Past Forum Info

March 27, 2019

Closing Plenary: Big Challenges in Library Publishing

Friday, May 10, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)

Presenters: Melanie Schlosser, Library Publishing Coalition; Nicky Agate, Columbia University; Dave Ghamandi, University of Virginia; Inba Kehoe, University of Victoria

Description: This plenary session will close the Forum with an exploration of the big challenges facing library publishers from a variety of perspectives. It will be structured as a panel discussion, with LPC Community Facilitator Melanie Schlosser moderating. The panelists will share and discuss—based on their own experience and what they have heard at the Forum—what they feel are the most pressing issues for library publishers. This session will be both a culmination of the Forum and a call to action for the coming year.

March 27, 2019

Full Session: Aligning the Definition of Published Scholarly Products with Today’s Practices

Friday, May 10, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)

Presenters: Brandon Butler, Director of Information Policy, University of Virginia Library; Chip German, Senior Director for Scholarly Communication, University of Virginia Library; Craig Van Dyck, Executive Director, CLOCKSS Archive

Description: Published products are key factors in the professional lives of faculty and core elements of scholarly communication. That said, how we should define a published scholarly product in our rapidly changing digital-information environment? Experiments of just a few years ago have now become standard means of presenting new knowledge, while increased emphasis on reproducibility in scientific research means that documented methodological steps in the research process are as important as the results themselves. Pre-prints are increasingly important factors in the rapid dissemination of discoveries.

Examples are everywhere. The interactivity that was novel in the Valley of the Shadow project at the University of Virginia in the 1990s surprises no one in more recent scholarly works such as Enchanting the Desert from Stanford University Press and A Mid-Republican House from Gabii and Animal Acts from the University of Michigan Press. Post-publication comments can add significant value in scholarly discourse, a point not lost on Rockefeller University Press and eLife, each of which formally enables them for journal articles. Code Ocean publishes software code in functional capsules, as data sets are increasingly considered just as important as the article. Jupyter Notebook has rapidly become a common tool for documentation of research processes. Are results that support the null hypothesis disseminated as fully as they should be? Are all of these published scholarly products? What characteristics should be considered in categorizing them as such? Who owns them? How is each uniquely identified? How do P&T committees value these faculty products? What responsibilities for discoverability and long-term access should their publishers assume? Should they be preserved with the same rigor we use in preserving other components of the digital scholarly record? How can recognizing the value of these kinds of products help overcome structural shortcomings in traditional scholarly publishing?

In the first half of our presentation, we’ll examine these questions from our different perspectives, and in the second half we’ll work with attendees to suggest a framework of analysis that helps us continuously update our definition of published scholarly products to reflect current academic practice.

March 27, 2019

Full Session: Kick-Start Your Digital Preservation Strategy

Friday, May 10, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Canfor Policy Room (1600)

Presenters: Emma Molls, University of Minnesota; Emma DiPasquale, University of Michigan

Description: Library publishers continue to identify digital preservation as being a high priority, however, according to the 2019 Library Publishing Directory, a large number of libraries are still in the early planning stages of implementing a preservation strategy for publishing programs. Not only are more libraries venturing into publishing, but the type of content published by libraries is changing. Enhanced ebooks are moving from a sandbox into a production environment, presenting challenges in retaining rich content in new technologies, while journals are incorporating more content types beyond PDF and HTML. Preservation is a long-standing library value that promotes future access and collection development, but for library publishers, digital preservation can also have major implications when it comes to indexing, client expectations, and platform migration.

This session will help attendees kick-start their digital preservation strategy and provide attendees with a custom digital preservation policy. The session will provide a brief overview of preservation for digital publications and present examples of existing digital preservation strategies. The presenters will guide attendees through a series of self-assessment exercises in order to give each attendee time for reflection on their own publishing program. Finally, attendees will map out their identified digital preservation goals with actionable next steps. Attendees will leave this session with a draft digital preservation statement ready for program adoption, and with concrete steps on implementing a digital preservation strategy.

