Forum

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.