Past Forum Info

March 10, 2022

Full Session: Discussion of University-based Publishing Infrastructure Virtual Convening

Day/Time: Thursday, May 26,  10:15am – 11:15am

Presenters

• Ally Laird, Penn State University
• Melanie Schlosser, Community Facilitator, LPC (Educopia)

Description

Members of the Library Publishing Coalition, the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) will be hosting and planning a series of sessions both within and across communities over the first half of 2022, culminating in a small convening of representatives from the three groups on the topic of “University-based Publishing Infrastructure” in July 2022. This convening is meant to highlight the values and goals around shared and open infrastructure, advancing equity in scholarly communication, increasing efficiencies in services, and sustainability in university-based publishing. To prepare for this small convening, each community will host a community discussion and then a series of three small focus groups which will pull representatives from each group to participate in facilitated discussions. The goals of the convening are to identify the goals/values/needs to advocate on behalf of university-based publishing and to establish a shared definition of university-based publishing between the LPC, AUPresses, and ARL.

This session, hosted by the LPC Board, would pull together the community in a discussion around the outcomes of these community meetings and focus groups. Attendees will be invited to provide input on discussion questions addressing the importance of library publishing, the values that underpin library publishing, and how University Presses and library publishers are similar, among other questions. They will also be asked to provide feedback on materials pulled together from the previous community meetings and focus groups. The final list of questions and materials will be available closer to the Forum date, after these events have taken place.

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March 10, 2022

Panel: PT-1015

Day/Time: Thursday, May 26, 10:15am – 11:15am

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What it takes: Successful Open Publishing Programs

Presenters

• Amy Song, Pressbooks

Description

From my position as customer success manager of Pressbooks, I have watched a number of institutions start and grow their open publishing operations, usually from within the library. It has been a great pleasure to see these programs become more formalized, and to watch the open books and other forms of OER impact students’ lives.

For this session, I have gathered stories from folk behind some of the successful open publishing programs I’ve seen. I will begin by discussing the story of how they got involved in open publishing. Did they advocate for the creation of the program? Were they teaching at the time and needed an alternative textbook? What struck them about open publishing?

Next, I will list the challenges, successes, and surprises involved in growing open publishing programs. The goal with this portion of the session is to share practical advice derived from real life experiences.

Finally, I’ll ask the audience to share their experiences doing the labour of open publishing. This portion of the panel will be an open conversation, during which we’ll pull out key pieces of advice to turn into a blog post that can be shared throughout the open publishing community.

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Conversations with OER Creators: Advice for Accessibility

Presenters

• Elena Azadbakht, Health Sciences Librarian, University of Nevada; Reno
• Teresa Schultz, Social Sciences Librarian, University of Nevada, Reno

Description

Open educational resources (OER) aren’t truly accessible to all if they’re not made accessible for disabled users. However, making OER accessible is not easy and can come with plenty of barriers, including lack of time, money, guidance, and user-friendly tools. With barriers to accessibility already identified, less is known about what leads to successfully making an OER accessible. This presentation will share the results of a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with OER authors and support staff – including librarians – to discover factors that helped lead to known accessible open textbooks, such as having a supportive team and input from students. The presenters will discuss the common themes from these interviews and how librarians who support the publishing of OER can incorporate them into their own work. The presentation will also discuss what role the broader library and open education community can play in supporting this important work, including providing support and advocating for accessible authoring and hosting platforms.

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March 10, 2022

Workshop: Your Input Needed – An Interactive Session to Improve Usability and Findability of OJS Documentation

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 25,  2:30pm – 5:00pm

Presenters

• Mariya Maistrovskaya, Digital Publishing Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries
• Amanda Stevens, Associate Director of Publishing Services and Support, Public Knowledge Project

Description

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is the most widely used journal publishing software in the world, and popular with library publishers. It is developed by a small team at the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and supported by a large community of users and developers worldwide. PKP’s Documentation Interest Group (DIG) was started in 2017 to coordinate documentation as a whole and to develop and maintain user guides and resources about how to use PKP software and best practices in scholarly publishing. Composed of community members and staff, it is a very active group that has collaboratively created and updated almost all of the documentation that is available in the Documentation Hub.

While the Documentation Hub is widely used, it is evident that its growing content has outpaced its current organizational structure. Users frequently complain that it is difficult to locate resources. The DIG is looking to improve the structure to make it easier for our users to find the resources they need. In order to do that, it is critical for us to receive input from our users on how they would categorize our documentation and where they would look for a certain topic.

