Forum

April 10, 2018

Full Session: DigitalCommons Users Discuss the bepress Acquisition

Tuesday, May 22, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Presenters: Paul Royster, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Roger Weaver, Missouri Science and Technical University; Marilyn Billings, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Phillip Fitzsimmons, Southwest Oklahoma State University; Terri Fishel, Macalester College

Description: Since the acquisition of the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) by Elsevier last summer, there has been much discussion online, in listserves, and elsewhere about what that development means for the future of open access and scholarly communications. The people most directly affected are the users of the bepress DigitalCommons repository hosting service. Some have recoiled in horror at the new ownership situation, others are waiting to see what happens next. This is a panel discussion by current users concerning what they see in the road ahead, including what they regard as essential services, possible options, functionality requirements, and necessary safeguards.

April 10, 2018

Full Session: Extending and Measuring Impact

Tuesday, May 22, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

Presenters: Elizabeth Scarpelli, Director, University of Cincinnati Press; Jason Colman, Director, Michigan Publishing Services, University of Michigan Library; John W. Warren, Director, George Mason University Press/Mason Publishing

Description: This session centers on how to develop strategic goals and priorities with impact in mind, and how to identify and implement impact measures and assessments that are appropriate to your organization. We’ll learn how to align the goals of your library publishing organization or university press to your university’s strategic goals. We’ll examine strategies for increasing diversity and inclusion that are likewise aligned with library and university initiatives. We’ll demonstrate how impact can be extended through strategic thinking, the use of analytical tools, and creative methods. This session distills many of the lessons provided in the Library Publishing Curriculum module on Impact and is informed by a wide spectrum of library-based publishing programs. As library publishers, we seek to increase and measure the impact of our publishing programs not only to demonstrate the value our programs add to the library, the university, and the wider community, but to ensure that our portfolios and publications are meaningful and contribute to the advancement of scholarship.

Attendees will learn to:
• Strategically develop and evaluate goals and priorities for a library publishing program designed to increase impact, aligned with the strategic priorities of the university and university library, that are measurable and actionable
• Build inclusive engagement strategies that foster diversity in both authors and audiences
• Identify the range of available impact measures, recognize the merits and weaknesses of each, and selectively apply relevant measures to evaluate a specific publishing program, platform, or individual publication

April 10, 2018

Panel: The Editorial Side

Tuesday, May 22, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Heritage Gallery

Think Like an Editor

Patrick Hogan, American Library Association

Description: Library publishing initiatives offer library expertise in digital formats, institutional repositories, and metadata in order to create access to the institution’s scholarship. Simply publicizing the service to faculty, researchers, or students, however, may not be enough. While digital workflows and open access break from publishing tradition, the challenge of obtaining compelling content remains constant. In a traditional publishing operation, the acquisitions editor proactively recruits writers, coordinates with production and marketing, and develops positive author relationships along the way. Relegating that role risks a lack of cohesion or of content itself. Editorial plans, schedules, and strategic initiatives drive an editor’s work. Communication is central, and it’s not so different than the outreach of librarians to their university communities. Patrick Hogan will speak from 20+ years experience as an editor with the American Library Association and with professional/trade business books. By thinking like editors, library publishers can adapt traditional publisher practices to direct library publishing resources toward delivering the greatest value and meeting the program’s goals.

The Pain of Peer-Review for a Small Press

Amy Filiatreau, Lynn University

Description: This presentation will be a warts-and-all confessional about how a small press fought (and fought, and fought some more) to implement a rigorous peer-review process for our books.

The Lynn University Digital Press is tiny. We publish iBooks written by faculty that are used as textbooks for our students, given to them for free. The press, a part of the library, has only one full-time employee. There is very little infrastructure or administrative help. So how does a small press do peer-review?

The answer is: painfully.

It was certainly a learning process, with little help out there from vendors or partners. Over the past two years we have piloted peer-review in fits and starts, and finally have hammered out a somewhat successful program for rigorous peer-review. The presentation will show how we’ve done it: how we tried to hire a company to help us (that tactic failed), how we chose our pilot books for review, chose reviewers, requested their input, organized the responses, and more. I will share what worked, and what definitely did not. I will also propose some ways that small presses can work with one another to streamline peer-review.

