Past Forum Info

April 10, 2018

Full Session: No Publisher Is an Island: How to Find and Work with Freelance Editorial and Design Professionals

Tuesday, May 22, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Presenters: Jody Bailey, University of Texas at Arlington; Peter Potter, Virginia Tech; Kellie M. Hultgren, KMH Editing; Madeleine Vasaly

Description: Scholarly publications require quality-control processes such as professional copyediting, design/layout, proofreading, indexing, and more. Copyeditors and proofreaders add value and aid readers by ensuring grammatical and stylistic correctness and consistency and by suggesting revisions to passages that may be ambiguous or confusing. Design professionals enhance the presentation of scholarly content and create polished products of which both publisher and author alike can be proud.

The fact is, however, that most library publishers do not hire full-time, in-house editors and designers, and so increasingly they face the prospect of hiring freelance professionals. Unfortunately, librarians often lack expertise in finding and knowing what to expect from a working relationship with freelance editorial/design professionals. Furthermore, some librarians may decide to completely forego these valuable services because of a misguided notion that they are too expensive when in reality at least some of their published pieces could greatly benefit from the value that freelance editorial/design professionals add.

This presentation will be led by two individuals who currently coordinate library publishing efforts at different institutions: a librarian with experience in scholarly journals publishing as both an in-house technical/production editor and a freelance copyeditor and a former editor-in-chief from a major university press. They will invite one or more freelance editorial/design professionals to participate in a panel and provide practical information to answer the following questions:

1. What are the reasons for hiring freelance editorial professionals?
2. When does it make sense to hire a freelancer? When should the work be kept in house?
3. Are there special considerations to bear in mind when hiring a freelancer?
4. Are there downsides?
5. How do I go about finding qualified freelance professionals?
6. How does one incorporate freelance work into existing schedules and workflows?

The presenters will allot sufficient time for attendees to pose questions as well.

April 10, 2018

Panel: Working With a Scholarly Community

Tuesday, May 22, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

Library and Societies as Publishing Partners

Suzanne Stapleton, University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries

Description: In 2012, the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries expanded support of scholarly publishing through the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal System, locally named Florida Online Journals (Florida OJ), and entered into Memorandums of Understandings with a number of external scholarly organizations. Academic society publishers in the United States serve to disseminate scholarly information to specialized research communities. “The fundamental mission of the university library for the past few centuries has been to facilitate long-term, reliable access to the cultural and scholarly record by collecting, organizing, and preserving the materials that it contains” (Courant & Jones, 2015), but new technologies offer libraries today a chance to expand beyond content organization and provide greater support of the publishing lifecycle. This type of support is appealing to small society publishers as they struggle to survive as the scholarly publishing system transforms. Societies working with the library to publish serials include the Association for Tropical Lepidoptera, American Institute for Chemical Engineers and the Florida State Horticultural Society. Although each society presents a unique situation with particular reasons for adopting Florida OJ, all are interested in increasing discoverability and accessibility of digital scholarly content. In this presentation, we will share why society publishers are eager to migrate to Florida OJ, provide details of what services the library provides and challenges faced by these partnerships.

Coalition Publi.ca : A Canadian Initiative for a Sustainable Publishing Environment in HSS

Emilie Paquin and Élise Bergeron, Érudit.org

Description: University-based open access book publishing, as a symbiotic creative collaboration between students, faculty, librarians, authors, and a publisher with shared interests yet different skills and resources, is an easily adaptable model that serves multiple purposes: (a) to provide a university-based OA publishing option for scholars who want a high-quality editorial and design experience, which places a premium on the author’s vision, and values experimentation and accessibility; (b) to present an alternative career path for PhDs interested in working in public, mission-driven scholarly communications; and (c) to provide undergraduates with an interdisciplinary, experiential, and skills-based experience.

