Forum

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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March 27, 2019

Panel: Understanding Usage

Thursday, May 9, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)

Unpacking the Impact and Usage of Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Case Study

Kathryn Ruddock, University of Calgary; Christie Hurrell, University of Calgary

Description: A graduate thesis or dissertation, for most graduate students, represents the culmination of years of research and study, and are an important record of the intellectual output of an academic institution. Like many academic institutions, the University of Calgary began in 2012 to deposit electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) into PRISM, the University of Calgary’s Digital Repository. PRISM provides a valuable archive and dissemination vehicle for unique research outputs of early career researchers. All theses are described and categorized with disciplinary information. Usage data is tracked from November 2015 – present.

These characteristics of the ETD collection also allow for investigation into understanding the usage of these documents and how they relate to other research outputs, like articles and monographs, the impact of which are commonly measured by metrics such as citation counts or download statistics.

For this case study, we investigated the usage patterns of the ETD collection to understand how these scholarly outputs fit into the scholarly communications ecosystem. Through analysis of statistics and metrics available through the repository as well as those available through academic databases, we explore the following questions: What do repository usage statistics tell us about ETDs as a scholarly output? Do factors like subject and length of time available influence higher usage of ETDs in a repository? And does repository usage correlate to a citation advantage, either for the thesis itself or for derivative works?

Open, Free, and Easy Altmetrics Through Community-Owned and Operated Infrastructure

Juan Pablo Alperin, Public Knowledge Project and ScholCommLab

Description: Despite growing discussions about the need for community-owned and operated scholarly publishing infrastructure, there continues to be a lack of community alternatives for key publishing services. Chief among these are those that can be used for tracking the audiences of scholarly research, either through citation metrics or through social media metrics (altmetrics). While the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) has been working to open access to the necessary data for calculating citation metrics, the recently launched Crossref Event Data (CED) service already offers a stream of mentions of research from across the web. However, the data from CED needs further processing to calculate, aggregate, and represent the altmetrics information before it can be used by researchers or publishers. To make this data useful, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) partnered with ImpactStory to create an open, free, and easy altmetrics service based entirely on open source software, open data, and operated by two non-profit, mission-driven organizations. This new service—Paperbuzz—is already widely available to any journal using Open Journal Systems through a plugin, is natively available to the journals on the Open Library of Humanities platform, and can be added to any webpage through a javascript library (PaperbuzzViz). With Paperbuzz, PKP is building on its 20-year experience as an academic project offering open tools and services, but questions remain about who should be leading such efforts and how they should be funded and sustained. This presentation will touch on the ways in which publishers and librarians can use Paperbuzz and OJS, the advantages and disadvantages of this and other existing altmetrics solutions while simultaneously opening up the discussion on the larger questions surrounding community-based infrastructure.

Building a Trusted Framework for Coordinating OA Monograph Usage Data

Kevin Hawkins, University of North Texas

Description: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently funded a study of the landscape of usage data for open-access scholarly monographs and an investigation of the viability of creating a data trust for sharing of usage data among stakeholders in the publishing ecosystem. In spring 2019, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will publish a final white paper that takes into account feedback from the community during a consultation period. This presentation will provide a summary of the main findings and proposals of the forthcoming white paper.

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March 27, 2019

Panel: Use This Resource

Thursday, May 9, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)

Textbook Training Wheels: Developing Book Templates to Support OER Production

Matt Ruen, Grand Valley State University

Description: Producing an open educational resource (OER) often demands more than subject expertise alone. Formatting and designing a book can be as daunting an obstacle as writing the text in the first place, with many book production tools posing a steep learning curve. At Grand Valley State University, most of our library-published OER authors were familiar with software like LaTeX and InDesign, which allowed them to develop OER that look and function like books. But without dedicated support for layout and design work, we are likely missing opportunities for OER creation by other authors.

To address this gap, I am collaborating with one of our OER authors to develop and test a set of templates, beginning with InDesign, to allow authors to focus more of their time and energy on OER creation, rather than on learning the nuances of software or the norms of book production. In this short presentation, I will give an overview of the template pilot and share the resulting templates.

Findable, Impactful, Citable, Usable, Sustainable: A Rubric for Rigorous Digital Publishing

Nicky Agate, Columbia University Libraries; Cheryl Ball, Wayne State University

Description: What makes a digital publication “excellent”? Its intellectual content? Its attention to underrepresented voices? Superior discoverability? Attention to user experience? When a faculty member or student comes to us with a new publishing idea, how do we know when and why to say no (or better, when to say, “yes, but only if…”)? How do we ensure that digital projects are fully integrated into the scholarly publishing ecosystem—and are recognized and rewarded as first-class scholarly contributions? These are some of the questions that the FiCUS team—a group of library publishers, presses, and digital scholars—posed to ourselves at the 2018 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute. Our goal was to built a checklist of (more) questions that publishers could ask themselves before embarking on a new digital project, thereby lowering the risks of multimodal, expansive, or experimental digital publishing for libraries, presses, and scholars alike—and empowering us and other publishers to create digital projects that are more visible, more usable, universally accessible, and sustainable. Building on the work of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, and the FAIR Data Principles, we collaborated on a criteria checklist for robust, impactful digital scholarly publishing—noting standards, making recommendations, illustrating best practices, and suggesting alternatives for each element. Designed as a living, collaborate document, the draft checklist requires community input and expertise. To that end, we plan to present it for community feedback at the Library Publishing Forum, inviting attendees to work with us to test our assumptions and priorities in order to enhance and enrich it to make it a valuable resource for all.

