Forum

Panel Session: A Student-Centered Approach: How to Build Inclusive and Effective Digital Publishing Teams

Day/time: May 6, 2025, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m.

Title: A Student-Centered Approach: How to Build Inclusive and Effective Digital Publishing Teams

Presenters:

• Lindsey R. Peterson (she/her), Digital Humanities Assistant Professor of Practice, University of South Dakota
• Mariah Cosens (she/her), CWRGM Researcher and History MA student, University of South Dakota
• Alessandra Diaz (she/her), CWRGM Researcher and History BA student, Columbia University
• Amiracle Funches (she/her), BA, History, CWRGM Researcher and Historic Objects Collections Cataloger
• Amanda Patrick (she/her), MLIS, CWRGM Researcher, University of Southern Mississippi

Description: Incorporating student labor in library publishing projects presents challenges, such as the significant time commitment required to train students with little to no prior experience. Yet, well-structured university publishing programs that are responsive to student needs demonstrate that student involvement can be highly rewarding for both the project and students’ professional development.

Since its inception in 2019, the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project (CWRGM) has trained over 60 student researchers and editors in skills essential to digital publishing. Funded by the NHPRC and NEH, CWRGM is publishing more than 20,000 Civil War and Reconstruction-era documents from Mississippi’s governors’ offices with high-resolution images, metadata, transcriptions, and annotations at cwrgm.org. To accomplish this goal, CWRGM assembled a dynamic team of student researchers from across the nation who are at various stages in their careers.

The proposed panel features five student researchers and editors—including one now serving as project co-director—who have worked on CWRGM’s metadata, transcription, and annotation teams. Drawing on their experiences, panelists will discuss strategies for recruiting students from diverse academic and personal backgrounds, structuring project workflows to accommodate students’ varied schedules and commitments, and addressing challenges such as high turnover.

Panelists will also highlight ways to empower students by aligning project tasks with their career aspirations, providing meaningful skill development opportunities, and mentoring them to leverage their project experience into future academic and professional roles. Additionally, the panel will address methods for using anti-racist and reparative editing strategies for creating a supportive and inclusive work environment where students feel valued and motivated.

By centering student rather than faculty voices, this panel offers actionable and reproducible strategies for digital publishing projects with research initiatives and student training platforms. Together the panelists demonstrate how editorial projects can prepare the next generation of publishing professionals while advancing the accessibility of historical resources.

Individual Session: May 6, 12:00-1:00

Day/time: May 6, 2025, 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.

This session includes two individual 15-minute presentations and three 2- to 3-minute lightning talks.

Title: Overdue Knowledge: Teaching & Learning via Student-led Journals in the Library

Presenter: Rebecca Wojturska (she/her), Open Access Publishing Officer, University of Edinburgh

Description: Academic publishing is an area often associated with a lack of transparency. What goes on behind the scenes and how does publishing really work? One of the many merits to Open Access is not only opening up research but the practices that make it possible. Embedding this knowledge from undergraduate level has the potential to help students flourish when it comes to approaching academia or publishing as a career path. But how can librarians help?

Edinburgh Diamond, situated within Edinburgh University Library, provides free publishing services to academics, staff and students of the University of Edinburgh who wish to publish their own Diamond Open Access books and journals. The service currently has eight journals that are led by student-groups across the University, showcasing a variety of research from internal students as well as researchers of all levels worldwide. Edinburgh Diamond aims to grow this offering to increase publishing transparency and to equip students with skills and knowledge in academic publishing, including: launching a journal, managing workflow, facilitating peer-review, coordinating submissions, understanding editorial, production, marketing and promotion processes, and the importance of indexing, metadata and discoverability.

This presentation will demonstrate how the service aims to engage with students to develop their understanding and practical application of publishing knowledge, as well as how the process of running their own journal enhances the learning experience. Furthermore, this presentation will look at Edinburgh Diamond’s history and growth of student-led publishing, highlight student feedback, and share plans for the future.

Title: Building Bridges between Publishing and Teaching

Presenter: Gabriela Mircea (she/her), Digital Project Librarian, University of Calgary

Description: A few years ago, I attended the Libraries as Publishers: Building a Global Community, a two-day satellite pre-conference held in advance of IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress. I recall some presentations demonstrating how close the librarians were working with students and faculty to incorporate journal publishing within courses. Ever since that event, I have been intrigued by the idea, and I wanted to learn more about the library’s role in incorporating journal publishing into education.