A University Library and a Scholarly Society Walk Into a Bar… Leveraging Open-Source Technologies Together to Help Researchers Tell a More Textured Story About Their Work

Nicky Agate, Columbia University

Description: How might scholarly societies, libraries, and other nonprofit partners work together towards an expansive vision of scholarly communication outreach and dissemination that goes beyond institutional and national boundaries?
The Modern Language Association, with the aid of an NEH ODH Implementation Grant, has been collaborating with Columbia University Libraries on CORE, or the Commons Open Repository Exchange, since 2015. The repository at the heart of Humanities Commons, CORE facilitates the open-access distribution, discussion, and citation of the many products of humanities research, including pre- or postprints, conference presentations, data sets, and learning objects such as syllabi and slide decks. What makes CORE stand out, however, is its social facet—its embeddedness in the social functionality of the 12,000-member strong Humanities Commons network.
Nicky Agate will discuss the process of building and refining the repository and what both the MLA and Columbia University Libraries have learned—and continue to learn—from one another. She will propose CORE as a case study in the potential for scholarly societies, libraries, and other nonprofit entities to work together towards more useful (and more used) open-access repositories.

April 10, 2018

Panel: Non-Textual Publishing

Tuesday, May 22, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Heritage Gallery

Accessible Transformations of Early Web-based Archives

Karl Stolley and Katie Ediger, Illinois Institute of Technology

Description: We will describe our experience and efforts to rescue and accessibly redesign a digital archive that contains digitized audio files and transcripts and translations of Holocaust-survivor interviews as recorded in 1946 by Dr. David P. Boder. Our project represents a complete, accessibility-minded overhaul that addresses challenges common to digital archives and other presentations of rich-media content originally prepared for the web in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

We will describe and demonstrate how we are making a universally accessible, web-standards-compliant user interface that works across all modern devices, and also how we are writing custom scripts to automate the process of rescuing and restoring content from the original archive.

The media content in our archive was originally presented through the now-defunct Flash player. We have developed the prototype of an entirely HTML-based system for delivering the audio using the HTML5 <audio> element. Additionally, the audio is now presented alongside universally accessible transcripts and translations, which we have structured to conform to the WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) standard that the new interface presents perfectly timed to the audio recordings.

Additionally, we are creating a series of custom scripts to help rescue the transcripts and translations. Those scripts will help to automate the correction of mismatched character sets that incorrectly encode diacritics and other special glyphs from Spanish, German, Russian, and other languages. The scripts will also improve the existing presentation of the transcripts in HTML and JSON, and extend them to WebVTT.

New Directions in Digital Library Publishing: Increasing Access to Non-Textual Cultural Dance Narratives

Sara Benson, Copyright Librarian and Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Library; Harriett Green, University of Illinois Library

Description: This panel presentation will describe a developing project centered around the anthropological study of the Bele dance movement in Martinique to explore how best to develop a library based publication of a non-textual cultural heritage. The presenters will explore issues ranging from how to protect the cultural heritage of the dance participants as well as innovative methods to utilize digital media to tell the story of a dance rooted in the African diaspora. This project is an ongoing one, and audience members will be encouraged to provide comments to the panelists after the presentation with additional ideas about working with non-textual cultural heritage digital publications.

April 10, 2018

Panel: New Directions

Tuesday, May 22, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Your Sh*it Isn’t Really Open: A challenge to all of us in ScholCommLand

Amy Buckland, University of Guelph

Description: This is a challenge to all of you: your sh*t isn’t open and that’s no longer acceptable. I know it’s been hard to get some legit funding to host a repository with PDFs. I know it’s been hard to get some legit funding to offer open services as though they are real services (no one questions ILL as a service, amirite?) But we have to do better around accessibility when it comes to open. Let’s talk small and big things we could be doing, and accept the challenge to talk about this again in 2019 and have improved our practices.

