Forum

March 19, 2021

Panel Mo1b

Day/Time: Monday, May 10, 1:15 PM to 2:15 PM

Growing Knowledge in Living Handbooks: The Open-Access Platform PUBLISSO

Presenters:

  • Gregor Schumann, ZB MED – German National Library of Medicine
  • Uta Woiwod, ZB MED – German National Library of Medicine

Description:

This presentation introduces the audience to the “Living Handbook” project, an open-access publishing format for academic research in medical science/life sciences. Operated by ZB MED (German National Library of Medicine), Germany’s prominent library for life sciences, the project was designed to provide evolving science with international visibility and a sustainable ‘home‘ within the world of open access: The Handbooks’ architecture allows their content to grow alongside the achievements of the scientific fields they cover – chapters can be continuously added, scratched or updated without much ado.

Thus, our way of open-access publishing enables a fast-track, professional, and long-term exchange of scientific knowledge. By providing individual PIDs and ensuring citability by an accessible version history, it functions as a living host that combines common values and standards for scientific publishing: Quality-management workflows were established on both sides of the publishing process, high-quality academic research is guaranteed by peer reviewing and accompanied by editorial quality assurance. Scientists from all over the world are invited to connect their knowledge to the Handbooks‘ contents, which can be accessed by Internet users without any paywall and at any chosen time.

Based on the Content Management System Drupal, the Living Handbook project was built into the online publication platform PUBLISSO, also hosting ZB MED’s very own repository. The platform has already been in use for more than four years and is subject to continuous development. Genuinely developed as an open-source application, other libraries or institutions are welcome to use the system for their own publishing ideas and even develop it according to their specific needs.

Developing a Press Approach to Omeka S with the Teams Module

Presenters:

  • Alexander Dryden, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Daniel G. Tracy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Description:

This presentation explores user experience challenges faced by authors and library publishers when using Omeka S as a platform to publish digital exhibits curated by scholars, and a solution developed locally and available for reuse: the Omeka S Teams module. Omeka S offers a major advance over Omeka Classic in its ability to host multiple sites, making it possible to publish multiple scholar-created exhibits without maintaining multiple servers and installs. The Illinois Open Publishing Network at the University of Illinois Library began using Omeka S as part of a suite of platforms for long-form publications by authors, in this case for curated exhibits with analytical essays attached. However, a key challenge quickly became apparent: Omeka S assumes that the different sites will still maintain a shared pool of media assets, meaning all authors experience the assets of other authors as back-end “clutter” obstructing their work. Even more seriously it creates circumstances where one author may edit or even delete another author’s assets.

The Teams module addresses these concerns by introducing a new class of object into Omeka S, the Team, through which users, resources, and sites are linked. Various components of Omeka S then filter results based on a shared Team, eliminating clutter and reducing the chances of mistakes. Additionally, to address security concerns and provide greater flexibility, a supplemental access control setting allows administrators restrict user permissions on a Team-by-Team basis. This presentation will discuss the UX and operational challenges researchers and publishing staff face when using Omeka S as a long-form publishing platform, and describe how the Teams module can address those concerns.

State-of-the-art, non-commercial library publishing at TIB

Presenters:

  • Xenia van Edig, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)
  • Dulip Withanage, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)

Description:

With TIB Open Publishing, the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology – is about to launch a new open-access service on which scientific journals and conference publications can be published. In doing so, it is underlining its orientation towards open science and adding a significant new pillar to its activities to support the transition to open access. As a research partner, TIB is committed to professional, optimally accessible, and widely visible publications. The service is aimed at editors of scientific journals and conference publications who want a library-supported, non-commercial, but at the same time sophisticated, sustainable, and completely open access publication option. Our service is aimed at existing conference publications and journals as well as at new launches and it is open to all scientific disciplines. The scientists who act as editors and reviewers of the individual publications are responsible for the quality assurance of the content of the published articles. On the part of TIB Open Publishing, however, we ensure that formal quality standards are met by the hosted publications. There must be compatibility with the funding criteria („Plan S“) of the research funding agencies that are members of the cOAlition S. Our quality standards are therefore based on the technical implementation guidelines of Plan S, but also on the DOAJ Seal, the OASPA membership criteria, and the COPE guidelines. Our technical services encompass the hosting of journals and conference publications and the distribution of metadata and content to indexing, archiving, and registration systems. We offer a continuously enhanced XML-based publication workflow and engage especially with the OJS developer community in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We also develop OJS plugins for community use.

