Past Forum Info

March 27, 2019

Full Session: One Platform, Many Possibilities: Lessons Learned from the Manifold Pilot

Friday, May 10, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Canfor Policy Room (1600)

Presenters: Annie Johnson, Temple University Libraries and Press; Meredith Carruthers, Concordia University Press; Liz Scarpelli, University of Cincinnati Press; Liz Bedford, Verletta Kern, and Elliott Stevens, University of Washington Libraries; Beth Fuget, University of Washington Press (moderator)

Description: New platforms offer opportunities for publishers to experiment with different forms of scholarly output and serve emerging campus needs. This is true not only because of the capacities offered by the platform itself, but also because the process of adopting a new technology can serve as a catalyst for new collaborations and procedures. In this session, organized by the Association of University Press’s Library Relations Committee, library and press staff from some of the institutions involved in the Manifold pilot program will discuss our experiences using the platform. We’ll talk about the kinds of projects we’re developing, including open books, open educational resources, and classroom projects. We’ll also touch on such points as the cross-campus discussions that have developed in the process of adopting the platform, how we’ve identified needs it might serve, what kinds of procedures and documentation we’re putting in place to use it, our goals for the pilot, and how we’re thinking about assessment.

Manifold is a new publishing platform developed by the University of Minnesota Press, the CUNY CG Digital Scholarship Lab, and Cast Iron Coding. The focus of the session will be not so much on this particular platform, however, as on what the process of adopting a new platform makes possible.

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March 27, 2019

Full Session: Continuing to Build on What We’ve Learned in OER Publishing: Working Together in the Open Textbook Network Publishing Cooperative

Friday, May 10, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Barrick Gold Lecture Room (1520)

Presenters: Karen Bjork, Portland State; Karen Lauritsen, Open Textbook Network; Kathy Labadorf, University of Connecticut; Amanda Larson, Penn State University ; Emily Frank, Affordable Learning LOUISiana; Maira Bundza, Western Michigan University; Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech; Anna Craft, UNC Greensboro; Carla Myers, Miami University

Description: Following up on last year’s LPF presentation about the inaugural cohort of the Open Textbook Network Publishing Cooperative, this panel will continue the conversation. We’ll share what we’ve learned and applied in the last year of working together as a community to establish publishing infrastructure, processes and support to expand open textbook publishing in higher education. In short, we’ll talk about the reality of what it takes to start and sustain an open textbook publishing initiative.

The Co-op’s vision is to support campuses in owning educational content production and distribution, and members are supported throughout the entire publishing process. Now in its second year, the Co-op has grown to include additional members, including consortia. Together we’ll discuss the strength of the community model to grow publishing expertise, and increase the availability of open textbooks across a diverse network of institutions.

In this presentation, a panel of new and returning Co-op members will discuss successes and challenges of running an open textbook publishing program within their institutional and consortial contexts, and how they’ve designed their publishing programs within the Co-op environment. We’ll explore each member’s expectations around the Co-op experience, including how local program programs and services may have been imagined at the outset, and how those expectations have evolved with experience and time. We’ll hear from small programs with one person at the helm, as well as from programs that include teams of people with diverse library and publishing backgrounds. We’ll also learn how institutions work directly with Scribe, our partners in the Co-op. In addition, we’ll talk about how member feedback continues to shape and improve the on-boarding experience and related publishing curriculum, which is now openly available.

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March 27, 2019

Full Session: ScholarLed: Solidarity, Self-Determination, and the Limits of Reform

Friday, May 10, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)

Presenters: Dave S. Ghamandi, University of Virginia; Sherri Barnes, University of California Santa Barbara Library; Eileen Joy, punctum books

Description: In this dynamic conversation, panelists will use the principles of solidarity and self-determination to explore the work of the newly formed ScholarLed, a consortium of open access monograph publishers, and to critically examine other open access publishing and scholarly communication efforts.

Despite early resistance to open access, the academic publishing oligopoly has used its position to develop a neoliberal model of OA. As the amount of market-based, commodified open access knowledge increases each year, the struggle for a more democratic form of open access becomes more difficult. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the scholarly community to embody radically different organizing principles including cooperation, solidarity, mutual aid, and self-determination.

