Forum

May 3, 2018

Principles and pragmatism: Navigating the choppy waters of library publishing infrastructure (LPC Membership Meeting)

Wednesday, May 23, 8:30-9:30am
Room: Memorial Hall

Recent events have highlighted both our community’s reliance on commercial partners to provide infrastructure and our initiative in building platforms of our own. Both approaches involve a complex weighing of benefits, challenges, and compromises. During this discussion-based meeting, we will share our strategies for navigating these waters and identify ways that we – as individual programs and as a profession – can help ensure successful outcomes for both approaches.

All LPC members and Forum attendees are welcome to join in the discussion!


May 1, 2018

Reception

Tuesday, May 22, 6:00-8:00pm
Weisman Art Museum
333 E River Road
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Directions

The Weisman is an 11 minute walk from the Graduate Hotel. From the hotel’s main doors, head right (west) along Washington Avenue. Cross Washington Avenue at Harvard Street and continue west on Washington until you come to Church Street. When you’ve gotten this far, follow the sidewalk to the left to head toward Coffman Union. (You will be about a story above street level if you stay left.) The Weisman is the bright shiny silver building directly to the west of the Union.

If you need help arranging alternative transportation to the reception, please email contact@librarypublishing.org.

Program

There will be two rounds of informal lightning talks during the reception – a sponsor showcase and an LPC committees and task forces showcase. Remarks will begin around 6:30pm.

Galleries

As a special bonus for Forum attendees, the Weisman galleries, including the Prince from Minneapolis exhibit, will be open and available to Reception attendees. Be sure to wear your Forum badge, and leave any bulky bags or backpacks at the hotel.

Food and drink

The reception will feature heavy hors d’oeuvres, and each registered Forum attendee will receive two drink tickets.

 


April 11, 2018

Full Session: Taking the Leap: Experiences Planning and Implementing a Migration to OJS 3

Tuesday, May 23, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Heritage Gallery

Presenters: Sarah Hare, Indiana University; Emma Molls, University of Minnesota; University of Minnesota; Ted Polley, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Description: The Public Knowledge Project announced the release of Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3 in August 2016. In addition to a more streamlined interface OJS 3 offers important functionality, including more flexible roles, new plugins, and even the ability to operationalize XML-first publishing.

However, almost two years after the official release, several library publishers have not yet migrated to the newest version of OJS. In addition to the technical support needed to successfully plan and execute the migration, implementation often involves extensive outreach to editors on system changes and new functionality.

At the same time, library publishers that do decide to migrate often work in isolation, asking colleagues on listservs, Github, or other online forums for advice or information about their experience migrating. There are no formal community-developed outreach materials for library publishers to share communally and implement locally.

This session will present three case studies for the transition to OJS 3. One case study, from the University of Minnesota, will explore the migration from bepress to OJS 3. Two others, from Indiana University and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, will explore migrating a multi-site instance from OJS 2 to OJS 3. Each case study will be grounded in information about the library publishing program, timeline, size of the department, and level of technical support available.

In addition to presenting our process for completing the migration, we will share tangible outreach materials with participants. These include communication templates, training outlines, videos, and wikis created to support journal editors transition to OJS 3. The session will also present obstacles to success, which we hope will prompt a discussion about how to improve others’ planning process and eventually build community around this topic.


April 11, 2018

Full Session: What OA Policy Administrators, I.R. Managers, and Scholarly Communication Officers Want from Publishers

Tuesday, May 23, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Presenters: John G. Dove, Paloma & Associates; David Scherer, Carnegie-Mellon University; Barbara DeFelice, Dartmouth College; Jonathan Bull, Valparaiso University

Description: What do librarians involved with scholarly communication programs, such as open repositories and author rights consultation, want from Subscription Journals? What do they want from Open Access Journals? Here’s your chance to make your wishes known!

We will break into three working groups to come up with three lists:
What should subscription journals agree not to do if they claim to support Libraries?
What would friendly practices and policies for supporting open repositories, author rights, and open and public access policies look like from subscription journals?
What can Open Access journals do to be more Library friendly?

