Forum

Individual Session: May 8, 1:15-2:15

Day/time: May 8, 2025, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EDT

Title: An International Data Space for OA Book Usage Data Exchange Across Public and Private Stakeholders – Project Update

Presenter: Ursula Rabar, Community Manager, OA Book Usage Data Trust / OPERAS

Description: While different interfaces have made it easier for libraries, publishers, policymakers, and information services to access, use and innovate with usage and metadata at scale, time and human resources are still required to manage, compile, and link open access book usage data metrics coming from multiple platforms in multiple formats.

In 2022, the Mellon Foundation awarded a project team led by the University of North Texas, OpenAIRE, and OPERAS to develop “governance building blocks” for the Open Access Book Usage Data Trust in line with both the Principles of Open Infrastructure and protocols emerging from the Design Principles for International Data Spaces. Over more than two years, stakeholders leveraged in-depth community consultations to produce a rulebook to guide participation in the data space community, define Data Trust membership benefits, and get feedback on cost-recovery and functional requirements. In 2024, the Data Trust’s Technical Advisory Committee and Board of Trustees selected an experienced international data spaces technical team to build out the technical infrastructure. Using a staged development approach focused on “scaling small”, a limited proof of concept focused on the exchange of COUNTER item-level views and downloads data was developed and tested with a first group of partners (JSTOR, LibLynx, Michigan University Publishing, Punctum Books, Knowledge Unlatched) with plans to extend data space security and auditing functionality to support additional data exchange use cases in the future.

Title: Collaborate with Creative Commons: open licensing training for all

Presenter: Jennryn Wetzler (she/her), Director of Learning and Training, Creative Commons

Description: Want to collaborate with Creative Commons on open licensing training? We are open!

Through the CC Certificate program, Creative Commons (CC)* invests in a world where everyone has the legal tools to share their knowledge freely, expanding global learning. It is a global professional development program training librarians, educators and cultural heritage professionals in copyright, open licensing and open access efforts.

Now in our seventh year, we have approximately 2000 alumni in 68 countries, and course content in 10 languages. Through initial partnerships, we’ve subsidized CC Certificate training for hundreds of participants, provided customized workshops, and co-created the University of Nebraska Omaha’s microcredential Introduction to Open Educational Resources, and Library Juice Academy’s Creative Commons Licenses and Copyright: From Concepts to Practice.

Now, we aim to expand open licensing learning to meet the needs of new audiences at libraries and academic institutions. Join this session and help us explore what we can create together to better meet your community’s needs!

This session will entail a brief overview from Creative Commons.

*CC is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to helping build and sustain a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture with the global standard of open licenses. We built and steward the open licenses that power millions of people’s unfettered access to culture, research, information, education and more. There are over 2.5 billion CC licenses being used across 9 million websites.

Active Session: Defining Quality in OER Textbooks: Drafting a Guide

Day/time: May 7, 2025, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. EDT

Title: Defining Quality in OER Textbooks: Drafting a Guide

Presenters:

• Stefanie Buck (she/her), Director, Open Educational Resources, Oregon State University
• Karen Lauritsen (she/her), Senior Director, Publishing, Open Education Network

Description: Although the adoption of open textbooks is increasing, some faculty still hesitate to switch to Open Educational Resources (OER), often due to concerns about quality. Defining and creating “quality” OER is challenging, as it is inherently subjective and varies between creators and their supporters. This situation mirrors the early skepticism surrounding online learning, where faculty questioned its quality compared to face-to-face instruction. This led to the development of the Quality Matters (QM) standards, a nationally recognized rubric designed to assess online courses based on their structure and design rather than content alone. These standards, which include guidelines on learning objectives, assessments, instructional materials, and more, were later adapted into an “Essentials Guide” for faculty at Oregon State University.

Building on the idea behind QM’s Essentials Guide, we are drafting an OER Essentials document, which will serve as a guide for OER creators in developing quality open textbooks. This document will not evaluate the content completeness but will provide a framework for authors and their supporters to enhance textbook quality. The categories covered include comprehensiveness, content accuracy, clarity, modularity, organization, accessibility, cultural relevance, and media integration.

In this session, we will present a draft of the OER Essentials document (at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DpYwnUFiKr4JYD4-oQUQhsrJhBarcB5CJmkC1AVe8xU/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.xi0yifgsjjlf) and invite feedback through small group discussions and interactive tools. Our aim is to develop a dynamic, collaborative guide that evolves based on feedback. By the end of the session, we hope to refine this resource to better support OER creators, ensuring it becomes a valuable, shared tool in the ongoing development of high-quality open textbooks.