In 2022, while on research leave at McMaster University, I set out to examine the level of support from academic libraries in incorporating journal publishing in teaching. In this context, I looked at the similarities and differences between the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities, Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) libraries in Canada, and between CARL libraries in Canada and Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries from the US.

The initial work was focused on building and refining the research instrument. I used a mixed-method study that provided sufficient depth of detail to gather relevant data for the research topic. To collect the data, I used a survey. The questionnaire included questions about staffing, maturity of publishing services, number of hosted journals, level of instructional, technical, and production support, service level agreements, policies and workflows, level of participation in journal publishing instruction by library staff and/or assisting faculty to incorporate journal publishing into teaching. Follow-up questions captured information on documentation, course framework, and syllabus.
The presentation will share key findings on how libraries integrate journal publishing in education.

Title: Undergraduate Journal Workflows Project

Presenter: Christopher A. Barnes (he/him), Assistant Professor and Digital Publishing Librarian, Adelphi University

Description: Academic librarians are frequently asked to support and publish student-led journals featuring undergraduate scholarship. Student editors and faculty advisors look to library publishers for guidance on all aspects of the publishing process, from developing policies and selecting platforms to organizing the review process and production workflow. By following the example of professional scholarly journals, these undergraduate journals can provide students with educational experience as editors, peer reviewers, and authors of peer-reviewed publications.

As closely as these student journals model themselves on their professional counterparts, however, they are necessarily different by virtue of their undergraduate leaders and authors. New editors must be found and trained to replace those who graduate, for example, and graded coursework should be prioritized over involvement with an extracurricular publication. Furthermore, faculty members must find time to help and advise on a myriad of issues, often at the busiest times of their year. Finally, the educational purpose of the journal must not be lost in the effort to edit and publish the next issue, meaning that more time must be allotted to student authors, editors, and peer reviewers as well as the faculty and staff members who advise them. Successfully supporting and publishing an undergraduate journal on a regular schedule year after year is therefore one of the more difficult responsibilities a library publisher can face.

The undergraduate journal publishing workflows project is aimed at better understanding how successful journals are organized and published with the support of academic librarians. Inspired by the Library Publishing Workflows project, the goal will be to analyze and diagram the responsibilities, schedules, and internal policies that have enabled a variety of undergraduate journals to operate successfully for multiple years. This presentation will offer an overview of the initial stages of the project and solicit library publishers who would like to participate.

Title: Open Access to Publicly Funded Research in China: Policies, Platforms, and Accessibility

Presenter: Feng Yang (he), Professor, Sichuan University

Description: Funding agencies for various types of scientific research, as key stakeholders in the management, decision-making, and allocation of public funds, hope to ensure that research outcomes have a “public” nature. On the other hand, the continuous accumulation of public funds and the growing number of research outcomes have led to an increasing demand from the public for access to and utilization of these results. Therefore, open access to research outcomes funded by public funds is an important way to unlock the potential of research results and a key safeguard for social innovation and development. In China, public funding for scientific research is a crucial means by which society generates knowledge, shares knowledge, and promotes social development. This also gives public institutions the authority to impose funding conditions that require researchers to fulfill corresponding obligations. How are these policies regulated? In order to safeguard the public’s right and ability to access and utilize research outcomes supported by public funding, which public institutions in China are currently constructing open access platforms? What are the specific circumstances of these public institutions in the practice of implementing open access policies for research outcomes? How is accessibility ensured?

Title: An Ultra-Brief Look at Aperio’s Platform Migration

Presenter: Dave S. Ghamandi (he/him), Open Publishing Librarian and Managing Editor, Aperio, University of Virginia

Description: Since our 2019 Library Publishing Forum presentation where we first outlined our new press, Aperio has gone through some significant changes. We recently switched our service provider from Ubiquity Press to Fulcrum. Our journal program remains our main focus, and it is now powered by Janeway (via Fulcrum’s contract). This presentation will briefly explore some of the reasons why Aperio migrated, challenges faced, and benefits gained.

This presentation is done with a spirit of solidarity and to report back to the community from where much has been drawn over the years. Attendees considering migrations are encouraged to follow up with Aperio staff for continued conversation.