Grist for this mill:
http://goo.gl/VjTbo5
https://unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=1657
https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16699/18181


April 11, 2018

Panel: Discovery

Wednesday, May 23, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

On Adding Platforms to Improve Sustainability: The Case for the Minimal Journal

Kerri O’Connell and Alexander Gil Fuentes, Columbia University

Description: Library publishing programs extend significant value to the scholars on their campuses through service-based partnerships in which the particular needs of individual publications and their editors may be uniquely accommodated. Especially for programs with dedicated library IT personnel and a preference for open-source platforms, the idiosyncratic needs of scholars and their scholarship may be attended through platform selection and customization—but such programs mature at a cost. The accretion of “technical debt,” attributable to platform multiplicity and bespoke solutions, when combined with robust approaches to online security and software patching, creates negative downstream consequences as staff time becomes increasingly allocated to maintenance tasks over new project builds. Many successful projects and publications result from this high-touch approach, but are there less resource-intensive approaches available over time? And how might one assess and tack toward such solutions?

In an attempt to mitigate against the future costs to maintain software customizations made to legacy publishing platforms, program staff at Columbia University Libraries have begun to examine our current offerings and the extent to which peer review and submission management software is necessary for each of our partners. Our goal is to identify editors who may not have a need for elaborate publication management and editorial workflows and to provide them with a lightweight alternative. With an eye toward sustainability, scalability, and reduced overhead around future platform maintenance and upgrades, we have begun to formalize discussions with current and prospective editorial partners: How extensively are the editors of this journal using the platform(s) provided to them? Is the perpetual availability of a content management system necessary for the publication of each journal’s content? Are there alternative workflows and software solutions that the library’s digital scholarship group can offer to scholars who require only minimal infrastructure to publish online?

To accommodate editors who fit into this category of minimal publication needs, we are experimenting with new options for journal publishing that will not rely on our standard toolset (WordPress and Open Journal Systems), but will instead leverage static site generation in order to share scholarly outputs. This panel will explore the project requirements, assessment frameworks, and service implications of this additional platform offering.

 

Strategies to Improve Visibility and Reuse of Library-Published Journals

Marianne Reed, University of Kansas Libraries

Description: Library-published journals all need visibility in order to survive and thrive. Visibility increases the journal’s standing in the scholarly community and attracts readers, submissions, reviewers, and editors. It’s especially important for niche journals or those that are just launching to take steps to make sure that journal content reaches as wide an audience as possible. The success and visibility of library-published journals also enhances the prestige of the library publishing program and encourages more journals to publish with the library.

My presentation will outline the practical steps that the University of Kansas Libraries’ Digital Publishing Services and our editors have taken together to successfully increase the visibility of our journals and their content. Our strategies include making almost all of our journals open access, with machine-readable Creative Commons licenses added wherever possible; adding back issues to the journal website; providing DOIs for journal articles through CrossRef; adding journals and article metadata to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); encouraging editors/authors to talk about the journal/articles at their discipline’s conferences and on discussion lists; putting policies on sharing in the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publisher policies; advising editors about working with aggregators, as well as more unusual methods such as providing a venue for editor-hosted meetings of reviewers and other members of the scholarly community in that discipline.


April 11, 2018

Panel: Intersections of Library Publishing and Pedagogy

Wednesday, May 23, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Heritage Gallery

Expanding Scholarly Communication Instruction for the Next Generation of LIS Leaders: Building an Open Educational Resource to Support the Work of Scholarly Communication

Maria Bonn, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Description: Librarians have become a major stakeholder in the open education movement. However, many of the courses in which we are taught our craft are still bound by traditional commercial texts. The open, collaborative nature of OER lends them a unique ability to support community-driven learning and sharing, making them an ideal venue for introducing new learners to a dynamic, aspirational field like scholarly communication. Librarians from three institutions – Kansas, Illinois, and NC State – are developing an OER for training librarians and other learners about what scholarly communication librarianship is and what it has the potential to be. This presentation describes our work developing a collaborative, community-driven, dynamic OER for introducing students and practitioners to scholarly communication.