March 19, 2021

Panel Mo1a

Day/Time: Monday, May 10, 1:15 PM to 2:15 PM

Capturing Open Access Publishing Efforts in the International Journal of Librarianship by the Chinese American Librarians Association: A Case Study

Presenters:

  • Raymond Pun, Education/Outreach Manager, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University
  • Grace Liu, Systems Librarian, University of Windsor

Description:

In this project update, the presenters will discuss publishing efforts and experiences on the International Journal of Librarianship (IJoL) hosted by the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA), a National Association of Librarians of Color (NALoC). Since 2016, IJoL is an open access and refereed journal that focuses on research and discussion in all areas of librarianship and information science globally. Most importantly, the journal centers on global audience and connections and recent issues covered timely topics such as sustainability in libraries and artificial intelligence. This presentation will share the logistical components of setting up the open access publication, the process in quality control and management including benefits and challenges. The presenters include the Chief Editor and a Guest Editor of the journal who will share their experiences in supporting the journal as CALA volunteers and supporting the publication, now reaching its fifth year. The speakers will discuss how the journal serves as an important collaboration to engage with librarians from Asia, particularly in China. Attendees will learn more about this journal platform and its process and be engaged in discussing how libraries and associations can manage and promote and support research in open access publishing.

Poly Publishing: a choose-your-own ideals in publishing

Presenter:

  • jaime ding, California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo

Description:

Poly Publishing is a publishing program that aims to raise visibility and enhance access to Cal Poly scholarship. In working to create an immersive, interactive digital project, this alternative approach to present and disseminate academic scholarship rethinks accessibility and assessment of such work. The system focuses on collaboration, accessible approaches, and recognition of individual’s places within structural systems, using inclusive and equitable practices to adjust scholarly publishing while centering historically underrepresented identities, perspectives, and creativity. Using past projects from the Cal Poly faculty exhibition program as prototypes, the project aims to ensure scholarship will be transformed into digital publications that integrate with current publishing systems on and off campus. By creating a non-traditional pathway for publishing scholarly research, this pilot project plays an active role in strengthening Cal Poly’s scholarly communication system, with a commitment to amplify underrepresented topics and voices.

This presentation will outline the workflow, concepts, and scholarship of the Poly Publishing program. Using an interactive choose-your-own adventure format, each section of the publishing process (content selection, digital development, assessment, and dissemination ideals) will pose a question to allow viewers to follow various paths of how poly publishing will work, leaving room for feedback and further questions. The ideas and models that the system has shaped itself from include autoethnography, open peer review discussion sessions, critical race theory, contextual citation practices, visual annotation practices, establishing common vocabularies, and more, all designed to rethink the systemic inequities that academic publishing holds.

Revising the Library Publishing Curriculum: Values, Progress, and Possibilities

Presenter:

  • Cheryl E. Ball, Wayne State University Libraries

Description:

The Library Publishing Curriculum, released in 2018, includes four modules on Content, Impact, Sustainability, and Policy–each with a set of instructional materials that provide a foundation in scholarly publishing for library units that may be new to various forms of scholarly publishing. Sustainability efforts for this IMLS-funded project included onboarding an editor-in-chief (in 2019) and an editorial board (in 2020), to guide and oversee the continued maintenance of and revisions to the curriculum. Following the editor-in-chief’s curriculum update at LPF 2020, this presentation provides updates from the second year of the sustainability plan for this resource. Key outcomes of this individual presentation include an overview of the work the editorial board has accomplished in the (by then, almost a) year they’ve been advising on the curriculum: a preview of their methodology for making revision suggestions; how those suggestions across the four modules raise questions about the structure and use patterns of the existing curriculum; how those questions indicate framing needs in a revised curriculum; what target audiences the curriculum hits and misses (and how to ameliorate those misses); where equity and inclusion need to be more prominently and explicitly addressed; where global outreach and other non-US library publishing units need better representation; where more kinds of library publishing units including non-academic and single-person shops need inclusion; and what baseline content is still needed to provide foundational instruction on library publishing in accordance with library publishing values and competencies (as indicated on the Library Publishing Coalition’s website). During the presentation Q&A, the editor-in-chief welcomes additional suggestions from the audience for revisions regarding content, values, structure, framing, outreach, etc. And, by LPF, the editorial board will likely have decided upon a strategy for soliciting revisions for the second edition, the process for which we hope to share.