BOAF Session: Looking at Accessibility and Archiving of Open Access Books – A Copim Open Book Futures Workshop

Day/time: May 6, 2025, 12:00 p.m. to 1 p.m. EDT

Title: Looking at Accessibility and Archiving of Open Access Books – A Copim Open Book Futures Workshop

Presenters:

• Gareth Cole, Loughborough University Library
• Joanne Fitzpatrick, Lancaster University Library
• Dr Rupert Gatti,O pen Book Publishers, Thoth Open Metadata, Cambridge University

Description: One of the Copim Open Book Futures project’s core tenets is embracing open infrastructures and community led-initiatives. Open Book Futures is all about how to scale and deepen the impact of community-led initiatives working to deliver a sustainable, equitable and bibliodiverse future for OA book publishing.

Our proposed session will take a closer look into the interconnected worlds of Archiving and Accessibility for open access books. We would like to invite discussion around how we can collectively work to ensure that open access content remains freely accessible in the long term. We are keen to hear about the challenges, requirements and practicalities participants have experienced at their institutions. We also want to hear about experiences with accessibility requirements for open access content, responses to changes in national and international legislation over accessibility and digital content, to then collaboratively explore how these might be met through publishing workflows.

Following a brief introduction into our work on Archiving and Accessibility, we invite participants to share their opinions, specific needs, expertise and concerns around archiving and accessibility. We hope for these conversations to be informative for participants, as they will learn about current activities as well as issues faced by other participants, and will also help the team with their work on developing new tools, shape technical protocols and share good practices for open access publishing, so that publishers can help to meet the needs of their readers.

The session will be structured around two core themes, each representing a critical pillar of the OA book publishing ecosystem: 1) Archiving and Preservation: Safeguarding the Legacy of Open Access; and 2) Accessibility: Ensuring Inclusivity and Equity in Open Access. Each theme will be introduced by short presentations by one of our experts, followed by the opportunity to engage in direct knowledge exchange.

BOAF Session: Structuring Library Publishing Programs One Step At A Time

Day/time: May 6, 2025, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EDT

Title: Structuring Library Publishing Programs One Step At A Time

Presenter: Jordan Pedersen (she/her), Research & Scholarship Librarian, University of Guelph

Description: Are you starting a library publishing program, refreshing a program that needs some care and attention, or amalgamating and cutting services? Developing a structure can result in easier maintenance and promotion of services, better alignment between goals and outcomes, and can surface concerns (and responses) to questions of equity and accessibility. This session will cover some of questions you should consider, and will provide sample documentation and checklists for structuring a publishing program.

The session will take the format of a world-café, with 3 rounds of breakout groups to give participants a chance to approach the topics that are the most interesting or relevant to them. These discussions will be summarized in a collaborative document.

Sample topics for the breakout groups may include:
• Scoping publishing services: who is involved and what is included
• Documentation: developing and maintaining admin guides, policies and procedures
• Outreach and user relations: getting the word out, creating service agreements, celebrating successes
• Accessibility in publishing programs: legal requirements and moral obligations
• Partnerships and connectivity: who do you want to work with, indexing, standards, and more!

This session builds off recent work at the University of Guelph to develop sustainable services.

Active Session: Open Access, Open Metadata, Open Archiving: How to Liberate Metadata Flows across the OA Landscape

Day/time: May 6, 2025, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.

Title: Open Access, Open Metadata, Open Archiving: How to Liberate Metadata Flows across the OA Landscape

Presenters:

• Toby Steiner (he/his), COO, Thoth Open Metadata
• Vincent van Gerven Oei, punctum books & Thoth Open Metadata
• Hannah Hillen, Thoth Open Metadata

Description: Now that open access is rapidly becoming the mainstream mode of publishing scholarly publications, including monographs and edited collections, integrating open metadata management into book production workflows, library cataloging systems, and long-term archiving solutions is gaining importance and urgency.

This workshop will seek to showcase the metadata workflows of a sample of open access library and university publishers from across the globe – including presses from the Netherlands, the UK, the US, Latin America, and Africa – through the usage of Thoth Open Metadata (https://thoth.pub/), a non-profit open source and community-led platform providing innovative metadata management and distribution solutions tailored to tackle the problems of getting open access books and chapters into the book supply chain, ensuring their long-term discoverability, sustainability and accessibility.