Publishing Literacy in the For-Credit Classroom: Assessing Indiana University Journal of Undergraduate Research Student Editors

Sarah Hare, Indiana University

Description: Library publishers are in a unique position to educate undergraduate students on publishing and scholarly communication concepts. In addition to being experts in ethical publishing practices and open access funding models, library publishers often offer a publishing platform that is open to everyone affiliated with their institution, including undergraduate students.

In Fall 2017, the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Indiana University took undergraduate outreach a step further by developing a one-credit hour course for the student editorial board of the Indiana University Journal of Undergraduate Research (IUJUR). The course attempted to balance practical fundamentals—for example, learning OJS and evaluating submissions using IUJUR-specific rubrics—with larger concepts, including understanding and critiquing various peer review models, comprehending the value of open access, and grappling with ethical dilemmas.

This session will discuss how including undergraduates in library publishing outreach efforts can promote a publishing program while also furthering the library’s information literacy goals (ACRL, 2015) and the institution’s student retention ambitions (Council on Undergraduate Research, 2017). It will also describe the readings, case studies, and discussion prompts used throughout the course. While not every librarian will be able to create a for-credit course, these active-learning materials are modular and can easily be integrated into other outreach endeavors.

Finally, the session will discuss the instrument used to assess student learning. The presentation will build upon other work on assessing undergraduate publishing literacy and student confidence before and after library outreach (Weiner & Watkinson, 2014) to present formative and summative assessment strategies participants can adopt.

Beta Testing an Open Access Monograph Publishing Lab: Brainstorm Books at UCSB Library

Sherri L. Barnes, University of California, Santa Barbara; Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, Punctum Books

Description: Sherri L. Barnes, University of California, Santa Barbara; Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, Punctum BooksBrainstorm Books, an imprint of open access (OA) academic publisher punctum books, was launched in 2017 by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Literature and the Mind program. The unusual cohort responsible for the production of the first Brainstorm titles included: nine UCSB undergraduates; two PhD students; an English professor; a scholar-publisher; a scholarly communication librarian; and a data librarian. UCSB Library, an advocate for advancing transformative, no-fees OA publishing, interdisciplinary research, and collaboration, hosted the experimental publishing lab in its Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory. In the two-quarter seminar / workshop-style lab, students with no prior publishing experience worked in teams to undertake the copyediting, proofreading, source verification, typesetting, and graphic design of three scholarly books written by non-UC authors. In addition to navigating and learning library systems, style manuals, and Adobe Creative Suite software, to help students better understand the business, legal, and related practical challenges of academic publishing as a “content industry,” students were also offered mini-tutorials on: (a) the history of the OA movement; (b) the history of the book; (c) the state of the art and the business of contemporary academic publishing; (d) the history of copyright and intellectual property; and (e) disputes and trends within particular information industries.

University-based open access book publishing, as a symbiotic creative collaboration between students, faculty, librarians, authors, and a publisher with shared interests yet different skills and resources, is an easily adaptable model that serves multiple purposes: (a) to provide a university-based OA publishing option for scholars who want a high-quality editorial and design experience, which places a premium on the author’s vision, and values experimentation and accessibility; (b) to present an alternative career path for PhDs interested in working in public, mission-driven scholarly communications; and (c) to provide undergraduates with an interdisciplinary, experiential, and skills-based experience.


April 11, 2018

Full Session: Getting the Word Out: Strategies for Reaching Your Readers

Wednesday, May 23, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

Presenters: Kathryn Conrad, University of Arizona Press; Emily Hamilton, University of Minnesota Press; Becky Welzenbach, University of Michigan Library; John W. Warren, Mason Publishing Group/George Mason University Press

Description: A publisher can make a book openly available but beyond creating good metadata, what can you do to help it find its audience, and assess whether it has? This session, organized by the Association of University Presses’ Library Relations Committee, focuses on how to promote the discovery of open monographs, with an emphasis on low-cost strategies such as social media, and tactics for directly engaging authors in promotion. We’ll talk about barriers to discovery but also about how readers are finding new, open scholarship on the web, and how publishers can reach those readers where they are. We’ll discuss scheduling and budgeting for promotions, as well as promotional tactics such as publicity, outreach, and engagement. While the session primarily deals with research and practice focused on books, many of the strategies can also be used to promote journals and other kinds of scholarship.