Support for Multilingual Journals using Open Journal Systems 

Camille Thomas and Jessica Kirschner, Texas Tech University; Vanessa Gabler and Timothy Deliyannides, University of Pittsburgh

Description: In open access publishing, the theoretical global reach of research is not enough. This study will focus on how language affects the process of open access journal publishing at two public research institutions. This study includes cases from Texas Tech University Libraries and University of Pittsburgh Libraries.

April 10, 2018

Full Session: Fellows Forum

Tuesday, May 22, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Catherine Mitchell, California Digital Library/2017-18 LPC Board President; Reggie Raju, University of Cape Town, 2017-18 LPC Fellow; Charlotte Roh, University of San Francisco, 2017-2018 LPC Fellow

Description: Since July of 2017, Library Publishing Coalition Fellows Reggie Raju and Charlotte Roh have been participating in the LPC community, making important service contributions to task forces and bringing critical issues to the community’s attention on the LPC blog at https://librarypublishing.org/category/blog/fellows-journal/. As they move towards the end of their year-long fellowships, their work will culminate with this hour-long session at the Library Publishing Forum. Reggie and Charlotte will each give a 15-minute presentation focused on library publishing challenges and opportunities, and then will engage in discussion with each other and with the attendees, moderated by LPC Board President Catherine Mitchell.

Reggie Raju will explore how the library publishing program at institutions in the Global South are driven by a social justice and “Ubuntu” agenda. To positively contribute to this agenda the program has to be innovative, robust and flexible, ensuring that it addresses, in a functional way, the widespread lack of access to content. Reggie will discuss how the current publishing landscape does very little to address the issues of decolonization of content or the challenges of an educational system not is not affordable to the vast majority.

Charlotte Roh will discuss her experiences in the LPC Fellowship, specifically how her work with the Ethical Framework Task Force resonates for her with the dialogue around the impacts of historical bias and colonialism as well as efforts to move toward a more just scholarly communication system.

Would you like a chance to hear from Reggie and Charlotte about their fellowship experiences over the past year? Are you interested in further exploration of the topics they have raised on the blog? Do you want to get our fellows’ perspectives on a topic that’s important to you? Don’t miss what is sure to be a thought-provoking session!

April 10, 2018

Full Session: The Publishing Cooperative at the Open Textbook Network: Challenges & Opportunities in Launching an Open Textbook Publishing Program

Tuesday, May 22, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

Presenters: Karen Lauritsen, Open Textbook Network; Beth Bernhardt and Anna Craft, UNC Greensboro; Karen Bjork, Portland State University; Corinne Guimont and Anita Walz, Virginia Tech; Amanda Larson, Penn State University ; Carla Myers, Miami University

Description: Open only works if there are open materials to use and ways to produce them. Due to growing interest in supporting faculty authors, the Open Textbook Network recently launched The Publishing Cooperative with nine partner libraries. Our goal is to grow open textbook publishing expertise in higher education, and increase the availability of open textbooks for use by instructors and students around the world.

The Publishing Cooperative establishes publishing infrastructure, processes, community, and technical support to expand open textbook publishing in higher education. The founding member cohort benefits from shared professional development, while also paving the way for future professionals. Together they will publish two dozen new textbooks with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license by 2020, giving future users maximum freedom to adapt the work to meet their local student needs.

In this presentation, a panel of founding members will discuss why they joined the Co-op, and summarize its origins, purpose, and progress thus far, including challenges, surprises, and plans for collaboration and implementation at their individual institutions. They will also discuss methods for overcoming open textbook publishing challenges, including continuity of resources, technology issues, sustainability of materials, and addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion. Many founding members joined in order to address challenges they’ve experienced in establishing an open textbook publishing program and meeting author expectations without prior press work experience.

April 10, 2018

Panel: Collaboration

Tuesday, May 22, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Heritage Gallery

The Michigan Experience: A Cross-institutional, Cross-stakeholder Publishing Collaboration

Carolyn Morris, BiblioLabs

Description: This new-directions-focused presentation will discuss a multi-institutional private/public partnership between a state library, university presses, a platform creator, and a library collective. University of Michigan Press, Wayne State University Press, Michigan State University Press, BiblioLabs, and Midwest Collaborative for Library Services worked together with the Library of Michigan to create a Great Lakes Regional Ebooks Collection. This involved curating content, producing digital files, evaluating hosting platforms, establishing priorities and workflows, and gathering feedback. A vital component of this project focused on outreach and community engagement, and librarians not only curated the content but also developed sample materials, including book club questions, pinterest boards, and interactive games, for libraries to use in promoting the digital collection to residents of Michigan.