This panel will explore how ScholarLed is putting these principles into practice by discussing their goals, tactics, and project proposals. Panelists will also discuss similarities with this organization’s praxis and the strategies employed during the Black Power and Black Arts movements. The Black radical tradition has a deep, but mostly ignored, history of responding to racial and social oppression and economic exploitation with self-respect, self-organization, self-management, and self-determination.

The conversation will include a critical look at the values, rhetoric, and tactics involved in the effort to “secure community-controlled infrastructure.” How far can a reform approach rooted in a market model and continued negotiation with the publishing oligopoly take us? How do “community-controlled” and “community-owned” reflect two very different sets of tactics? Panelists will describe the ways commercial entities continue to co-opt the language of the public good to undermine movements, the contradiction of ethical consumption under capitalism, and the need to own the means of production.

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March 27, 2019

Panel: Static Site Generators: Powerful Publishing with Less Infrastructure

Friday, May 10, 9:45-10:45am
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)

Publishing with Static Site Generators

Chris Diaz, Northwestern University

Description: Libraries can use static site generators to publish scholarly journals, conference proceedings, monographs, and open educational resources. Northwestern University Libraries has been using Jekyll, Hugo, and Bookdown for its digital publishing services since 2018. These static site generators are free, open source, and especially useful for libraries with very limited information technology, staffing, and financial resources available for digital publishing operations. This presentation will discuss the advantages static site generators provide library publishers, cover workflows for partnering with students, faculty, and campus units on publications, and reflect on experiences using these technologies for recent open access publications.

Using the Jekyll Static Site Generator for Journal Production

Robert Browder, Virginia Tech

Description: In this session I will share and discuss our experience with using the Jekyll static site generator for the production of journal content in HTML format. This is a GIT based “ultra light” production process that is readily accessible to the tech savvy. The info I will share about the process is intended to make the process more accessible to the less tech savvy. I’ll talk about what Jekyll is and how creating static content frees organizations from maintaining complex and expensive IT infrastructure. I’ll talk about Mark Down, the language used to author items to be rendered by Jekyll. I may touch on techniques for porting older HTML content to Mark Down format.

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March 27, 2019

Panel: Metadata! Metadata! Metadata!

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

Collaboration Through Richer Metadata

Shayn Smulyan, Crossref

Description: Metadata is crucial to discovery, access, citation, linking, and metrics. Crossref, as a member organization, represents the collaborative efforts of over 10,000 publishers to build and maintain an infrastructure which collects and distributes that metadata to the broader scholarly community.

This presentation will illustrate ways that library publishers can participate in the Crossref community and benefit from the corpus of enriched metadata they collectively create. I’ll highlight recent improvements to metadata deposition and tracking tools; outline metadata practices that promote connections between published content items and other scholarly objects; and preview some upcoming partnerships between Crossref and allied organizations like ROR, Metadata 2020, ORCID, and Datacite. These collaborative efforts are working to build an interconnected network of scholarly metadata, which makes published content easier to find, cite, link, and assess.

Lemons into Lemon-aid: An Update on Turning PKP’s Metadata Problems into Actionable Challenges

Mike Nason, University of New Brunswick Libraries and PKP; James MacGregor, PKP

Description: PKP’s applications have been around for 20 years, and can be found distributed all over the web. This distributed nature, combined with the one-size-fits-most approach of designing the software, has resulted in a fascinating ecosystem of metadata abuse enablement, where publishers seek to fit their metadata into OJS and OMP in such a way that makes sense from a display perspective, but often is incorrect from a metadata perspective. This metadata abuse significantly impacts the journal authors and publishers; has implications for citation accuracy; and impacts the work of any researcher who use this data corpus as a means to evaluate global scholarly publishing trends.

As part of Coalition Publi.ca (a national scholarly publishing research and infrastructure project that requires high quality metadata to support its aggregation, preservation and data corpus research components), as a sponsoring organization for publishers in Crossref (which harvests metadata and provides additional resources such as reference linking, plagiarism checking, and Crossref Event Data), as a provider of a long-term preservation system (PKP’s LOCKSS-based Preservation Network), and as a direct participant in research on scholarly publishing (which demands the availability of high quality metadata to ensure accuracy of any data evaluation) PKP has a duty to ensure accurate metadata across this distributed ecosystem, regardless of whether we personally host the content.