Participants will:
Gain a better understanding of how readers find open books.
Learn practical, low-cost strategies they can use to promote their books.
Discover ways to improve outreach and engagement for titles and series.
Gain insights on scheduling, budgeting, and publicity.


April 11, 2018

Full Session: Developing Library Support for Publishing Expansive Digital Humanities Projects

Wednesday, May 23, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Presenters: David Hansen and Paolo Mangiafico, Duke University Libraries; Liz Milewicz, Duke University

Description: Addressing the theme of libraries tackling new challenges, this workshop session explores how research libraries can support expansive digital humanities publishing projects—projects that are interactive and dynamic in their content as they span and often grow over time across multiple content types, audiences, and contributors. Recognizing that the digital humanities are often not static, and change and grow as the scholarship and its community expands, what role can libraries and the institutions that back them play in planning, growing and sustaining these publications? How can institutions adequately evaluate and reward this type of scholarship, particularly when the audiences and collaborators for these publications extend beyond the academic community?

Workshop leaders will briefly present preliminary ideas to start the discussion, based on a separate meeting of library publishing leaders held in April 2018 at Duke University under a new Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to address library services in support of expansive digital publishing. This workshop will focus on five areas of support: 1) planning, 2) resource allocation and production; 3) discovery; 4) evaluation; and 5) preservation and sustainability. Participants will be asked actively contribute in a roundtable discussion structured around each of these ideas, with the goal of helping form a collective understanding of what works and what doesn’t in establishing ongoing institutional support for expansive digital projects. Results from this workshop will be incorporated into a comprehensive report, to be released in summer 2018, that will offer a framework for research libraries to develop sustainable services within their institutional context in support of expansive digital publishing.


April 11, 2018

Full Session: Getting Found / Staying Found: Practical Strategies for Improving Discovery for Online Journals

Wednesday, May 23, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

Presenters: Roger Gillis, Dalhousie University/Public Knowledge Project; Andrea Pritt, Pennsylvania State University/Public Knowledge Project; Andrea Kosavic, York University Libraries; Sonya Betz, University of Alberta; Jeannette Hatherill, University of Ottawa

Description: For journals operating independently from large commercial infrastructure, success is very much determined by the reach and impact of the content they create. As library publishers, with limited resources at our disposal, we must find ways to effectively expose our locally published articles to automated discovery tools, as well as ensure that they are widely disseminated in the places researchers, and the public, will look for them. In 2006, the Public Knowledge Project authored a guide called Getting Found / Staying Found to help users of its popular Open Journal Systems software understand some of these issues. Now, with a recent major revision, Getting Found / Staying Found is even more relevant to editorial teams beyond the original intended audience and it can help journals using any publishing platform navigate many of the topics that make up the evolving and changing landscape of online scholarly publishing.

Join us for a panel discussion by community contributors to the second edition of Getting Found / Staying Found as they explore some of the issues of discovery addressed by the guide and how they, as librarians involved in publishing at different libraries, have tackled implementation of specific strategies, such as applying for inclusion with the Directory of Open Access Journals, negotiating representation in commercial indexes, promotion via social media, search engine optimization, digital preservation considerations, copyright and licensing, and more.


April 11, 2018

Full Session: Strengthening the Scholarly Record: A Workshop on Crafting Metadata Records and DOIs with Crossref

Wednesday, May 23, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Presenters: Jennifer Kemp and Shayn Smulyan, Crossref

Description: Everybody has some familiarity with DOIs but using them and creating them are very different roles. Fortunately, libraries are in an excellent position to do both. You may know Crossref from OpenURL linking. We also provide infrastructure that makes research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess using DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers).

This session will introduce tools and resources to help attendees get to grips with Crossref so that they can register content, link references and ensure that content is easily discovered and cited.

The workshop will focus on “Working with DOIs,” walking participants through the process of understanding: How to create a DOI, deposit metadata with Crossref, add to or edit the metadata that Crossref holds for your publications, what types of content can be registered and how metadata is used in systems throughout scholarly communications. It will also cover how to find DOIs for reference lists and the importance of linking these references to other scholarly content in a persistent way.

If you publish anything or plan to, please join us for this workshop –– ’stupid’ questions welcome!