We would like to invite users of OJS and other PKP software who attend the Library Publishing Forum in 2022 to share their feedback on how to improve the Documentation Hub. In this session we will facilitate a card sorting exercise and focus group to determine user pathways to information and solicit other input on how we can improve the usability of PKP’s Documentation Hub. The same interactive exercises will be done during each hour of the workshop, so participants can choose to attend the first or second hour. Participants are asked to bring a laptop or tablet if they are able to.

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March 10, 2022

Workshop: Getting Started with Library Publishing Workflow Documentation

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 25,  2:30pm – 5:00pm

Presenters

• Katherine Skinner, Educopia Institute
• Brandon Locke, Educopia Institute

Description

Drawing on the lessons learned through more than two years of the IMLS-funded Library Publishing Workflows (LPW) project (https://educopia.org/library-publishing-workflows/), this workshop will provide participants with the tools, resources, and support they need to get started with workflow documentation. Participants will then have an opportunity to get a strong start on their documentation process.

This workshop will begin with a brief introduction to the LPW project, the methods the project team employed, example documentation, and the reflection tools developed to make the documentation useful and actionable. The majority of the workshop will consist of structured time for participants to sketch out a rough draft of their workflow, have a review session with a partner to identify gaps or unclear descriptions, and then reflect on practices through the paradigm of one or more of the recently released LPW reflection tools.

This workshop will provide participants with a strong start to their workflow documentation process, as well as the motivation, knowledge, and tools to complete their documentation in the days, weeks, and months following the Forum.

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March 10, 2022

Workshop: A Focus Group on In-Progress Revisions to the Library Publishing Curriculum

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 25,  2:30pm – 5:00pm

Presenters

• Cheryl E. Ball, moderator
• Other Curriculum Board members TBA

Description

This workshop will allow participants to provide feedback to the Library Publishing Curriculum revisions that have been undertaken by the Curriculum Board since 2020, with a particular focus on reviewing a brand new Introduction module and highlighting proposed revisions to the Policies module. Access to a draft of the new Introduction module will be made available via the LPC Listserv in advance of the conference, and opportunities to engage with the document and offer peer review, feedback, comments, and additional revision suggestions will be welcome both virtually (prior to the conference in the Google Doc) and in person. Focused discussions on areas of need in the Introduction and in the Policy modules will take place in this workshop. While it will be helpful to read the draft Intro before attending the in-person workshop, it is not a requirement.

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March 10, 2022

Full Session: Multimodal Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 25,  11:45am – 12:45pm

Presenters

• Allison Levy, Digital Scholarship Editor, Brown University
• Sarah McKee, Senior Associate Director for Publishing, Emory University

Description

In April 2021 Brown University and Emory University hosted a virtual summit focused on university-based approaches to developing enhanced or interactive digital monographs for publication by a university press. The summit convened grantees in the Digital Monograph cohort supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and included institutional support staff (e.g., digital scholarship editors, digital humanities and scholarly communications librarians) and representatives from presses who are publishing these works, as well as some of the scholar-authors who have intentionally chosen the digital environment to advance and present their arguments.

The summit attendees examined a selection of eight diverse digital monograph publications, either recently released or in development, to think through some of the most pressing questions facing stakeholders in digital scholarly publishing today: How have we adapted, transformed, or disrupted the familiar publishing process? What can we learn from the publishing models that have emerged to date? What challenges are we facing today, and what might the next few years look like? How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these digital publications within the wider scholarly communications landscape?

The proposed session will present the preliminary outcomes of the summit discussions, to be reported by a white paper in late 2022, on topics ranging from cross-institutional collaborations, professional development, community engagement and the co-production of knowledge, and diversity, equity, and inclusion to open access, funding models, peer review, metadata and discoverability, preservation, and sustainability. We’ll open the floor to discussion, inviting attendees to share their own experiences or raise new questions that we should consider addressing in the report. The LPF session would provide the first post-summit opportunity for dialogue and reflection on the current and future landscape of digital publishing as well as the growing alignment between research libraries and scholarly presses.