Exploring Open Data Policies for Library Publishing

Monica Westin, California Digital Library

Description: Independent library publishers have lagged behind other nonprofit and commercial publishers in implementing data sharing policies and platforms for our journals. At the California Digital Library, we have been exploring various ways to support true data sharing for our journal publishing program, both on our current journal manuscript workflow platform (a customized version of OJS) and as a requirement for future systems. In addition to improving our technical services, we have also focused on educating our journal editors on best practices around data sharing. This spring, in collaboration with the data curation group (UC3) at the CDL, we presented a webinar for our journal editors on open data policies and practices and gauged their interest in setting up a data sharing component of their submission and publishing workflows. I will provide an overview of our talking points from the webinar, including definitions and types of data across disciplines, what exactly open data means and why it is crucial in a climate of research budget cuts, and the key characteristics of several major publisher policies, from PLOS to university presses. I will also share what we learned from our journal editors regarding their knowledge about open data and their interest in working with it; and, based on this information, the data publishing options we have decided to pursue for our journal program.

Understanding the New Publishing Goals of Scholars: Toward a Sustainable Model for Broadly Accessible Library Publishing

Janet Swatscheno, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Description: This presentation introduces the Publishing Without Walls (PWW) project, which is developing a scalable, shareable model for library-based digital publishing. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Illinois Library is leading the initiative in partnership with the School of Information Sciences, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the African American Studies Department. This project aims to broaden access to scholarship while also increasing the accessibility of publishing itself to scholars from diverse institutions. We are developing a sustainable model for open access publishing that can be adopted academic libraries with varying resources. To this end, our model is guided by research on the publishing requirements of scholars, with a focus on scholars at minority-serving and under-resourced institutions, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

To guide the development of our publishing service model, we are conducting a multimodal study of the goals that scholars aim to meet through digital, open access, multimedia publishing. Through a national survey and a series of more than 20 interviews with humanities scholars, we are identifying authors’ various motivations for digital publishing, such as the desire to reach more diverse audiences; the desire to integrate heterogeneous, interactive evidence into publications; and the desire to publish “living” documents that are subject to ongoing, collaborative authorship and change. These motivations have significant implications for the design and development of publication systems and services. This study has also identified major challenges that authors perceive in publishing processes, along with a set of most-desirable services they seek from library-based publishers. In this talk we will describe the outcomes to date of this study, including the implications for library publishing and improving access to scholarship. This proposal sits at the juncture of the “New directions” and “Accessibility” conference themes.

April 9, 2018

Full Session: University Libraries and University Presses: Working towards true collaboration

Tuesday, May 22, 10-11:00am
Room: Memorial Hall 

Presenters: Thomas Hickerson, Libraries & Cultural Resources, University of Calgary; Brian Scrivener, University of Calgary Press; Guylaine Beaudry, Concordia University Library; Geoffrey Little, Concordia University Press

Description: As more university libraries and university presses become organizationally aligned, library and press directors are looking for ways to move beyond simple administrative alignment to a shared mission and synergistic integration. Libraries and presses are both committed to supporting the full cycle of research and scholarly exchange as part of the academic mission of their universities. Libraries, however, bring a unique and longstanding commitment to open access that doesn’t typically line up with the business model of most presses. This session looks at how two research universities—University of Calgary and Concordia University—have created innovative library-press relationships that, in different ways, bring together shared resources and expertise in pursuit of open access publishing. At Calgary, an existing press was reconceived to align more closely with the mission and operations of the library. Vice Provost and University Librarian Tom Hickerson will describe how an integrated vision for support of open access, peer-reviewed publishing informed the restructuring of the Press. University of Calgary Press Director Brian Scrivener will speak to the mechanics of putting vision into action on a daily basis, blending the strategic goals and institutional resources of a university library with the research goals and publishing practices of an open access university press. At Concordia University, a library-based press was developed from the ground up and launched in 2016. Concordia University Press is a non-profit publisher of open access, peer-reviewed books that cross disciplinary boundaries and propel scholarly inquiry into new areas. Vice-Provost, Digital Strategy & University Librarian Guylaine Beaudry and Geoffrey Little, Scholarly Communications Librarian and Press Editor-in-Chief, will speak of the lengthy, deliberate process of establishing a new press: from visioning and needs case, crafting an economic model, leveraging donor, campus, and community support, to implementation.