This presentation will share lessons learned along the way, from defining the vision to project launch and assesment, and will provide a valuable blueprint for any innovative partnership.

Carolyn Morris (BiblioLabs) will discuss how to apply “lessons learned” to your own organizations.

Subject Librarianship in Flux: Scholarly Communication Partnerships at Dublin City University

Alexander Kouker, Dublin City University Library

Description: Academic-led presses are well-established fixtures in the United Kingdom. They are frequently facilitated though scholarly and learned societies that have been on the publishing scene for well over 300 years. In contrast, the rise of the New University Press is a recent phenomenon with only two library-led presses in the United Kingdom explicitly committed to open access (University College London and University of Huddersfield).

In Ireland, library-led university presses do not exit … yet.

This vacuum creates an interesting challenge for subject librarians at Irish universities aspiring to transform the nature and quality of their professional relationships with faculty colleagues. Successful, engagement-centric subject librarianship requires two essential ingredients: 1) the establishment of trust between library and faculty, 2) mutual-interest projects.

My presentation offers an overview of the higher-education landscape in Ireland, followed by an introduction of Dublin City University Library and a snapshot-overview of Irish academic presses. The focus will be a case study describing how a librar(y)ian-led academic journal, Studies in Arts and Humanities (sahjournal.com), can fundamentally change the dynamics between subject librarians and faculty colleagues at Dublin City University.

Toward Justice: Reflections on A Lesson Before Dying: Community Engagement through Library Publishing

Robin A. Bedenbaugh and Holly Mercer, University of Tennessee

Description: In 2016, citizens of Knoxville, Tennessee, joined in the Big Read, a community reading program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Knoxvillians read Ernest J. Gaines’s book A Lesson Before Dying and shared their reactions in book-discussion groups. Students from a local magnet school expressed their reactions through works of art. A public forum featuring community leaders delved into the book’s themes of racism, justice, and human dignity. The Clarence Brown Theatre on the UT campus performed Romulus Linney’s dramatic adaptation of the novel.

The University of Tennessee Libraries took this opportunity to work with the community to produce a volume through Newfound Press. Founded in 2005, Newfound Press is the open access digital imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries. Toward Justice: Reflections on A Lesson Before Dying is the result of this endeavor. Robin Bedenbaugh, communication and marketing coordinator for the Libraries, conceived of the book project and served as editor, while Newfound Press published the volume. The Libraries put out a community-wide call for written responses to A Lesson Before Dying and was richly rewarded with thoughtful and heartfelt commentaries by faculty, UT students, and community members. It serves as a powerful example of how a press can contribute to civic discourse and engagement.

In 2015, UT received the Carnegie Community Engagement designation, the purpose of which is “the partnership of college and university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.”

The presentation will provide details of the book project and plans for future engagement activities for Newfound Press.

April 10, 2018

Full Session: No Publisher Is an Island: How to Find and Work with Freelance Editorial and Design Professionals

Tuesday, May 22, 1:15-2:15pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Presenters: Jody Bailey, University of Texas at Arlington; Peter Potter, Virginia Tech; Kellie M. Hultgren, KMH Editing; Madeleine Vasaly

Description: Scholarly publications require quality-control processes such as professional copyediting, design/layout, proofreading, indexing, and more. Copyeditors and proofreaders add value and aid readers by ensuring grammatical and stylistic correctness and consistency and by suggesting revisions to passages that may be ambiguous or confusing. Design professionals enhance the presentation of scholarly content and create polished products of which both publisher and author alike can be proud.

The fact is, however, that most library publishers do not hire full-time, in-house editors and designers, and so increasingly they face the prospect of hiring freelance professionals. Unfortunately, librarians often lack expertise in finding and knowing what to expect from a working relationship with freelance editorial/design professionals. Furthermore, some librarians may decide to completely forego these valuable services because of a misguided notion that they are too expensive when in reality at least some of their published pieces could greatly benefit from the value that freelance editorial/design professionals add.