This presentation provides an update on where we are with this problem. We will discuss how we have worked with Coalition Publi.ca systems staff and metadata experts, PKP researchers, Crossref support staff, an iSchool practicum student from the University of Toronto, and our own support staff to establish the nature and extent of the metadata accuracy problem. We will also discuss the tools we are developing, and the changes we are proposing to the PKP development team, that will a) help to identify and correct legacy metadata issues for longstanding publishers using PKP tools, and b) ensure better metadata hygiene going forward.

Wikidata: Open Linked Data for Library Publishing

Jere Odell, IUPUI University Library; Ted Polley, IUPUI University Library; Mairelys Lemus-Rojas, IUPUI University Library

Description: Wikidata, a collaboratively edited, open, linked data knowledge base hosted by the Wikimedia foundation, includes a growing collection of open citation data. As of November 2018, more than 20 million publications and 160 million citations have been contributed to Wikidata (http://wikicite.org/statistics.html). Many of these data items have been added by bots that contribute data from open bibliographic databases, including PubMed Central, and from data made available by Crossref and the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). Although this approach may be the most efficient way to build a large corpus of open citation data, many scholarly journals will be missed. Journals that cannot meet the requirements of a Crossref contract (for financial or technical reasons) will be invisible in growing open citation network. The journals that are likely to be missed are also those that have not been well-served by for-profit publishers and large university presses–including print journals that flipped to open access and journals in fields that are unfamiliar with or unconvinced of the value of a Crossref DOI (e.g., law reviews and some arts and humanities journals). In this presentation we demonstrate how a library publisher can contribute bibliographic data to Wikidata. By using both manual and batch-processing methods, we contributed complete runs for selected journals hosted on our library’s instance of Open Journal Systems. We share our methods for contributing data for journals that mint DOIs and for journals that do not. We also provide a demonstration of the short-term benefits of building this collection in Wikidata and reflect on the challenges of including Wikidata in a library-publishing program.

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March 27, 2019

Panel: Case Studies in OER Publishing

Friday, May 10, 9:45-10:45am
Room: Canfor Policy Room (1600)

The Faculty Experience – Creating an Open Textbook on Equity and Design: Outcomes and Challenges

Kristine Miller, Ph.D., University of Minnesota; Kristi Jensen, University of Minnesota LIbraries

Description: Creating a textbook is a time consuming endeavor requiring support from numerous experts throughout the process both in the traditional publishing environment and in the developing open textbook publishing sphere. Choosing to publish an open textbook over a traditional publisher may be motivated by several factors: the ability to more quickly bring a publication to press and update its content, the allowance of complete control over content as opposed to meeting the need to modify content to make a book more marketable, the desire to distribute content as widely as possible including to those without access to academic resources or systems. Providing “all” students with the content on the first day of class can also be a strong motivation for faculty concerned with equitable access to information for the students in their classes.

Once the open textbook model has been selected, new issues and opportunities arise. My experience creating an open textbook led to several questions for the larger community. This presentation will engage the audience through interactive activities on the following questions:

How do we determine when an open textbook is “good enough”? When is the book acceptable from a production perspective? From a scholarly perspective?

How do we build in a robust but efficient peer review process?

Are there other ways beyond peer review that can demonstrate the quality and credibility of a new text to others who are skeptical of an alternative publishing process?

How do we make these new publications into a “platform” for scholarly conversations but not lose editorial control?

How do we track a work’s use beyond pageviews? How do we know other faculty or community members are using it?

How do we find funding to provide for frequent updates (e.g., every 6 months)?

