March 19, 2021
Lightning Talks
Day/Time: Thursday, May 13, 12:00 PM to 1:15 PM
Adapting Free Tools to New Digital Publishing Uses
- Daina Dickman, MA, MLIS, AHIP; Scholarly Communication Librarian, Sacramento State University
- Mya Dosch, Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Sacramento State University
Lacking adequate staffing and resources, two faculty members in the Library and Art departments were faced with a challenge. How could a multi-faceted student project that included photos, video interviews, and written work be published to a larger audience? Collaboration, communication about priorities and bandwidth during remote instruction, and being open to challenges allowed collaboration on a new project with the possibility that it could serve as a test case for future digital publications. StoryMapJS is a free tool from Knight Lab meant to create a location-based sequential narrative for a series of events. By adapting StoryMapsJS away from the time-based narrative approach we created an online publication highlighting students’ projects. The creative application of StoryMapsJS to a new use is allowing students to create a visually-appealing interactive mural walk of downtown Sacramento, CA. As part of the project students were also taught how to create accessible documents for future inclusion in the institutional repository. While this project used a particular platform, this is presented as a case study in cross-departmental collaboration and creativity using available resources. Even though our regional public university does not have the staffing or resources for a full-fledged digital humanities or publishing program the students are still creating amazing work that deserves to be published to a wider audience. As many institutions face budget cuts, we believe creativity and scalability will be a theme that rings true for many people at a variety of institutions.
Developing a Bilingual OER: Pursuing Student Translations for an Open Physics Textbook
- Moriana M. Garcia – STEM and Scholarly Communications Librarian, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester
- Kristen Totleben – Humanities Librarian, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester
Addressing issues of equity and inclusion in library collections has become a vital necessity for academic librarians. Increasing the availability of translations is one of the possible strategies designed to make library materials more accessible to students from underrepresented groups. A few years ago, River Campus Libraries collaborated with a faculty member to publish an OER Physics textbook, later ingested in the LibreTexts platform. In this lightning talk, a STEM and a Humanities librarian will share information about their new project aimed to translate the Physics OER textbook to Spanish by collaborating with Spanish faculty and students through an open pedagogy model. The project will use LibreTexts’ Spanish platform to host the translated content. The expectation is to establish an ongoing collaboration with an advanced Spanish course(s) to translate a few sections at a time as part of their curricular work. This project, because of its specific technical language requirements, could function as a low-stakes trial for students considering a career as scientific translators. As many Spanish students in UR are science majors, this activity could establish a connection between their scientific knowledge and their humanities interests. Given that the translated text will be openly available and CC licensed, the project will give students an opportunity to learn about their rights as creators, reflect on their social responsibility as educated citizens and include the experience on their resumes.
Open Editors
- Andreas Pacher, TU Wien Bibliothek
‘Editormetrics’ analyse the role of editors of academic journals and their influence on the scientific publication system. However, such analyses often rely on laborious processes of manual data-collection. Using webscraping, the project ‘Open Editors’ tried an alternative approach to collect data on ca. 480.000 editorial positions across ca. 6.000 scholarly journals from 17 scientific publishers through automated scripts (see https://openeditors.ooir.org). This presentation offers preliminary results of descriptive statistics, and discusses possible usages of this open dataset.