Individual Session: May 7, 2:45-3:45

Day/time: May 7, 2025, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. EDT

Title: Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology (Ibict)

Presenters:

• Lucas dos Santos Souza da Silva (he/him), Post-Graduate Student/Researcher, Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology (Ibict)
• Fabio Gouveia (he/him), Professor, Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology (Ibict)
• Nanci Oddone (she/her), Professor, Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)

Description: In recent decades, Brazilian academic libraries have been envisioning opportunities in a new digital context for academic publishing, therefore they’ve been carrying out a variety of practices to support services for their community, among them, the creation, editing and dissemination of publishing projects in their campus. This presentation aims to expose the perspectives of academic librarians engaged with library publishing services in Brazil, among planning, provision of these editorial services, and training. It shows that the tendency is for unawareness about this field among Brazilian academic librarians, even though there are practices being carried out and blooming in more recent years. Characterized by isolated practices that are not yet integrated into international discussions, this presentation intends to recommend the development of a community of practice in Brazil for Library Publishing, in other to share the knowledge and experiences on scholarly publishing as part of the professional duties of academic libraries, provide training in editorial services and management of library publishing initiatives for Brazilian academic libraries staffs. At last, aims to discuss the opportunity to include Brazil into the international Library Publishing landscape, promoting the widespread dissemination of the actions undertaken by academics libraries in the global south, benefiting an open, inclusive, and sustainable scientific communication system in the region.

Title: Stronger Together at the Big Ten: Library Publishing Collective Action

Presenters:

• Kate McCready (she/her), Program Director for Open Publishing, Big Ten Academic Alliance
• Ally Laird, Open Publishing Team Lead, Penn State University
• Matt Vaughn, Open Publishing Librarian, Indiana University

Description: Tasked with serving extremely large populations, with limited resources and little chance of realizing increased capacities, the Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries are realizing opportunities to work together through collective action. With a goal of strengthening our work, and expanding our capacity, the library publishers of the Big Ten Academic Alliance have aligned our resources in order to build a cooperative, aggregated collection of BTAA-published works on the Next Generation Library Publishing’s Meru platform. The short term goal of this project is to evaluate Meru’s capacity to support the display of a variety of publication types, regardless of the platform they were created on. The longer term goals are to determine Meru’s capacity to produce metadata for all publications (or selected publications) for use in discovery systems and preservation systems, and to identify options for the Alliance to work at scale.

At this presentation, members of the project team will share information about the functionality of Meru and the process used to ingest content from Janeway, OJS, DSpace, and Pressbooks into a unified, structured display layer. The interactive, community engaged process used to identify the common product requirements, and to evaluate the implemented multi-publisher display platform will also be explored. We will also outline our efforts to assess the potential for reusing the newly compiled, aggregated publication data for discovery (via third party vendors such as ExLibris, EBSCO, and OAPEN), preservation (via third party vendors, Portico and CLOCKSS), and accessibility testing. These activities will be shared within the context of the challenges and opportunities present when bringing together disparate programs; We aim to identify our differences in order to strengthen all our publishing programs and see what synergy comes from working together.

Individual Session: May 7, 1:15-2:15

Day/time: May 7, 2025, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EDT

Title: “Reasonable costs” for publishing: what do we know now, and what can library publishers help us find out?

Presenter: Lauren B. Collister (they, she), Research Engagement Manager, Invest in Open Infrastructure

Description: In 2024, Invest in Open Infrastructure conducted a study focusing on “reasonable costs” for public access to the outputs of federally-funded research in the United States. This study was prompted by the guidance in the 2022 US Office of Science and Technology Policy Memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, commonly referred to as the “Nelson Memo”, and the policies being implemented as a result. This work was supported by a 2023 grant from the US National Science Foundation (#2330827).

In this presentation, we share some of the significant findings from this study. One of the key distinctions we’ve made is that we need agreement on better language to describe two crucial aspects of providing public access to publications and research data: cost and price. “Cost” refers to the expenses incurred in the course of providing public access to research outputs, or the resources used to produce, deliver, and maintain a research output online. “Price,” on the other hand, is the charges paid by stakeholders in the market exchange for the service of providing public access to a research output. These two terms are often conflated in publishing literature (Steinhart & Skinner, 2024).