March 27, 2019

Panel: Innovation in Meeting Needs

Friday, May 10, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Barrick Gold Lecture Room (1520)

Supporting Journals to Assess and Improve Their Practices When Using a Library Hosted Editorial Initiative

Pierre Lasou, Université Laval

Description: Université Laval has more that 30 peer review scientific journals on campus. In 2017, a survey confirm that most journals on campus shared the same practices, workflows and challenges regarding peer review management. If all are published online, few works with an automated workflow management system. Most Journals are manage with part time resources at the scientific, strategic and operational levels. With scarce human resources, they must also face increasing requirements with regard to Copyright, dissemination, ethics, conflict of interest, and innovations. In order to support these journals, Université Laval library has launched a hosted editorial initiative in 2018 to manage peer review and production workflows and streamline processes. A longstanding journal, Laval théologique et philosophique, was integrated as a pilot. The pilot project reveals a major challenge: by itself, the technology will not change the way journal staff manage their workflows. It appears that for a journal participating in a hosted editorial initiative the benefits lie as much in providing an opportunity to assess, revise and perhaps improve its practices as in using the automated journal management system itself. For library staff, offering basic training sessions on the platform itself is not enough. Journals need strong commitment on coaching on processes (how to interact through the system with reviewers and authors? How to redistribute task and roles?). All those aspects require skills from library staff that are far from traditional core competencies of librarians. This presentation will outline the measures Université Laval Library implemented to assist journals in redesigning their practices when participating to a hosted editorial initiative.

Bridging the Gaps: Finding Creative Solutions to Unmet Needs in a Growing Library Publishing Program

Julia Lovett, Associate Professor, Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of Rhode Island; Andrée Rathemacher, Professor, Head of Acquisitions, University of Rhode Island

Description: With six peer-reviewed open access journals under our belt, our library publishing program at the University of Rhode Island is modest but growing. As the library has expanded and streamlined library publishing services in the past few years, we have conducted a series of interviews with editors to identify successes, challenges, and unmet needs that editors have encountered in the publishing process. The program relies on a combination of in-house and outsourced library services (including our Bepress platform), editorial board contributions, and occasionally additional funding by the University. URI journal editors have found creative solutions to unmet needs, such as hiring student workers, obtaining small internal grants, and hiring freelance designers online. Our findings will be of interest especially to libraries with nascent publishing programs and limited resources to devote to publishing activities.

Supporting Monograph Creation: Creative and Scholarly Publishing at the University of Victoria Libraries

Inba Kehoe, Copyright Officer, Scholarly Communication & Research Repository Librarian, University of Victoria Libraries; Christine Walde, Grants & Awards Librarian, University of Victoria Libraries

Description: The University of Victoria Libraries offers 2 publishing streams—one devoted to producing limited editions of monographs showcasing the Libraries Archives and Special Collections and the other has a dedicated mandate towards publishing open access scholarly monographs and textbooks funded through research grants. Both streams have developed strategic partnerships with campus stakeholders and disseminate free PDF, EPUB, and print-on-demand versions. In tandem with these services the Libraries launched its Grants Menu in 2017 itemizing in-kind library services and contributions to assist researchers with grant applications—thereby, directly positioning the library within the research life cycle and enabling open access initiatives.

Participants will learn about the practical considerations for supporting and sustaining a digital monograph publishing service.

March 27, 2019

Panel: Big Ideas for Library Publishing

Friday, May 10, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)

Copyright Reform for Open Access: An End to Workarounds

John Willinsky, Stanford University

Description: This presentation addresses the scholarly publishing initiatives of libraries by tackling the legal question of whether copyright law in the United States, Canada and elsewhere is doing enough to encourage access to research and scholarship to still be true to the original intent of copyright, captured in the Statute of Anne 1710 — An Act for the Encouragement of Learning — and the U.S. Constitution: To promote the progress of science and useful arts. I will argue that current copyright law is being used to unduly impede the circulation of research in the digital era, contrary to the new scientific norm of open access supported by government agencies, universities, and publishers, both here and internationally. I will present the case for creating a distinct intellectual property category for research, with the costs handled by the institutional users and funders of this research (much as cost are paid now, only with considerable impeding of access to this work). Current copyright law recognizes a range of intellectual property types, including literary works, film, sound recordings, video games and tapes, among others. I am proposing that copyright law be amended to create a new category of intellectual property for research that has been published through a scholarly process. This new research category would cover work that (a) has been peer-reviewed by recognized experts in the relevant field of research; and (b) the publication of which is valued and utilized, in the first instance, by the larger academic community of universities, research institutes, and the research arm of industry. When such work is published, the law should provide, on the one hand, for its immediate free public online access; and on the other hand, for publishers of such work to be fairly compensated by those utilizing (via libraries) and funding it.