Dive into SCUBA: A Collaborative Conference in a Box (partial)

Sarah Wipperman, University of Pennsylvania; Laurie Allen, University of Pennsylvania; Kenny Whitebloom, University of Pennsylvania

Description: Many institutions offer scholarly communications services, platforms, and tools (e.g., institutional repositories, publishing platforms), but we commonly differ in our approaches and priorities. Our needs often overlap, but it can be hard to find meaningful ways to collaborate when we have different resources and goals (e.g., number of staff).

SCUBA (Scholarly Communication UnBoxed Activity) is a blueprint for hosting events where communities work through collaborative activities (both practical and dreamy) designed to build a shared understanding of scholarly communications and to help participants think together about their practices. It is meant to broaden the conversation about the role of libraries in scholarly communication and the technologies we use and to dream up as many great ideas as possible for how we might tackle a set of sticky problems.

SCUBA is flexible in that the “divers” can choose the topics they want to address and select activities and resources that will best help them achieve their goals during their event. The SCUBA event can be held at a single institution or even with multiple institutions. As they complete activities, SCUBA divers are asked to share back their results with the larger community so that we might build a shared understanding of the issues our organizations face and find targeted collaboration opportunities.

In this hybrid presentation and workshop, we will briefly introduce you to SCUBA and how you can run an event at your university. We will then choose one or two activities to run as a group, diving into a topic of the attendees’ choice.

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March 27, 2019

Full Session: Member and Mission Driven Publishing: Consortial Library Publishing Programs

Thursday, May 9, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Canfor Policy Room (1600)

Presenters: Christine Fruin, Scholarly Communication and Digital Projects Manager, Atla; Amanda Hurford, Scholarly Communications Director, Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI); Olivia MacIsaac, Scholarly Communication Associate, Butler University; Justin Gonder, Senior Product Manager, Publishing, California Digital Library

Description: Library publishing programs do not only exist within the confines of an individual institution. Increasingly, organizations or associations who represent and support libraries are engaging in library publishing activities. While these programs share similarities with traditional library publishing programs, there are also unique challenges posed by publishing at scale. Each presenter will describe how they support distributed library publishing programs with limited resources and will also share accomplishments and lessons learned. Attendees will gain knowledge that they can use to collaboratively develop or expand their library publishing activities that reflect their own mission and needs.

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March 27, 2019

Panel: Library Publishing Beyond Books and Journals

Thursday, May 9, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Barrick Gold Lecture Room (1520)

A Repository for the Community: Report on the British Library – Ubiquity Press Hyku Project

Brian Hole, Ubiquity Press; Torsten Reimer, British Library

Description: The open source Hyku repository system is a highly promising open source option for both large and small institutions, including those with library publishing operations. Hyku is designed to be a cloud-based, multi-tenant turnkey solution. Ubiquity Press and the British Library have been working together for the past year with the rest of the Hyku community to bring the platform to an MVP level. As part of this project the British Library has piloted the platform to see whether it could be provided as a hosted service to other memory institutions. At the same time Ubiquity has focused on developing the platform as a no-lock-in product offering that is integrated with its open source journal, book and conference publishing systems. This presentation will describe the work done and evaluate the platform in light of both organization’s goals.

Working Papers, A Work in Progress: Integrating Libraries with Publication and Preprint Services

Anna Oates, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Description: The vitality of open preprint services in the “creation and dissemination of knowledge” is irrefutable (Lynch, 2017). They enhance scholarship by enabling communities to interact with each other at the early stages of the research process. In the case of economics, the distribution of preprints is embedded in the culture of researchers’ scholarly communication. Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), founded by Thomas Krichel, has been a central force in the democratization of economic research culture since it began in 1997. RePEc is a subject bibliography of economic research, which indexes books, papers (i.e., working papers or preprints), articles, and software. It aggregates metadata from 200 contributing “archives” to freely distribute economic research. Among the contributing RePEc archives is Fed in Print, “the central catalog of publications [, working papers, and speeches] of the US Federal Reserve System.” Established in 1960 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Library, Fed in Print has existed under the aegis of libraries and librarians since its genesis. In 2014, Fed in Print integrated its system model to function as a RePEc archive, automatically feeding all scholarly production to RePEc. As Judy Ruttenberg elucidated in her presentation for ACRL’s webinar on “Preprint Repositories in the Social Sciences,” libraries and librarians are central to the framework of preprint services. As advocates for open practices, research lifecycle experts, and stewards of the scholarly record, librarians are fundamental forces to the ongoing development of sustainable preprint services. This presentation will provide a case study on Fed in Print as a model for unifying workflows for discovery of working papers and publications within library services. In addition, this presentation will discuss an extensible, exploratory framework to support increased standardization of scholarly records and democratization of RePEc maintenance, furthering the utility and efficiency of RePEc as a discovery service.