This presentation will be led by two individuals who currently coordinate library publishing efforts at different institutions: a librarian with experience in scholarly journals publishing as both an in-house technical/production editor and a freelance copyeditor and a former editor-in-chief from a major university press. They will invite one or more freelance editorial/design professionals to participate in a panel and provide practical information to answer the following questions:

1. What are the reasons for hiring freelance editorial professionals?
2. When does it make sense to hire a freelancer? When should the work be kept in house?
3. Are there special considerations to bear in mind when hiring a freelancer?
4. Are there downsides?
5. How do I go about finding qualified freelance professionals?
6. How does one incorporate freelance work into existing schedules and workflows?

The presenters will allot sufficient time for attendees to pose questions as well.

April 10, 2018

Panel: Working With a Scholarly Community

Tuesday, May 22, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room

Library and Societies as Publishing Partners

Suzanne Stapleton, University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries

Description: In 2012, the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries expanded support of scholarly publishing through the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal System, locally named Florida Online Journals (Florida OJ), and entered into Memorandums of Understandings with a number of external scholarly organizations. Academic society publishers in the United States serve to disseminate scholarly information to specialized research communities. “The fundamental mission of the university library for the past few centuries has been to facilitate long-term, reliable access to the cultural and scholarly record by collecting, organizing, and preserving the materials that it contains” (Courant & Jones, 2015), but new technologies offer libraries today a chance to expand beyond content organization and provide greater support of the publishing lifecycle. This type of support is appealing to small society publishers as they struggle to survive as the scholarly publishing system transforms. Societies working with the library to publish serials include the Association for Tropical Lepidoptera, American Institute for Chemical Engineers and the Florida State Horticultural Society. Although each society presents a unique situation with particular reasons for adopting Florida OJ, all are interested in increasing discoverability and accessibility of digital scholarly content. In this presentation, we will share why society publishers are eager to migrate to Florida OJ, provide details of what services the library provides and challenges faced by these partnerships.

Coalition Publi.ca : A Canadian Initiative for a Sustainable Publishing Environment in HSS

Emilie Paquin and Élise Bergeron, Érudit.org

Description: 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.

A University Library and a Scholarly Society Walk Into a Bar… Leveraging Open-Source Technologies Together to Help Researchers Tell a More Textured Story About Their Work

Nicky Agate, Columbia University

Description: How might scholarly societies, libraries, and other nonprofit partners work together towards an expansive vision of scholarly communication outreach and dissemination that goes beyond institutional and national boundaries?
The Modern Language Association, with the aid of an NEH ODH Implementation Grant, has been collaborating with Columbia University Libraries on CORE, or the Commons Open Repository Exchange, since 2015. The repository at the heart of Humanities Commons, CORE facilitates the open-access distribution, discussion, and citation of the many products of humanities research, including pre- or postprints, conference presentations, data sets, and learning objects such as syllabi and slide decks. What makes CORE stand out, however, is its social facet—its embeddedness in the social functionality of the 12,000-member strong Humanities Commons network.
Nicky Agate will discuss the process of building and refining the repository and what both the MLA and Columbia University Libraries have learned—and continue to learn—from one another. She will propose CORE as a case study in the potential for scholarly societies, libraries, and other nonprofit entities to work together towards more useful (and more used) open-access repositories.

April 10, 2018

Panel: Non-Textual Publishing

Tuesday, May 22, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Heritage Gallery

Accessible Transformations of Early Web-based Archives

Karl Stolley and Katie Ediger, Illinois Institute of Technology

Description: We will describe our experience and efforts to rescue and accessibly redesign a digital archive that contains digitized audio files and transcripts and translations of Holocaust-survivor interviews as recorded in 1946 by Dr. David P. Boder. Our project represents a complete, accessibility-minded overhaul that addresses challenges common to digital archives and other presentations of rich-media content originally prepared for the web in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

We will describe and demonstrate how we are making a universally accessible, web-standards-compliant user interface that works across all modern devices, and also how we are writing custom scripts to automate the process of rescuing and restoring content from the original archive.

The media content in our archive was originally presented through the now-defunct Flash player. We have developed the prototype of an entirely HTML-based system for delivering the audio using the HTML5 <audio> element. Additionally, the audio is now presented alongside universally accessible transcripts and translations, which we have structured to conform to the WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) standard that the new interface presents perfectly timed to the audio recordings.