Project Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS)
- Markus Putnings, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), University Library / FAU University Press
- Carsten Borchert, SciFlow GmbH
- Frederik Eichler, Co-founder, SciFlow GmbH
The Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS) project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, aims to enable small and university publishers to publish very easily and media-neutral. The open source software includes an importer for (e.g. Word) documents and an editor to edit structures and metadata. Using templates, which can either be easily created using an appropriate development kit or selected from a pool of existing ones, the design of the PDF can be automatically adapted according to the format requirements of the publisher. In addition, an EPUB and HTML e-book is created quickly and reliably. SciFlow GmbH develops the Open Source Academic Publishing Suite reusable as open source. The University Library of Erlangen-Nürnberg and the University and State Library Saxony-Anhalt are gathering the requirements of various publishers (e.g. from the working group of German university publishers) and are testing the connection to other open source software such as Open Monograph Press and DSpace. The project team would like to briefly introduce the OS-APS idea and invite further library publishers to participate in the project, for example by joining the OS-APS advisory board (https://os-aps.de/
Revising the Model Publishing Contract for Open Educational Resources
- Cheryl E. Ball, Wayne State University Libraries
- Joshua Neds-Fox, Wayne State University Libraries
With funding from the President’s office, Wayne State University Libraries has begun work to publish our first faculty-authored Open Textbooks. Knowing we needed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with our authors that would directly address 1) the types of content they would be writing and remixing, 2) the Creative Commons license we hoped to apply, and 3) the funding distribution for author stipends and production costs, we turned to Emory University’s and the University of Michigan’s “Model Publishing Contract for Digital Scholarship” (2017), featured at previous LP and DL Forums. This Model Publishing Contract “[articulates] a more liberal approach to author rights,” which aligned nicely with our own aims. However, in practice, we found the contract heavily reliant on traditional commercial publishing values instead of library publishing values, most clearly in its discussion of licensing and royalties. This lightning presentation points out the key changes we needed to make to the Model Publishing Contract to accommodate a fully open, royalty-free, Creative-Commons-licensed, non-commercial textbook, and should prove useful to library publishers in similar scenarios. A version of our revised MOU will be available through the Library Publishing Coalition’s member resources page.
Scholia for increasing IR participation
- Ashlea Green, Appalachian State University
Academic institutions may face a number of challenges in persuading scholars to contribute content to their institutional repositories (IRs), often resulting in a low rate of scholar participation. As Holzman and Kalikman Lippincott (2019) lament, “despite attempts ranging from cajoling to faculty mandates, even getting 50 per cent of local faculty to deposit their materials has been difficult (p. 387).” In light of this, IR administrators need a variety of tools to bolster scholar participation. Scholia, a scholarly profile visualization service using data from Wikidata, may serve as one such tool. This lightning presentation will provide an overview of Scholia as a means for identifying scholars and their works and for encouraging their participation in institutional repositories through targeted outreach.
Holzman, A., & Kalikman Lippincott, S. (2019). Libraries. In A. Phillips & M. Bhaskar (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Publishing (pp. 379-397). Oxford University Press.
Using the Instructor Guide for Course Journals to support in-class, library-supported student publishing projects
- Kate Shuttleworth, Simon Fraser University
- Karen Meijer-Kline, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
At the 2019 PKP Sprint in Barcelona, a team of librarians created an Instructor Guide for Course Journals to help college and university instructors develop in-class academic publishing projects. This lightning talk will introduce the projects that inspired the guide and set the stage for a webinar on the same topic, to be held at a later date.
At SFU and KPU Libraries, we work with course instructors in a variety of subjects to publish course journals: library-hosted journals published as part of for-credit courses in a variety of subject areas. Course journals offer valuable learning opportunities for students by involving them in the publishing process; they are an example of open pedagogy in that they provide an alternative to the “disposable assignment” by encouraging students to publish their work openly as part of the journal. Students learn about open access, copyright, author rights, and Creative Commons licensing, while gaining hands-on experience with peer review and writing for publication.
The webinar will be a chance to start a discussion about how library publishing programs can leverage the Instructor Guide to encourage instructors at their own institutions to create online, open access journals in their for-credit courses.
Interested in learning about course journals and want to know whether the webinar is right for you? Listen to our lighting talk and find out!
Using Web Scraping to Enrich Metadata
- Joseph Muller, Michigan Publishing
When preparing metadata for a platform or repository, we often want to enrich it: filling in gaps, adding fields, or checking it against authoritative sources. In the case of ACLS Humanities E-Book, a collection of over 5,000 books published mainly by university presses, Michigan Publishing often lacked book descriptions in our own metadata but found them on the original publisher websites. In this lightning talk, I show how I used web scraping—powered with a custom Python script—to automate the collection of book descriptions from various websites, saving hours of manual searching and copy-pasting. Web scraping is a powerful tool for data collection that, when used ethically and at scale, can bring a little magic to otherwise tedious workflows and free us up for the more artful to-dos on our list.