We show how fully open and reusable metadata (released under a CC0 dedication) are ingested, managed, and then exported and disseminated to a variety of platforms including, but not limited to, OAPEN, DOAB, the Open Book Collective, JSTOR, and Project MUSE; how DOIs get auto-registered with Crossref for books and chapters alike; and how publications are automatically archived in open repositories such as the Internet Archive and Zenodo through the Thoth Open Archiving Network, a novel, open, transparent and auditable alternative to existing long-term preservation mechanisms.

Following an introductory presentation of these open workflows, we would like to engage participants in an open discussion of the topics raised to learn more about attendants’ backgrounds, needs, and recommendations – with an aim to scope applicability of the proposed workflows to different national contexts and corresponding specificities.

Panel Session: Exploring ways to increase global participation in a diamond open access journal: the case of the Special Issue at JLSC

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

Presenters:

• Janet Catterall (she/they), Senior Project Officer, Open Access Australasia
• Shenmeng Xu (she/her) Librarian for Scholarly Communications Digital Lab, Vanderbilt University
• Andrea Quinn, Law Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Research Services, Emory University School of Law
• Frances Andreu (she/her), Scholarly Communications Librarian, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Janaynne Carvalho do Amaral (she/her), Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Samir Hachani, Professor, School of Library Sciences-University of Algiers
• Eleanor Colla, University of Melbourne

Description: The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (JLSC) is a diamond open access (OA) journal founded in 2012 and published by Iowa State University Press continuously in annual general issues. JLSC pursues a global authorship and readership.

JLSC is publishing a Special Issue (SI) Open Access: Diverse Experiences and Expectations. The impetus was twofold: to commemorate and evaluate 10 years of OA since JLSC’s original 2014 Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe, and to respond to a 2023 internal report which identified that not only were the vast majority of JLSC’s submissions coming from the US, but also the rejection rate for submissions coming from non Northern/Western countries was proportionally much higher. Submissions from the Global South* were few and most were rejected and only 1% of JLSC’s peer reviewers came from these countries. Despite a stated interest in “diversity, equity, and inclusion in scholarly communication, including such areas as anti-racism, anti-oppression, and decolonization” (https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/site/about/), manuscripts from the US, Canada and Europe remain predominant, and work continues to determine why. This SI aims to advance themes of diversity and inclusion highlighted in the 2014 publication by expanding topics, authorship, editorship, and peer review – to present the “diverse experiences” of “voices from around the globe.” (JLSC, 2014.)

We propose a panel of members of the 2024 Special Issue Working Group- who represent four geographic areas and multiple educational and cultural backgrounds- to discuss our approach to the following issues in implementing the SI:

● Expanding the voices and themes represented in the original.
● Crafting an explicitly inclusive call for abstracts
● Designing a fair, representative selection process.
● Recruiting diverse perspectives and experiences among our guest editors.
● Increasing diversity of our reviewers to match the increased diversity of manuscripts
● Engaging audience experience in a concluding discussion of the limitations of our approach and ways to improve outcomes.

We hope this panel will generate conversation and provide insights to assist others in increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in their publishing initiatives.

* The authors recognise that the term “Global South” is problematic as it is not a geographical designation but one based on access to wealth and political power. The origin of the term lies in European and US institutions and structures, and it has been used to create a hierarchy among countries. In using the term, we reject negative connotations and are aware that many countries in the South are increasingly at par with rich Northern countries. We use the term here to denote those countries not traditionally included in the current model of scholarly publishing still dominated by Europe and the US.

Active Session: Managing relationships through boundaries: A library publishing discussion

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

Cap: 40 attendees

Presenters:

• Erin Jerome, Library Publishing & Institutional Repository Librarian, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Anne Cong-Huyen, Research & Engagement Librarian for Humanities & Social Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Esther Jackson, Scholarly Communication Technologies Librarian, Columbia University
• Kathryn Pope, Digital Repository Manager, Columbia University

Description: “Boundaries are good for everyone.” Veronica Arrellano Douglass

This session, facilitated by librarians and library staff supporting digital publishing programs within academic libraries, discusses the role of labor, relationships, and care in the provisioning of services to our academic communities through the frameworks of Human-Centered Leadership (HCL) and Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT). By their nature, library publishing programs may be small, run by staff supporting many other library programs, and are often competing for inter-libraries development resources and technical support. Boundaries are an essential communication mechanism and management tool used to maintain healthy relationships, safeguard against staff burnout, and protect space needed for program and service growth.