Lessons Learned From Online Publishing at the Library

Brian Sweeting, Digital Publishing Manager, EdLab, Teachers College, Columbia University; Rob Crawford, Digital Publishing Associate, EdLab, Teachers College, Columbia University; Gary Natriello, Ruth L. Gottesman Professor in Educational Research, Teachers College, Columbia University; Hui Soo Chae, Senior Director, Gottesman Libraries, Teachers College, Columbia University

Description: New Learning Times (www.newlearningtimes.com) is a mobile-friendly open educational resource that provides daily coverage of advances in learning technology, with a focus on innovation, entrepreneurship, accessibility, and diversity.

All of the content is produced and published by a dedicated group of students and staff situated in the library at Teachers College.

In this presentation, we’ll share the lessons we’ve learned from building a publishing team from scratch in a library space. We’ll focus on short and sweet tips for:

• Recruiting a small team for in-house content creation
• Optimizing for a fast and flexible workflow
• Supporting innovation in the workplace
• Creating opportunities for professional development
• Collecting and sharing data

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March 27, 2019

Full Session: Platforms and People: Building a Publishing House in the Library

Thursday, May 9, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)

Presenters: Maria Bonn, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign; marilyn thomas-houston, Associate Professor Emerita, African American Studies and Anthropology, University of Florida, Editor, Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies; Daniel Tracy, Head, Scholarly Communication and Publishing, University Library, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Janet Swatscheno, Digital Publishing Librarian, University of Illinois Chicago

Description: Publishing Without Walls, a humanities centered digital scholarly publishing initiative based in the university library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, grows out of the principle that sustainable publishing operations capitalize upon on existing investments in platform development, by choosing those platforms that best meet the needs of scholars and that library infrastructure can best sustain. Rather than investing in building new platforms, it places its emphasis on the human element of publishing, focusing on outreach and support, with a sensitivity to the social and institutional contexts of the scholars it serves, as well as understanding the publishing goals of scholars through a purposeful and self-conscience research effort. This panel will offer perspectives from various sectors of the project: the publications and workflows team will discuss the challenges and opportunities of leveraging existing publishing platforms as building blocks; outreach representatives will talk about the needs of scholars in Afro-American studies and at HBCUs, as well as connecting with scholars at other partner institutions, some close to hand, some scattered across the midwest, and their role in cementing the relationship between the authors and the platforms and the authors and the publisher and, in the end, the scholarship and its audience. We will also share some of the research insights and how those inform the design of the publishing house.

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March 27, 2019

Full Session: Students Perception of Open Textbooks: Students Tell Us What They Think About Open Textbooks in Their Courses

Thursday, May 9, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)

Presenters: Karen Bjork, Portland State University; Kristi Jensen, University of Minnesota

Description: Textbooks have long been an integral learning platform in higher education. As the rising cost of textbooks continues to burden students, many libraries have begun to facilitate the creation and publishing of open textbooks. While many colleges and universities have surveyed students about their textbook purchasing habits and interest in open textbooks, fewer surveys have captured student feedback on their actual hands on experiences with their resources. Portland State University (PSU) Library and the University of Minnesota (UofM) Libraries have both collected date from students about their experiences with open textbooks selected and created specifically for their courses.

In 2013, PSU Library developed an open textbook publishing program that works with faculty to create open textbooks that are designed specifically for the courses that they teach. To determine the role of open textbooks in higher education and their effectiveness, PSU Library surveyed the students taking courses with open textbook designed by their professors. The survey investigates students’ textbook purchasing behavior; how they access and use their open textbook, including their format preferences; and their perceptions of their open textbook, including its quality and what features they like and dislike.

The UofM University Libraries has worked with faculty through our Partnership for Affordable Content grants since 2015. The results of the grant projects primarily produced digital materials and several projects published open textbooks. Headlines frequently report “research” that concludes student preference for print over digital materials. In order to better understand the student experience in courses utilizing digital affordable content at the UofM, the University Libraries surveyed students to gauge the impact on study skills and to garner positive outcomes and challenges from the student perspective.

This presentation will discuss the results of the surveys, the study’s strengths and limitations, and provide recommendations for future open textbook authors and publishing programs.

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