While information about the factors of cost and price for publishing research from publishers is becoming more common, the information shared is not cohesive and, therefore, difficult to generalize. In particular, specific cost information is not shared, and pricing schemes lack transparency. This knowledge gap provides an opportunity for library publishers. The work of libraries and other institutional publishers can significantly contribute to a more complete and balanced understanding of what constitutes a “reasonable” model for providing public access. We will share an overview of what we know so far and present ways that library publishers can influence this field to improve understanding. This presentation will also describe how this work is related to recent changes in US federal funding policy.

Title: The Harvard Open Journals Program: A New Library Initiative to Support No-Fee Open Access Journals

Presenters:

• Colleen Cressman (she/her), Librarian for Open Publishing, Harvard Library
• Yuan Li (she/her), University Scholarly Communication Officer and Director of Open Scholarship and Research Data Services, Harvard Library

Description: The Harvard Open Journals Program (HOJP) is a new Harvard Library-based initiative that aims to advance the equitable and sustainable publication of open access (OA) journals at no cost to readers seeking access and no cost to authors seeking to publish. Comprising two models, HOJP provides guidance, resources, and funding for developing and stabilizing no-fee OA journals. With the Academic Press Model, we work with Harvard faculty and researchers and not-for-profit academic presses to furnish operational costs for the short-term, while collaborating with partner organizations to establish community-supported funding mechanisms for the long-term. Still in the early stages of development, the Repository Overlay Model seeks to leverage open infrastructure throughout the publishing lifecycle to support repository-hosted, or ‘overlay,’ OA journals. In this presentation, we will discuss HOJP from conception and planning to development and launch. We will cover the motivating factors that led us to create the program and its constituent models; the importance of collaboration and fostering partnerships; lessons learned and present challenges; and our current and next steps as we continue to build and strengthen the program.

Title: On Building Transgeographic Teaching Networks: The Digital Library of the Caribbean Open Educational Resources in Caribbean Studies Development Program

Presenter: Tania Ríos Marrero (she/her), Project Coordinator for the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

Description: The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com) is a collaborative international digital library that preserves and provides open access to cultural, historical, scientific, and research materials from and about the Caribbean. Established in 2004, dLOC consists of over ninety partner institutions that contribute collections and share governance over the organization. More than a digital repository alone, dLOC serves both as a hub for teaching and research initiatives and as an international network of partners, scholars, educators, students, and broader publics.

The Revitalizing the Digital Library of the Caribbean initiative (2022-2026) is a project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build, strengthen and sustain the dLOC organization and community. This initiative prominently features a OER stipend program (https://dloc.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/teaching-resources/) to support the development of open educational resources (OER) in Caribbean studies.

This presentation will be facilitated by the team member responsible for designing and implementing the dLOC OER program at the University of Florida. It will include a broad overview of the grant initiative and a discussion of the OER program including summary, goals, timeline, resources, metrics for success, outreach, review and selection, and publishing. The session will discuss accomplishments as well as challenges and lessons learned as the program enters its third year of operation. In particular, it will emphasize community engagement and collaboration across geographic and linguistic boundaries as central to the program’s development and the production of OER in Caribbean studies.

Active Session: Challenges & Opportunities – GenAI & Open Educational Resources

Day/time: May 7, 2025, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.

Title: Challenges & Opportunities – GenAI & Open Educational Resources

Presenters:

• Erin Fields (she/her), Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of British Columbia
• Will Engle (he, him) Open Education Stategist, University of British Columbia

Description: The introduction of GenAI will have a large impact on teaching and learning in higher education. For open educational practices, including creating and sharing open educational resources and open pedagogy in the classroom, the impacts are already being felt. This session will provide an overview, including examples, of how OER is being impacted by GenAI.

Additionally, the session will discuss the potential of AI in generating dynamic content, including interactive textbooks, and its potential in developing open educational resources and practices. We will also engage in discussions about the legal and ethical considerations of both AI and open education including copyright, privacy, and open licensing. In this workshop we’ll dive into practical exercises, including the co-creation of a textbook chapter, demonstrating the real-world application of AI in OER.