Library Publishing and Open Educational Resources: Challenges and Opportunities for Teachers

Celia Regina de Oliveira Rosa, Universidade de São Paulo (USP); Teresa Cardoso, Universidade Aberta de Portugal (UAB-PT)

Description: The participation of libraries in the processes of publication of monographs in the humanities and the social sciences is a growing phenomenon of dissemination and access to academic-scientific communication triggered in universities, establishing library publishing by practice and expanding it in the search for innovative solutions of cost-effective for authors in those institutions. The performance of editorial activities often adds to the expertise of professional editors from the institution press itself, or from librarians who need to build up such characteristics. The model supported by OA and complemented by CC licenses presents challenges to the institutions besides the development and sustainability of book-oriented library publishing, namely composition, high cost of editorial production and the distinctive distribution chain, which also makes it possible to trade content in another format. This paper intends to present a set of features needed to start this service in institutions that have not yet adopted it, like fostering an approach between teachers and librarians, for example through meetings or training. Thus, it is relevant to reflect on the opportunities and challenges that those different educational actors face, namely teachers. In this context, OER emerge as key elements, aligned not only with the principles of OA but also those of Open Science. OER have been perceived as “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work.” (UNESCO, 2012:1) Therefore, OER can contribute to address the topics of quality, innovation, access, cost and dissemination, among others, posed by library publishing.

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March 27, 2019

Panel: Open Source Publishing Tools

Friday, May 10, 9:45-10:45am
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)

Determining Our Own Knowledge Futures: How Independent and Open Publishing Tools Can Lead Us Forward

Travis Rich, Knowledge Futures Group

Description: In order for mission driven publishers to flourish into the future, it is imperative that we establish our own innovation pathways. The development of open source alternatives to the stranglehold that a few commercial entities now have on not the markets for information, reputation systems, publishing technologies, and digital innovation will benefit the research community and the reading public alike. In this presentation, Travis Rich will discuss the new MIT Knowledge Futures Group (KFG), a joint initiative of the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, that seeks to transform research publishing from a closed, sequential process, into an open, community-driven one. Rich’s presentation will detail the KFG’s vision for community publishing, focusing on two KFG projects: PubPub and the Underlay.

This open source approach not only reduces the precarious dependency that most non-profit academic publishers have on costly outsourced technologies and a limited network of commercial vendors, but also provides a foundation for greater insourced experimentation and innovation. Rich will discuss some of the KFG’s own experiments, roadmap, and potential areas for collaboration with attendees.

Key themes include: innovation, open access, collaboration, new technology, community

Open-Source Publishing Software: Surveying the Landscape

John W. Maxwell, Simon Fraser University

Description: Researchers at Simon Fraser U have been conducting a landscape analysis of available open-source software for publishing; as our project comes to a conclusion, LPF provides an excellent venue to share our initial analysis with the community. We’ve examined close to one hundred OSS projects, and are especially interested in how open infrastructure projects manage collaboration and sustainability.

Libero Publisher: eLife’s New Initiative to Build a Collaborative, Modern and Modular Open-Source Publication Platform for the Research Community

Maël Plaine, eLife

Description: Libero Publisher is eLife’s modern and modular open-source platform to help content providers do more with everything they publish. The platform has evolved since development began in 2015 from an enabler of innovation for eLife’s own journal to a reusable, cutting-edge web-publishing platform, and to a community-driven platform for the publication and presentation of scholarly content.

The Libero Publisher community – which consists of anyone interested in using, discussing, influencing or contributing to Libero Publisher – is currently composed of the following organisations in addition to eLife: the Coko Foundation (a non-profit organisation building open-source solutions for publishers), Hindawi (a multi-journal open-access publisher) and Digirati (a service and software company). We have adopted a governance strategy for Libero Publisher that will allow it to cater to the needs of a wide variety of organisations while we continue to build a robust core product and maintain the vision of an open infrastructure that fosters open access to scholarly resources. We believe university libraries could become an active part of Libero Publisher’s early-adopter community.

Conscious of the fact that some organisations may not have the IT resources to implement the platform, eLife is also working to build a healthy and diverse ecosystem of service providers for Libero Publisher’s users. We will work with them to ensure their services are reasonably priced and that they are knowledgeable of data migrations, implementations, integrations with other systems and so on.

During this short presentation, we would like to demo the first iteration of our Libero platform. We will also present a use case of a simple journal which recently adopted Libero. Future iterations of the software will support more complex journals and we will take this opportunity to showcase the platform’s high-level roadmap. Finally, we will explain how to take part in this journey or simply stay updated on Libero’s progress.