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/participate/).

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.

March 19, 2021

Full Session: Context, not checklists! Workshopping a collaborative, context-driven approach to evaluating journals

Day/Time: Friday, May 14, 2:45 PM to 3:45 PM

Presenters

  • Matt Ruen, Grand Valley State University
  • Brianne Selman, University of Winnipeg
  • Stephanie Towery, Texas State University
  • Leila Sterman, Montana State University
  • Joshua Neds-Fox, Wayne State University
  • Teresa Schultz, University of Nevada, Reno

Description

Attendees of this workshop will get the most out of it if they preview the project at https://vimeo.com/543381147

Concerns about “predatory” or questionable journals have led many academics to seek out simple checklists of good or bad journals, but this obscures the contextual and constructed nature of authority in information.

A group of librarians has banded together to try to address this problem through the creation of the journal Reviews: the Journal of Journal Reviews (RJJR) that would invite peer reviewed evaluations of all journals, both open and paywalled, from across the world, no matter the language. The idea is to create an open rubric for thoughtfully evaluating a journal, as well as a platform for sharing those evaluations as resources. Authors interested in a potential journal could look to RJJR for evaluations already completed on the journal, while the reviews themselves would model the practice of nuanced, contextual evaluation. This aims to be an iterative process that can be updated and allows for open feedback.

The values which shape this project include: taking a critical approach to prestige, supporting labor not traditionally seen as scholarly work, ensuring an environment inclusive of diverse voices, being transparent about the process, emphasizing nuance in journal evaluation, and accepting that change happens.

Prior to the Forum, we will share our rubric and a video overview of this project so that the session can focus on deeper engagement with the idea of context-centered journal reviews as a form of scholarly publication.  The heart of this session will be a facilitated conversation using Mentimeter to gather and discuss recommendations, critiques, and other feedback from participants.

We invite participants to help us revise and reflect on our project, specifically considering these questions:

  • For authors, does the context-centric rubric make sense when evaluating an unfamiliar journal, and how can we improve the tool for your future use?
  • For editors, is our framework appropriate to evaluate your journal?
  • For librarians, does this publication structure adequately recognize that the labor of librarians supporting scholarly communications is itself scholarship, especially for promotion and advancement?
  • For everyone, how can the practice of contextual evaluation critically reflect on racial, gender, and global biases that shape perceptions of publication venues?

“Read the Rubric: https://tinyurl.com/rjjrrubric

March 19, 2021

Full Session: Advancing Open Access Book Analytics for Library Publishing: Moving from use cases and case studies to next steps

Day/Time: Friday, May 14, 1:15 PM to 2:15 PM

Presenters

  • Christina Drummond, Data Trust Program Officer, Educopia Institute / OA Ebook Usage Data Trust
  • Lara Speicher, Head of Publishing, UCL Press
  • Charles Watkinson Associate University Librarian for Publishing / Director, University of Michigan Press
  • Andrew Joseph, Digital Publisher, Wits University Press
  • Cameron Neylon, Professor of Research Communication, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University

Description

This session will explore the opportunities and challenges library publishers face when looking to leverage OA book usage data for reporting and operational decision-making. The session will begin with an overview of the data flows, stakeholders, and metadata standards that enable OA book analytics, noting the role of a usage data trust in supporting library publishers’ use cases for OA book usage data. Three representatives will then share their experiences developing and piloting OA ebook usage dashboards to collate and visualize cross-platform usage and impact statistics. Each will share information about their organization’s OA book data dashboards to then describe how the addition of these dashboards has impacted their press operations.

After the case-study presentations, a member of the OA eBook Usage Data Trust’s technical team will provide a brief overview of the infrastructure that enables the cross-platform visualizations and then address the importance of privacy, security, and community governance mechanisms for such a public/private multi-stakeholder effort. The session will conclude with participants being invited to brainstorm needs, concerns, and questions to inform future development of this and other tools for library-publishers.