Individual Session: May 7, 12:00-1:00

Day/time: May 7, 2025, 12:00 p.m. to 1 p.m. EDT

Title: A Global View on the Evolution of Open Book Publishing

Presenter: Zoe Wake Hyde (she/her),  OMP Coordinator, Public Knowledge Project

Description: This presentation explores global open book publishing trends, considering the movement to diversify how we define a ‘book’, an assessment of the book production software landscape, a map of developing support structures, and other insights informed by research conducted by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) into use of Open Monograph Press (OMP). OMP, an open source tool developed by PKP and adopted by 400+ publishing initiatives globally to publish monographs, edited volumes and other kinds of long-form scholarship, has recently been subject to an in-depth strategic review to ensure responsiveness to community needs. While crucial to our collective knowledge, book publishing has seen a slower uptake of open practices than journal publishing, evident in the vast difference in adoption between OMP and PKP’s journal offering, Open Journal Systems (OJS), which supports 50,000+ journals worldwide. However, in line with their commitment to making research a public good, PKP is investing in support for open book publishing and growing our collective understanding of how knowledge creators worldwide are sharing all forms of long-form scholarship. Presenting case studies based on OMP users across North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, this session seeks to shine a light on how book publishing practices are evolving, how that is informing the next generation of book publishing infrastructures, and how library publishers can develop more book-oriented pathways to contribute to our collective knowledge, without the need to implement a traditional press structure.

Title: Beyond Journal Publishing: Adapting OJS for internal grant applications

Presenters:

• Priscilla Carmini (she/her), Digital Repositories Librarian, University of Waterloo
• Israel Cefrin (he/him), Information Technology Specialist / Developer, University of Waterloo

Description: Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal publishing system that has enabled scholars worldwide to share openly access scholarship outside of the confines of the traditional journal publishing landscape. The thoughtfully created review process, the array of plugins, and variety of customization options have allowed journals across all disciplines to facilitate a reading experience on their journal website that is unique to their brand. The adaptability of OJS has also allowed it to be developed for other use application use cases, including to facilitate the application of internal grants at post-secondary institutions.

In 2015, Israel Cefrin, the Information Technology Specialist/Developer, at the University of Waterloo, collaborated with a department of post graduate studies to develop a grant application process using OJS 2.0 for post graduate research grants at Universidade Estadual do Rio Grande do Sul (UERGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Since transitioning to his role at the University of Waterloo, Israel Cefrin and Krista Godfrey, Head of Digital Initiatives, successfully piloted a grant application process using OJS 3.3 for an internal grant at the University of Waterloo called the Graham Seed Fund. During the 2024-2025 academic year, Priscilla Carmini, Digital Repositories Librarian, and Israel Cefrin have since added four more grants to the pilot, in addition to the Graham Seed Fund, and will likely expand the program further during the 2025-2026 term. During this session, the presenters will describe the lessons learned from the initial pilots, the development of the grant service, and the ways in which OJS can be adapted out of the box (i.e., no changes to core code) to support grant application processes.

Title: Taming the Beast: Leveraging A Large Scale Platform Migration for Strategic Program Goals

Presenters:

• Lisa Schiff (she/her), Associate Director, Publishing, Archives, and Digitization, California Digital Library, University of California
• Justin Gonder, Senior Product Manager, Publishing, California Digital Library, University of California

Description: The phrase “platform migration” can strike fear into the heart of any team, especially if the platform provides the complex workflows of journal manuscript management systems. CDL’s recent experience migrating its 90 eScholarship journals from OJS to Janeway, though no small task, ultimately converted that dread to enthusiasm! Facing a daunting migration scale, the team leaned on the time-honored strategy of running a pilot to manage complexity; we identified a small cohort of journals to work in close consultation with in order to surface any unidentified gaps in the new platform and our migration plan. We intended initially to follow this pilot with a refined, formulaic migration of the remaining journals, moving them to the new platform as quickly as possible. However, we discovered, in the course of the pilot, that this hands-on approach opened up all kinds of opportunities to more deeply engage with our editors and advance our publishing program in ways that have nothing to do with technical infrastructure. By extending our timeline and continuing with our original consultative strategy, we built stronger connections between journal editorial teams and eScholarship staff and made space for:

Securing participation by the editors in DEI training
Increasing adoption of CC licenses within our publications
Ensuring journal author agreements met our current practices and were being properly used

In this session, CDL staff will discuss our consultative journal migration strategy, tools, and templates, and the unanticipated, significant positive outcomes that this approach to platform migration enabled.