April 6, 2018

Full Session: Digital Preservation for Library Publishers: Raising Awareness

Tuesday, May 22, 10-11:00am
Room: Heritage Gallery

Presenters: Heather Staines, Hypothesis; Wendy Robertson, University of Iowa; Jeremy Morse, University of Michigan Publishing

Description: In the summer of 2016, NASIG formed the Digital Preservation Task Force to expand awareness and education about digital preservation needs and challenges amongst its members and beyond. Library Publishers form a unique constituency in the scholarly communications ecosystem, as they are both libraries who need reliable preservation for their patrons and publishers who must ensure preservation of their content. How broadly are library publishers aware about digital preservation initiatives currently underway, including CLOCKSS, Portico, The Keepers, and national library initiatives? How is digital preservation evolving and changing in response to things like new formats and software? Please join us for a discussion on how these stakeholder perspectives overlap for library publishers. Come prepared with your questions and perspectives.

April 6, 2018

Panel: Evaluation and Change

Tuesday, May 22, 10-11:00am
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

Charting the New Frontier in Library Publishing: Using Janeway as an Open-Source Library Publishing Platform

David Scherer, Rikk Mulligan, and Dan Evans, Carnegie Mellon University

Description: As the current institutional repository and publishing landscapes evolve, libraries must assess, adopt, and adapt the tools and platforms available to provide their library publishing services. Additionally, as options in both the vendor-hosted and open-source solution markets evolve and become available, library publishers should strike a balance between adopting and/or adapting solutions that will best meet the needs of their service models and communities efficiently and cost effectively. Beginning in 2017, Carnegie Mellon University began to transition its institutional repository service from Digital Commons to Figshare. Although the new repository service would expand features by also offering a data repository, this would leave Carnegie Mellon without a suitable publishing platform. While satisfied to use a hosted solution for its repository, the University Libraries wanted to diversify its dependence on vendor-hosted platforms by implementing an open-sourced publishing solution to be organizationally maintained by its new center for Digital Sciences, Humanities, Arts: Research and Publishing, dSHARP.

Recently developed by the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, the Janeway publishing platform is an open-sourced journal management system. This session will discuss how the need to evaluate hosted and open-sourced solutions for institutional repositories and publishing platforms, how the decision was made to proceed with an open-sourced platform, why Janeway was chosen, and how Carnegie Mellon is using it as their choice for library publishing. Attendees can also expect to hear why the publishing platform will be organizationally owned by dSHARP, how dSHARP is implementing Janeway, and how dSHARP has started to develop its library publishing service model with the development of several early projects, including the Carnegie Mellon Encyclopedia of Science History (CMESH).

#pubfrontiers

Reaching Public Library Audiences with the DPLA Exchange

Michelle Bickert, DPLA

Description: The growth of e-reading technology and the push for open content allows publishers to reach audiences previously unreachable due to physical or financial barriers. Yet this advancement in accessing information is complicated by non-library vendors, proprietary platforms, and confusing licenses, which can create more barriers. DPLA is working with academic libraries and university presses on making open content available alongside traditionally licensed e-content for public library acquisition. Open Bookshelf, part of the DPLA Exchange, offers ebooks at no cost, with no holds or checkouts, to participating libraries, allowing them to share openly published content with their patrons without restriction. Readers will find the best fiction and nonfiction from a variety of content creators and distributors, all in one user experience.

Evolution Through Collaboration: Exploring Participatory Change in a Library Publishing Program

Matt Ruen and Jacklyn Rander, Grand Valley State University Libraries

Description: At Grand Valley State University, staff from the library publishing program, special collections and archives, and technology services are collaborating to rethink and merge our support for functionally-similar activities. Our evolution is rooted in participatory management methods–organizational change emerging from the bottom up, rather than change directed from the top down.

In this short presentation, we explore the framework and processes which enabled our collaborative journey towards a new organizational structure. We will share an overview of participatory change management approaches and dive deeper into one model, Appreciative Inquiry, from a library publishing perspective. We will also discuss lessons learned and themes which emerged from our experiences implementing a participatory approach to organizational change.