March 19, 2021

Full Session: Long-Term Preservation of Digital Library Publishing Content

Day/Time: Thursday, May 13, 4:00 PM to 5 PM

Presenters

  • Craig Van Dyck, outgoing Executive Director, CLOCKSS Archive
  • Jasmine Mulliken, Stanford University Press
  • Alicia Wise, incoming Executive Director, CLOCKSS Archive

Description

Library Publishers are aware of the importance of long-term digital presentation. In fact, librarians are the primary champions of preservation. However, many library publishers have not yet established a formal solution for preserving their content, including new forms of content that present preservation challenges.

This session will speak in general terms about digital preservation options that may be appropriate for library publishers. And the session will use Stanford University Press’s digital publishing program as a case study of the challenges faced by academy-led publishing, and how to think about preservation of these new types of interactive scholarly works that include multi-modal, dynamic, user-driven elements. A contributor to Educopia’s 2018 Library Publishing Curriculum, SUP’s digital program has advocated for the inclusion of preservation considerations early in a publication’s development. Their experiences identifying and applying preservation solutions before, during, and after a project’s publication shed light on the real challenges that publishers of complex digital content face.

Each presentation will be 20 minutes, leaving 20 minutes for Q&A. The presentations will include interactive polls to get input from the audience, which can be used to seed the Q&A session.

CLOCKSS is a robust and stable digital preservation system that serves the scholarly community. The CLOCKSS presentation will cover the basics of long-term preservation of digital scholarly content, and will survey the landscape of appropriate preservation options – not only CLOCKSS, but the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN) and others.

The Stanford University Press presentation will describe the Press’s Mellon-funded digital publishing initiative and the challenges faced, as well as the Press’s experiences as a participant in a follow-on Mellon-funded project that focuses on the preservation of enhanced e-books.

 

March 19, 2021

Full Session: LPC Fellows Forum 2021

Day/Time: Thursday, May 13, 4:00 PM to 5 PM

Presenters

  • Jody Bailey, LPC Board President (2020-2021) and Head of Scholarly Communications Office, Emory University
  • Talea Anderson, LPC Fellow (2019-2021) and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Washington State University
  • A.J. Boston, LPC Fellow (2019-2021) and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Murray State University

Description

In this session, Talea Anderson and A.J. Boston, LPC Fellows for 2019-2021, will reflect on their two-year terms as LPC Fellows and provide an update on their latest research activities related to library publishing. A.J. will discuss three writing projects (including a flip on David Lewis’ 2.5% proposal, a concept for a visual peer-review overlay service, and a potential alternative to the transformative agreement), while Talea will discuss accessibility in library publishing. After these presentations, all attendees will be invited to participate in a discussion of these topics moderated by LPC Board President Jody Bailey.

March 19, 2021

Full Session: Presenting Preprints: Are Library Publishers the New Facebook?

Day/Time: Thursday, May 13, 2:45 PM to 3:45 PM

Presenters

  • Lisa Schiff, Associate Director, Publishing, Archives, and Digitization, California Digital Library, University of California
  • Juan Pablo Alperin, Co-director of the ScholCommLab; Associate Director of Research of the Public Knowledge Project; Assistant Professor in the School of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, Canada
  • Bruce Caron, Co-Founder, EarthArXiv; Founder, New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute, Santa Barbara
  • Martin Paul Eve, Project Lead for Janeway; Co-Director, Open Library of the Humanities; Project Lead for Janeway; Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London
  • Alex Mendonça, Online Submission & Preprints Coordinator, SciELO Brazil

Description

Preprints are an increasingly important component of the scholarly record and preprint platforms have correspondingly grown in number. Academic communities value preprints for the opportunity to share early findings with peers and receive immediate feedback on not-yet-reviewed works. With the COVID pandemic, a broader audience is turning to preprints, as political leaders, journalists, and the public seek new information about the virus. Complications arise, however, when the unvetted nature of these works is not clearly signaled alongside discussions of their findings. In late 2020, Rick Anderson captured these concerns, highlighting cases where discredited preprints remained available to read, presenting a potential for misinformation. Anderson posited that preprint platform providers, not just editors, should ensure adequate preprint vetting and be willing to retract them.

