. This is particularly problematic for small publishers, who are required to submit metadata in multiple different formats, containing different information, to an array of different parties. Publishers then find that the transmission of this data across the book distribution system results in metadata being overwritten and/or degraded in the process. This is also problematic for third parties interested in creating services for users that rely on metadata records maintained across multiple platforms or publishers.

Several publishers have now adopted Thoth as their metadata manager to create and distribute metadata in multiple formats including ONIX and MARC, submit books and chapter metadata to CrossRef for DOI registration and archive content in university repositories. Third-party applications are also beginning to utilise Thoth’s open APIs as a trusted and open source of book metadata to create novel content and services.

In this presentation we propose to showcase several users and use cases for Thoth, outline planned developments for the service over the coming three years, and demonstrate the advantages of utilising and supporting open source, non-profit and community owned infrastructures over commercial alternatives. This session will give attendees at the Library Publishing Coalition conference valuable insight into the growth and development of an important and trustworthy new player in the field of OA book metadata.

March 21, 2023

Active Session: A Toolkit for Disability Equity in Scholarly Communications

Day/time: May 9, 2023, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. ETD

Title: A Toolkit for Disability Equity in Scholarly Communications

Presenters:

• Karen Stoll Farrell, Head of Scholarly Communication, Indiana University – Bloomington
• Simon Holt, Head of Central Strategies, Content Acquisition at Elsevier
• Erin Osborne-Martin, Associate Director, Strategic Analytics at Wiley
• Sylvia Hunter, Marketing Manager at Inera

Description: We would like to launch, present, and discuss the first version of our C4DISC Toolkit for Disability Equity for Scholarly Communications. While plenty of online resources on disability inclusion exist, finding and evaluating those relevant to scholarly communications remains a significant challenge. Modeled on prior C4DISC Toolkits for Equity projects, the Disability Toolkit is something different: an interactive, easy-to-update online hub providing access to high-quality and accurate resources, curated and vetted by knowledgeable people, that both people with disabilities and those wanting to successfully recruit, hire, and retain them can use to help achieve those goals. Like other C4DISC Toolkits, the Disability Toolkit will be openly available and will offer good search capabilities, topic and format filtering, and a variety of resource types (text, video, audio) with accessibility affordances.

We will present and discuss the Toolkit’s first iteration (launching in May 2023), which will include resources, an FAQ, and personal stories. Session attendees will get to know the current state of the project and plans for future development. In this active session, attendees will offer feedback on existing elements, identify gaps, and brainstorm use cases. In particular, the presenters hope to explore points of intersectionality with anti-racism efforts to expand on this portion of the Toolkit. Participants will come away with a better idea of how they can help make the scholarly communications industry more disability-confident, as individuals, teams, and organizations.

March 21, 2023

Full Session: A Model for Diversifying and Expanding Digital Publishing: Brown University Library’s National Endowment for the Humanities Institute

Day/time: May 8, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. EDT

Title: A Model for Diversifying and Expanding Digital Publishing: Brown University Library’s National Endowment for the Humanities Institute

Presenters:

• Allison Levy, Director, Brown University Digital Publications
• Cosette Bruhns Alonso, Contemporary Publishing Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Libraries & Penn Press (LPC DEI Committee Member, 2022-2024)
• Emily Lynell Edwards, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Educational Technologist, St. Francis College
• Warren Harding, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Diversity in Digital Publishing, Brown University
• Ashley Robertson Preston, Assistant Professor of History, Howard University

Description: This panel presents lessons learned in diversifying and expanding the field of digital publishing from Brown University Library’s National Endowment for the Humanities Institute held in summer 2022, “Born Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps.” Centered on inclusivity and accessibility, this first-of-its-kind national training program equipped 15 scholars — 60% from historically Black colleges and universities — with in-depth knowledge of the digital publishing process. Designed for scholars wishing to develop digital publications yet hindered by limited institutional resources and support, the curriculum was taught by librarians, digital humanities scholars, and editors, consolidating the successful path to university press publication formulated by Brown University Digital Publications, a program of distinction based in the University Library’s renowned Center for Digital Scholarship. The full curriculum, including recordings of all faculty presentations, has been made openly accessible via a resource-rich website that provides a continuous and active web presence for the institute, thereby expanding the voices, perspectives, and visions represented in digital publishing far beyond the summer cohort. This crucial re-prioritization of how and for whom the practice and production of digital scholarship is taught will have a profound impact on current and future generations of scholars. Reflecting on the institute’s broader impact, both in diversifying the field of library publishing and expanding resources for producing digital publications, members from the facilitating team and cohort participants will speak to how they are implementing lessons learned from the institute at their own institutions.

March 21, 2023

Active Session: Let’s Chat! How Do You Support Student Journals to be Sustainable and Ongoing?

Day/time: May 8, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. EDT

Title: Let’s Chat! How Do You Support Student Journals to be Sustainable and Ongoing?

Presenters:

• Kristin Hoffmann, Research & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Western University
• Emily Carlisle-Johnston, Research and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Western University
• Noah Churchill-Baird, MLIS Student, Western University

Description: Many library publishers host and publish student journals, and maintaining consistent operations for student journals is a common challenge. Student journals can surface and quickly disappear. Cohorts of students may emerge to form new editorial teams and revive defunct or ceased student journals. We have experienced these waves of student journal publishing at Western Libraries, and we know that these patterns are not unique to our publishing program. Many of us experience the same cycle of precarious student journal publications, so let’s talk about it.

This session will be a two-part facilitated discussion. In the first part, we will provide a space for those involved with library publishing to discuss the specific challenges facing student journal publishing, through breakout rooms and a collaborative document. We seek to encourage collaboration among library publishers and discuss ways to support more sustainable practices and long-term planning among student journals.

In the second part, we will offer a transition template document that library publishers can use with student journals. We created this document to better support the transition process from one editorial team to the next. Student editors can customize and fit it to the unique needs of their journals. We will share this transition document along with guiding questions to help library publishers consider what this solution looks like in practice for librarians and students.

Thinking critically about how library publishers can better support stable student journal leadership has direct implications for the development of our publishing services. The many benefits of student journal publishing for students involved should be strategically supported by library publishers to ensure that these opportunities are available to future students.