Leveraging Library Publishing to Promote Diversity

Suzanne Stapleton, University of Florida

Description: In 2018, the Library Publishing Coalition released the community-authored An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, including context and resources for library publishers as we aim to raise awareness of pressing topics among the scholarly community. In particular, the framework offers a starting point for promoting diversity and inclusion that encourages librarians to help combat a publishing ecosystem that represents only a small segment of the scholarly community.

How can librarians and other campus stakeholders take concrete steps to implement the framework’s recommendations within our own programs and institutions? This presentation will describe ongoing work at the University of Florida, where the UF Florida Online Journals Service Team is developing a series of short- and long-term initiatives focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Beginning in 2018-2019, we are creating a best practices guide to share with each of the journals we publish. Discussion of these best practices will be incorporated into initial discussions for new users of Florida Online Journals, our LibGuide website and also shared at annual meetings with journal staff. This guide will draw on the LPC framework and other resources, emphasizing issues such as academic bias and the importance of a globalized community of scholars and connecting these topics with our journals’ specific plans for outreach, policy, and assessment. An annual client survey provides a good venue to prompt self-reflection and track journal editorial policies and their impact on diversity for that publication and discipline.

March 27, 2019

Full Session: Toward Best Practices for OER Quality: A Conversation about OER Quality and Emerging Best Practice Solutions

Friday, May 10, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)

Presenters: Anita Walz, Virginia Tech; Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech

Description: Quality, currency, and lack of supplementary learning materials rank highly as barriers to open educational resource (OER) adoption. This session will encourage participants to consider issues, solutions, and emerging best practices in OER production in the context of shared (but sometimes conflicting) contributions from open source and traditional publishing philosophies. Emerging best practices for assuring OER (original and adapted) quality and communicating quality measures are discussed as a way to more accurately present OER to potential adopters.

This interactive conversation draws on our past and current experiences of producing and stewarding open textbooks and other OER. Participants are invited to reflect and respond to a series of informational prompts on issues and emerging best practices in creating, supporting, and adapting OER. Informational prompts for discussion include: contributions and conflicts between traditional publishing and open source philosophies; impacts of adaptability on production, version control, public access, and OER stewardship; emerging best practices in OER production; and publication practices which improve the experience and understanding of potential OER adopters. We will share insights from our own practices and eagerly look forward to participant contributions.

March 27, 2019

Full Session: Order Out of Chaos: The Role of Standards (Existing and Emerging) in Building a Distributed Infrastructure

Friday, May 10, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Canfor Policy Room (1600)

Presenters: James MacGregor: Public Knowledge Project; Davin Baragiotta, Érudit; Fabio Batalha, Érudit; Élise Bergeron, Érudit

Description: PKP and Érudit are in the middle of a nationally funded project called Coalition Publi.ca, which involves, in part, the aggregation of scholarly content across a distributed ecosystem into one common platform for the development of a Canadian data research corpus, and also for further discovery and dissemination. This project would be impossible without our ability to rely on pre-existing and emerging standards in content metadata (JATS); data markup, packaging and transfer (JATS, DAR, web OAI-PMH); usage metrics representation and dissemination (COUNTER, SUSHI); and more.

PKP and Érudit have been working in this space together for well over ten years, and have seen the evolution of these standards first-hand. We will discuss the standards we have evaluated, and how this evaluation has provided us with our current production toolset. As part of this discussion we will focus on metadata, full-text XML, and usage metrics standards in particular. We will touch on the history of these standards, and provide some insight into the challenges that we have faced, over a ten-year timespan, in adapting to change (either our own, or external). We will then open up discussion into a more involved conversation with the attendees, and welcome the opportunity to discuss, in detail, any particular standard or component that might be of interest, in particular for other institutions who are interested in or are proceeding with similar projects.