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March 27, 2019

Full Session: Solving Pesky Project Problems: Creative Ways to Manage the Work

Thursday, May 9, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)

Presenters: Laureen Boutang, University of Minnesota; Sonya Betz, University of Alberta; Kate McCready, University of Minnesota

Description: Library publishing program work is filled with projects needing to be managed! So, how can library publishing be approached with a project management lens? From appropriately scoping project development to assigning team member roles and responsibilities, library publishing professionals require strategies and tools to manage our publishing services and projects. Effective project management techniques along with lightweight project management support tools can help to develop standardized processes, breakdown work into more defined tasks, assign roles and responsibilities, and assist us in establishing clear communication channels with authors and editorial teams.

Beginning with an introduction to project management practices for library publishing work, the speakers will engage attendees in an interactive discussion of the common challenges, hurdles, and creative solutions for managing their programs and projects. Basic project management techniques and structures that support successful library publishing projects will be introduced, including scope documents, RASCI charts, stakeholder analyses, project plans, and communication plans. Project management frameworks to manage tasks and track projects will be explored.

Specific tools that have been used successfully to manage elements of library publishing work will then be discussed. What tools best facilitate communication amongst the team about development issues, back-file migration work and overall project workflow? What container provides access to the structured project documentation? What are the critical tools for managing different kinds of projects? How are tools like Hypothesis, AirTable, and Trello useful for managing a publication through its development cycle? This session will provide space for discussion of project management tools and techniques used by members of the community to support their work.

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March 27, 2019

Panel: Publishing Digital Scholarship Projects

Thursday, May 9, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Barrick Gold Lecture Room (1520)

Building Frameworks for Assessing Digital Research Projects and Early Digital Publishing Services at UH Libraries

Taylor Davis-Van Atta, University of Houston Libraries

Description: In February 2018, University of Houston (UH) Libraries launched the Digital Research Commons (DRC), a space dedicated to facilitating library-sponsored digital research projects and providing instructional programming around open scholarly practices. By November 2018, the DRC had interacted with 17 departments, 5 colleges, 29 faculty members, and dozens of graduate students at various levels of engagement, from project design consultations to an array of data-oriented workshops to partnerships on 10 digital research projects. In support of these activities, DRC staff has piloted new workflows with several units across the Libraries, including collaborations that build capacity to host and present bespoke research projects and outputs. From the start, the matter of assessing this broad range of activities has been a priority for DRC staff, especially since few standards exist for the evaluation of individual born-digital projects or of digital research operations as a whole. Based on content analysis of 24 DRC sponsored project applications, this presentation details the methods used by UH librarians to establish frameworks for assessing sponsored research projects and operations, and how this assessment process has informed our early publishing efforts.

Bridging the Gap: Digital Humanities to Digital Monographs

Sarah McKee, Emory University

Description: Emory University, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is experimenting with processes to guide faculty in the development and publication of open access/digital monographs. Multiple units at Emory, in the library and beyond, are collaborating to help faculty authors bridge the gap between their digital humanities projects and the formal, peer-reviewed publications required for tenure and promotion. The session will include an overview of the process to date and showcase a few monographs-in-progress, ranging in form from enhanced e-books to born-digital interactive works.

Navigating Support for Digital Projects: A Suggested Workflow for Non-Traditional Publications

Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech

Description: Digital projects incorporate various tools and technologies to analyze and present research in new ways. These projects range from online exhibits to digital archives. There are many steps in the development process and faculty all differ in their support needs. In this presentation, I will discuss a potential workflow that addresses common needs for this work and how we as publishers can fit into the support process.

Each digital project should arguably go through four different stages in its lifetime. A prototype stage that addresses the design, format, technology needs, involved personnel and more. The next phase is a sort of incubation period where most of the work is done. This phase includes any potential grant writing, technology development, documentation, and a sustainability plan. Following the creation of the project, there is a production phase where the project is live and regularly maintained and updated as needed. The final phase is the archive phase when the project is no longer live, but the pieces of the project are archived. With this workflow in mind, I will discuss different types of projects and how they may potentially fit into these phases as well as how we can best support this workflow as library publishers.

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