With the availability of two new open-source preprint platforms–PKP’s Open Preprint Systems (OPS) and Birkback’s Janeway preprint server–library publishers now have familiar, robust infrastructure for entering this space and are a logical home for such services, especially given a strong commitment to a specific research community. But what additional responsibilities must we accept–if any–as publishers of this genre? Should we establish terms for vetting of submissions? Without adequate domain knowledge, how would we enforce, or even audit, such terms? How do we indicate that a specific preprint’s findings have not yet been formally accepted? What about obligations regarding debunked publications? What are the responsibilities of platform providers, publishers, and editors? Should library publishers, as a community of practice, expand on the proposed best practices related to preprint metadata to ensure we are responsible actors in providing access to early research?

Panelists will explore these questions during the session’s first half, and invite attendee participation for the second. Registered attendees will receive an advance survey regarding current/planned preprint publishing, in order to identify additional discussion topics.

 

March 19, 2021

Full Session: Journal Seeks Publisher: How JLSC Imagined, Sought, and Found Its Next Partner

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 12, 4:00 PM to 5 PM

Presenters

  • Jill Cirasella, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
  • Rebekah Kati, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Wendy C. Robertson, University of Iowa
  • David Lewis, Emeritus, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
  • Daniel Bangert, Digital Repository of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy
  • Harrison W. Inefuku, Iowa State University

Description

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (JLSC) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal with no article processing charges for authors. It has been published by Pacific University Libraries (PUL) since its inception in 2012, with all costs covered by PUL. In April 2020, PUL notified JLSC that it was refocusing its publishing program and would not be able to publish JLSC beyond June 2021.

The news hit hard, but the editorial team and editorial board also saw opportunity. What additional best practices might we be able to adopt? What new technologies or modalities might we be able to embrace? What kind of financial sponsorship program might we develop to sustain the journal for years to come? We created a committee to bring our needs and hopes into focus and develop a request for proposals.

In September 2020, we issued the call for proposals and crossed our fingers. We knew our expectations were high, but we also knew that there exist numerous open access publishers with missions aligned with ours. And, indeed, we received six proposals, including a standout proposal from Iowa State University Digital Press (ISUDP). With excitement, hope, and gratitude, we selected ISUDP as JLSC’s next publisher.

In this presentation, members of JLSC’s editorial team and editorial board will detail our search, from initial panic to ultimate partnership. Additionally, the manager of ISUDP will discuss the decision to submit a proposal and the questions that arose while developing it. Attendees will have ample opportunity to ask the panel about our hopes, fears, priorities, and processes.

March 19, 2021

Full Session: Open Access Outreach Through Black Lives Matter Edit-a-thons: Building a Wikipedia Community of Practice

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 12, 2:45 PM to 3:45 PM

Presenters:

  • Melissa Seelye, J. Paul Leonard Library, San Francisco State University
  • Matt Martin, J. Paul Leonard Library, San Francisco State University
  • Devone Rodrigues, J. Paul Leonard Library, San Francisco State University
  • Toni Panlilio, J. Paul Leonard Library, San Francisco State University

Description:

Awareness of open access continues to increase with the proliferation of mandates and open access options provided by major publishing venues. However, most publishing decisions continue to be driven by concerns about prestige and status. As a result, researchers remain largely unaware of the socio-political dynamics at play in knowledge production and the importance of community-owned alternatives to commercial publishers. This session will demonstrate how the Digital Scholarship Center team of San Francisco State University’s J. Paul Leonard Library has started engaging researchers with these and related issues through Wikipedia edit-a-thons. 

The Library Publishing Forum falls just before the global #1Lib1Ref initiative in May, which will mark the one-year anniversary of the Digital Scholarship Center’s inaugural edit-a-thon. Since that time, the team has launched monthly edit-a-thons that task participants with contributing to Wikipedia articles related to the Black Lives Matter movement or the African diaspora more generally, inspired by the Black Lives Matter WikiProject. Through these events, instructional faculty as well as library faculty and staff have been able to learn how inequities in access to knowledge contribute to and reinforce under-representation and bias in our information resources. They are encouraged to seek out open access sources to add to Wikipedia articles, which affords opportunities to highlight library publishing venues and institutional repositories. 

The session will mirror these events, beginning with an introductory 20-minute presentation on the importance of universal access to knowledge, particularly as it relates to coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. From there, participants will be given 25 minutes to add an open access citation to a Wikipedia article. No experience with Wikipedia editing is necessary, and facilitators will be present to answer questions as they arise.