The session facilitators will reflect on the importance of boundaries, defined within RCT as “a place of growth and productivity rather than restriction and separation,” for establishing and maintaining manageable publishing programs with respectful constraints that center the needs of the people involved: academic staff, students (graduate and undergraduate), and faculty. (Schwartz 39)

After prepared comments, attendees will join facilitated breakout rooms to discuss their experiences with boundary-setting.

Works Cited

Arrellano, Veronica. “Boundaries as Meeting Places.” Presentation. CALM 2023 Conference.

Schwartz, Harriet. Connected Teaching: Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education Routledge: New York. (2019)

Marone, Mark. (2024) “How Human-Centered Leadership Helps People Adapt to Change,” Harvard Business Publishing

BOAF Session: Enhancing Accessibility in Library Publishing: Challenges, Best Practices, and Sustainability

Day/time: Tuesday, May 6, 2025, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. EDT

Presenters:

• Valrie Minson (she/her), Associate Dean of Research and Executive Director of LibraryPress@UF, University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries
• Tracy E. MacKay-Ratliff (she/her), Director of LibraryPress@UF, University of Florida Smathers Libraries
• Kat Nguyen (she/her), Publications Editorial Coordinator, University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries
• Ella Terran (she/her), Design and Publishing Assistant for LibraryPress@UF, University of Florida Smathers Libraries

Description: The importance of accessibility in library publishing cannot be understated, as indicative of recent legislative mandates. This proposal outlines a session designed to highlight current accessibility legislation, best practices, challenges, and sustainable solutions within the realm of library presses. The session begins with a concise conversation emphasizing why accessibility matters, its impact on readership, and the role it plays in upholding the values of library publishing.

Following the introductory discussion, participants will be directed into specialized breakout rooms tailored to specific publishing formats and accessibility: Journals, eBooks, and Print Books/Print on Demand. Each breakout room will serve as a collaborative space where attendees can share insights, exchange strategies, and reflect on practical questions such as: What accessibility best practices have you implemented and what challenges did you face? What are the barriers preventing the implementation of desired accessibility practices? What tools (AI or otherwise) do you use to facilitate accessibility? Are the current solutions sustainable long-term, or do they need adaptation?

By fostering dialogue and sharing experiences, this session aims to build a collective understanding of what is achievable, spotlight gaps, and inspire actionable steps to advance accessibility in publishing practices. Participants will leave with a clearer vision of shared challenges and innovations that can be adapted or developed to enhance accessibility in their own work environments.

Panel Session: Beyond Diamond: Exploring Dialectical Materialist Open Access

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

Title: Beyond Diamond: Exploring Dialectical Materialist Open Access

Presenters:

• Dave Ghamandi (he/him), Open Publishing Librarian and Managing Editor, Aperio, University of Virginia
• Brianne Selman (she/her), Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian, University of Winnipeg
• Sam Popowich (he/him), Digital Infrastructure Librarian, University of Winnipeg

Description: In this panel presentation, we plan to analyze and demystify open access (OA), and by extension, scholarly communication and library publishing, through a dialectical materialist lens. Dialectical materialism, with its focus on viewing things as interconnected, in constant motion, developmentally, and as they actually exist, encourages us to place greater emphasis on people and processes rather than viewing things in isolation and as unchanging. It is an underutilized framework in the OA and library publishing space. We will begin with a brief explanation of dialectical materialism and three major concepts: (1) use value and exchange value contradiction; (2) commodity fetishism; and (3) the forces of production and relations of production contradiction.

We will then enter into a general discussion where we apply these concepts to OA and library publishing. One goal is to begin testing via conversation how far these concepts can be applied, especially as OA objects are intangible and inexhaustible. To aid in doing so, we’ve ordered these concepts logically and will move back and forth between the abstract concepts and concrete reality to understand each better. We will problematize existing ways of thinking about OA, library publishing, and our relations with each other. To what extent does library publishing reinforce or challenge commodity fetishism? Does OA mystify social dynamics in new ways that hurt workers? Using the three concepts as anchor points will also allow us to explore issues such as epistemic positioning and OA-as-a-gift.

The latter part of the discussion will focus more on library workers and will generate several novel implications for practice. We will do this building on labor discussions from previous Library Publishing Forums and by applying the concept of relations of production more explicitly. By synthesizing all of our concepts, we aim to equip the audience with new ways of understanding the conditions of and strategizing for librarian-publishers.