Panel Session: Removing barriers: how libraries and university presses collaborate to effect change

Day/time: May 7, 2025, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. ETD

Title: Removing barriers: how libraries and university presses collaborate to effect change

Presenters:

• Jennie Collinson (she/her), Director of Sales & Marketing, Liverpool University Press
• Allison Levy (she/her), Director, Brown University Digital Publications
• Mary Rose Muccie (she/her), Executive Director/Scholarly Communications Officer, Temple University Press
• Jessica Fiorillo, Harvard Education Press (Moderator)

Description: Organized by the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) Library Relations
Committee, this session highlights successful collaborations between university presses and
libraries, showcasing the lasting impact they can have on the wider academic community.
Three case studies provide insight into how collaborative initiatives came to fruition, how
these partnerships have long-term benefits for both the libraries and the presses, and
ultimately how the initiatives contribute to a shared mission of removing barriers to the
publishing of research and the pursuit of knowledge.

There are presentations on:

• North Broad Press, a joint imprint from Temple University Press and the Temple University
  Library that publishes peer-reviewed open textbooks by Temple faculty.
• Trailblazers, a new open access initiative from Liverpool University Press that champions
  the often overlooked early-career researcher. Run in partnership with Lancaster University,
  University of Liverpool, and University of Salford (UK).
• Brown University Digital Publications, a Library-based born-digital publishing program
  that offers training workshops for HBCU scholars and library professionals seeking to gain
  expertise in developing open access born-digital scholarship.

AUPresses and the LPC are collaborating on the University Based Publishing Futures
initiative – the Library Relations Committee is contributing to the advocacy work of that
initiative through this session.

BOAF Session: Exploring the Landscape of Peer Review Models

Day/time: May 6, 2025, 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. EDT

Title: Exploring the Landscape of Peer Review Models

Presenters:

• Iliana Cosme-Brooks (she/her), Open Publishing Coordinator, Virginia Tech
• Corinne Guimont (she/her), Associate Director, Publishing and Digital Scholarship, Virginia Tech
• Patrick Tomlin (he/him), Associate Dean, Academic and Creative Engagement, Virginia Tech
• Cheryl Ball, Executive Director, Council of Editors of Learned Journals
• Eugenia Zuroski (she/they), Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, President of CELJ
• Sarah Salter (she), Professor of Pedagogy, English Dept Emory University, Vice-President CELJ

Description: Peer review is often a crucial step in producing modern, rigorous scholarship and, therefore, carries a lot of weight within the publishing process. But as definitions, modalities, and topics of scholarship have evolved, new peer review models have been created and piloted to meet these changes. Understandably, many questions have emerged regarding the relationship between open access publishing and open peer review; how to conduct scholarly peer review for nontraditional digital scholarship; and the ethical implications of every peer review model.

This session will be a semi-structured discussion on the nuances of different peer review models—exploring perceptions and impacts of various models on the entire publishing process. Discussion topics will include:
A comparison of open vs. closed peer review models, especially how they impact multiply marginalized authors, “junior” and nontenured scholars, production costs and labor/capacity, compensation and credit, and consent.
“Hybridization” of peer review models—i.e., combining open and closed models— identifying what counts as “rigorous” and “scholarly,” and the various definitions of “open” and “closed.”
How to approach writing or adapting peer review models for nontraditional formats (e.g., digital humanities and multimedia publications).
Accessibility of the peer review process—how reviewers of different abilities can participate, especially if publications may not yet be fully accessible.
What policies do we have or could we develop as library publishers to support an evolving peer review landscape.

Active Session: Leveraging Student Expertise: Collaborating with Graduate Assistants to Publish Open Educational Resources

Day/time: Monday, May 5, 2025, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. EDT

Title: Leveraging Student Expertise: Collaborating with Graduate Assistants to Publish Open Educational Resources

Presenters:

• Bailey Lake (she/her), Open Strategies Librarian, Eastern Kentucky University
• Kelly Smith (she/her), Director of Collections & Discovery, Eastern Kentucky University

Description: Graduate assistants (GAs) offer valuable expertise that can enhance open publishing initiatives while fostering their professional growth. In this session, we share our experience working with two GAs—one specializing in coding and another in editing—to develop high-quality, accessible Open Educational Resources (OER).

We will explore strategies for integrating GAs into OER projects that align their expertise with project goals, support institutional priorities, and address common challenges in open publishing workflows. Attendees will gain practical insights into training graduate assistants in OER, incorporating student labor into project management, and creating sustainable frameworks for collaboration that benefit both the students and the institution.

This session provides a roadmap for fostering impactful collaborations with GAs, empowering librarians to strengthen open publishing efforts and advance equitable access to knowledge.