March 27, 2019

Panel: The Editor’s Eye View

Friday, May 10, 9:45-10:45am
Room: Barrick Gold Lecture Room (1520)

Brown University’s Digital Publications Initiative: Supporting the Development and Publication of Digital Scholarly Monographs

Allison Levy, Digital Scholarship Editor, Brown University Library

Description: This paper explores the changing role of the editor in today’s (and tomorrow’s) publishing landscape: What are the challenges and considerations facing editors of digital humanities projects, from acquisitions to developmental editing to production to dissemination? How does the traditional editor-author relationship change to accommodate large-scale collaborative projects? As teams expand, how must workflows adapt to incorporate the contributions of digital humanities librarians, technologists, designers, and students? As audiences for digital scholarly projects grow, how can the editor best manage user-testing and peer review? In an attempt to answer these questions, this paper will foreground Brown University’s Digital Publications Initiative, based in the University Library and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The purpose of Brown’s initiative is to establish an infrastructure to support the development and publication of digital scholarly monographs. This initiative extends the University’s mission of supporting and promoting the scholarship of its faculty, while also playing a role in shaping the future of digital scholarship in the humanities. As part of this initiative, the Digital Scholarship Editor brings together key technological, organizational, and academic resources across the campus to generate a broader, more effective structure within the University to support the creation, cultivation, evaluation, dissemination, and preservation of new forms of faculty-driven digital scholarly projects intended for publication with a university press. Brown currently has four long-form, interactive, media-rich publication projects, in the fields of History, History of Art and Architecture, Italian Studies, and Middle East Studies. Though Brown’s digital publication projects are “monographic” in nature, the editorial lessons learned and workflows established at Brown over the last couple of years can be applied to a variety of digital projects, from journal issues to iterative works.

Being an Editor on a Library-Hosted Platform

Jessica Lange, McGill University

Description: As evidenced in the Library Publishing Directory, the size and scale of library publishing programs can vary widely. Library publishers often begin as smaller-scale operations hosting a select-set of journals. Important considerations in the context of these types of operations are envisioning how the library’s publishing services can support smaller journals, what kinds of support do these journals need, and what the typical obstacles and difficulties small journals face.

Using the case study of Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library & Information Practice & Research, this presentation will discuss how library publishers can support small journals. From the viewpoint of an editor, it will review the common obstacles, goals, frustrations, and opportunities for small journals and will provide an opportunity for library publishers to learn more about the inner workings of a journal from the frontlines.

March 27, 2019

Full Session: Library Publishing and Copyright: Common Questions and Answers

Friday, May 10, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)

Presenters: Kyle K. Courtney, Copyright Advisor, Harvard University; Will Cross, Director, Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center, North Carolina State University; Christine Fruin, Scholarly Communication and Digital Projects Manager, Atla; Kevin Hawkins, Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communication, University of North Texas Libraries; Carla Myers, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, Miami University

Description: Copyright considerations permeate almost every aspect of the library publishing process. This conference session will prepare participants to better identify and address copyright issues that library staff will encounter when they offer publishing services. The conference session will start with a discussion among the panelists and session participants on common library publishing and copyright issues according to US law, and then session participants will break out into small groups facilitated by panelists to explore the most common and pressing copyright issues their programs currently face. The conference session will conclude with an open Q&A session where conference participants will have an opportunity to ask any copyright questions they may have of a panel of copyright experts.

March 27, 2019

Full Session: Do They Teach That in Library School?: Educational Preparation for Scholarly Communication Work in Libraries

Friday, May 10, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)

Presenters: Maria Bonn, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign; Josh Bolick, University of Kansas; Will Cross, North Carolina State University

Description: What do scholarly communication librarians need to know about publishing? Do you need a JD to lead a library copyright program or to write a good publishing contract? How do we prepare research data for publication? Scholarly communication is a core academic librarian competency but there is currently no unified educational resource available for training and continuing education that represents the great diversity of experience and perspectives at place in effective support for scholarly communication.

This round table discussion asks librarians, publishers, and those who are both to weigh in on a community conversation about what scholarly communication is and what training a librarian should have to do the job. We’ll prime the discussion with findings from our IMLS-funded (LG-72-17-0132-17), study on this interdisciplinary and quickly evolving field. Then we’ll dig into these questions, with an eye to incorporating your ideas into an open educational resource (OER) for teaching library students and professionals about scholarly communication. Join the conversation and help us prepare the next wave of publishing librarians!