Additionally, we are creating a series of custom scripts to help rescue the transcripts and translations. Those scripts will help to automate the correction of mismatched character sets that incorrectly encode diacritics and other special glyphs from Spanish, German, Russian, and other languages. The scripts will also improve the existing presentation of the transcripts in HTML and JSON, and extend them to WebVTT.

New Directions in Digital Library Publishing: Increasing Access to Non-Textual Cultural Dance Narratives

Sara Benson, Copyright Librarian and Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Library; Harriett Green, University of Illinois Library

Description: This panel presentation will describe a developing project centered around the anthropological study of the Bele dance movement in Martinique to explore how best to develop a library based publication of a non-textual cultural heritage. The presenters will explore issues ranging from how to protect the cultural heritage of the dance participants as well as innovative methods to utilize digital media to tell the story of a dance rooted in the African diaspora. This project is an ongoing one, and audience members will be encouraged to provide comments to the panelists after the presentation with additional ideas about working with non-textual cultural heritage digital publications.

April 10, 2018

Panel: New Directions

Tuesday, May 22, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: Memorial Hall

Your Sh*it Isn’t Really Open: A challenge to all of us in ScholCommLand

Amy Buckland, University of Guelph

Description: This is a challenge to all of you: your sh*t isn’t open and that’s no longer acceptable. I know it’s been hard to get some legit funding to host a repository with PDFs. I know it’s been hard to get some legit funding to offer open services as though they are real services (no one questions ILL as a service, amirite?) But we have to do better around accessibility when it comes to open. Let’s talk small and big things we could be doing, and accept the challenge to talk about this again in 2019 and have improved our practices.

Exploring Open Data Policies for Library Publishing

Monica Westin, California Digital Library

Description: Independent library publishers have lagged behind other nonprofit and commercial publishers in implementing data sharing policies and platforms for our journals. At the California Digital Library, we have been exploring various ways to support true data sharing for our journal publishing program, both on our current journal manuscript workflow platform (a customized version of OJS) and as a requirement for future systems. In addition to improving our technical services, we have also focused on educating our journal editors on best practices around data sharing. This spring, in collaboration with the data curation group (UC3) at the CDL, we presented a webinar for our journal editors on open data policies and practices and gauged their interest in setting up a data sharing component of their submission and publishing workflows. I will provide an overview of our talking points from the webinar, including definitions and types of data across disciplines, what exactly open data means and why it is crucial in a climate of research budget cuts, and the key characteristics of several major publisher policies, from PLOS to university presses. I will also share what we learned from our journal editors regarding their knowledge about open data and their interest in working with it; and, based on this information, the data publishing options we have decided to pursue for our journal program.

Understanding the New Publishing Goals of Scholars: Toward a Sustainable Model for Broadly Accessible Library Publishing

Janet Swatscheno, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Description: This presentation introduces the Publishing Without Walls (PWW) project, which is developing a scalable, shareable model for library-based digital publishing. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Illinois Library is leading the initiative in partnership with the School of Information Sciences, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the African American Studies Department. This project aims to broaden access to scholarship while also increasing the accessibility of publishing itself to scholars from diverse institutions. We are developing a sustainable model for open access publishing that can be adopted academic libraries with varying resources. To this end, our model is guided by research on the publishing requirements of scholars, with a focus on scholars at minority-serving and under-resourced institutions, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

To guide the development of our publishing service model, we are conducting a multimodal study of the goals that scholars aim to meet through digital, open access, multimedia publishing. Through a national survey and a series of more than 20 interviews with humanities scholars, we are identifying authors’ various motivations for digital publishing, such as the desire to reach more diverse audiences; the desire to integrate heterogeneous, interactive evidence into publications; and the desire to publish “living” documents that are subject to ongoing, collaborative authorship and change. These motivations have significant implications for the design and development of publication systems and services. This study has also identified major challenges that authors perceive in publishing processes, along with a set of most-desirable services they seek from library-based publishers. In this talk we will describe the outcomes to date of this study, including the implications for library publishing and improving access to scholarship. This proposal sits at the juncture of the “New directions” and “Accessibility” conference themes.