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March 10, 2022

Full Session: Strategic Career Management

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 25,  11:45am – 12:45pm

Presenters

• John W. Warren, Director and Associate Professor MPS in Publishing, George Washington University
• Additional speakers TBD

Description

Strategic planning principles can be applied to your personal career to create direction, clarity, and focus, ultimately leading to a more rewarding and successful career. This Interactive Session/Workshop focuses on strategies that library publishing professionals, in a wide range of career levels and job functions, can take to plan, manage, and advance their careers. We will introduce principles of strategic planning, goal setting, prioritization, and more that can be applied toward personal career development. We’ll discuss key skills that will be needed in 2030 and beyond; how these skills might differ for editorial, marketing, production, and management; the value of professional certification and advanced degrees for publishing professionals; and awareness of the need for publishing to be accessible and to include people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. The strategies, tools, and action steps we’ll explore in this interactive session will aid you in mentoring others, benefit your team and your organization, and help you to advance through the profession and achieve your goals.

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March 10, 2022

Panel: PW-1030

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 25, 10:30am – 11:30am

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Let’s talk about academic labour: Changes in the academy and independent scholarly publishing

Presenters

• Jessica Lange, McGill University
• Sarah Severson, University of Alberta

Description

Trends in academia indicate declining numbers of tenure-track faculty, the increased use of contract academic staff, as well as an increasingly neoliberal academy. Scholarly journal editors typically require stable, academic positions in order to “afford” them the space (and incentive) to contribute volunteer labour to the academic knowledge commons. If academic labour overall is more precarious, how does this impact academic scholarly publishing, in particular, the independent scholarly journals who are supported by library publishers?

Furthermore, there are troubling trends about who make up full-time versus contract academic appointments. Research out of Canada suggests tenure-track faculty are less diverse than contract appointments. If tenure-track faculty are the persons best incentivized and supported to undertake editorial work, what does that signal for improving the diversity of scholarly publishing?

Using survey and interview data on labour, compensation, and organizational structures for non-commercial, Canadian scholarly journals, the presenters will discuss their results considering these trends and the implications for library publishers. The presentation will include space for participants to discuss their library’s publishing models and how they see changes in the academy affecting independent journal production.

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Should library publishers offer plagiarism screening? A pilot project at York University Libraries

Presenters

• Tomasz Mrozewski, Digital Publishing Librarian, York University

Description

A key tenet of high-quality scholarly publishing is rigorous oversight of research integrity. In its Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, The Coalition on Publication Ethics (COPE) recommends that “[p]ublishers and editors shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism.” However, scholar-led platinum Open Access publications hosted by library publishers often cannot effectively screen for plagiarism because of limited human and financial resources.

This presentation describes an ongoing, one-year pilot project at York University Libraries to provide library published journals with access to CrossRef’s Similarity Check service. The pilot will help York University Libraries determine whether to provide broader access to plagiarism screening software as part of its York Digital Journals publishing program and will explore questions such as: what proportion of editorial decisions are influenced by the plagiarism screening? Are the similarity reports useful? Do the editors have sufficient technical and human resources to interpret the similarity reports, and what support would they need going forward? Does plagiarism screening support editor confidence? Does use of plagiarism screening impact journals’ credibility among authors, indexers, or with organizations such as COPE?

This presentation discusses the rationale for the pilot project as well as the implementation. It considers arguments for libraries to offer plagiarism screening services to their journals, as well as possible alternatives.

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March 10, 2022

Full Session: Let’s Talk! Building Library Support for Scholarly Societies Publications

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 25,  10:30am – 11:30am

Presenters

• Emma Molls, University of Minnesota
• Lauren Collister, University of Pittsburgh
• Harrison W. Inefuku, Iowa State University

Description

This roundtable session will feature 3 library publishers with different perspectives on publishing, and consulting with, scholarly society journals. The presenters will share financial, outreach, and workflow examples from their publishing programs and guide conversations on the following topics:
– how societies approach journal publishing
– money, money money! – how societies “shop” for publishers
– mission alignment between libraries and societies

The session will be open for all attendees to share their own insight, ask questions, and consider how library publishing may be a solution for more scholarly societies.

This session will also be of interest to scholarly communication librarians who consult with on-campus faculty/researchers about society journals that are not published by library publishers, as topics of open access mandates and society journal business models will be discussed. It is the presenters’ hope that this session will provide a space for sharing questions and experiences that have not been asked openly on listservs or Twitter. This session will be free of fear of embarrassment or repercussions!

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