Forum

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.

Active Session: Library publishing: We can’t do everything, so should we just quit?

Day/time: May 5, 2025, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EDT

Title: Library publishing: We can’t do everything, so should we just quit?

Presenters:

• Rachel Molina (she/her), Digital Publishing and Repository Librarian, Indiana University Indianapolis
• Olivia MacIsaac (she/her), Research Information Management Librarian, Indiana University Indianapolis
• Jere Odell (he/him), Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship, Indiana University Indianapolis

Description: Library budgets and their investments in journal publishing have been under strain. At the same time, journals, policy makers, authors, editors, and funders expect more and more. Linked-data, persistent identifiers (PIDs), XML, accessibility, funding notifications, new formats, glitzy websites – where does it end? Given the demands, what is the least that a library can do to work within the values of the library’s mission without losing professional integrity? How can a library publishing program honor the organization’s intentions to foster and pursue equity for knowledge creators when budgets are tight?

This session proposes a model for assessing a library publishing program’s investment in a non-revenue generating open access journal publishing service. The model may be used to help a library make decisions about when to take on new titles or when to launch new publishing initiatives (e.g., monographs). Likewise, it will serve as a tool to identify journals that may be at risk of losing the library’s services. Tools of this nature may provide useful starting points for discussions between libraries, editors, and administration interested in forming or sustaining scalable university-based publishing initiatives.

CLOSING PLENARY: Here’s to the Next 10 Years!: Developing a Community Vision

Day/Time/Room
May 16, 2024 | 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. | Memorial Hall

Title: Here’s to the Next 10 Years!: Developing a Community Vision

Facilitators:

• Melanie Schlosser, LPC Community Facilitator
• Elizabeth Bedford, University of Washington, LPC Program Committee Co-chair
• Jennifer Coronado, Butler University (PALNI), LPC Program Committee Co-chair

Description: Join us for a dynamic closing session where we will grapple together with the question, “Where do we want to be in ten years?” What to expect: 

• Small and large group discussions
• Thinking about the future at the individual, program, and field level
• A focus on high-level shared goals, AND
• A focus on opportunities for collective action

Facilitated by Melanie Schlosser, Jennifer Coronado, and Elizabeth Bedford, this session will attempt to tie together threads from throughout the conference, while using Katherine Skinner’s opening keynote as a springboard for envisioning our collective future. 

Keynote: Moments, movements, and momentum: What comes next?

Day/Time: May 15, 2024, 8:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.

Room: Memorial Hall

Keynote Speaker: Katherine Skinner, Research Lead, Invest in Open Infrastructure

Description: A decade ago, Educopia, together with 60 universities, seed-funded and hosted the inaugural Library Publishing Forum. In that formation moment, library publishers forged a collective identity and shared crucial information with each other about how their publishing ideas and experiments were becoming institutionalized as new scholarly publishing practices. Over the last decade, we’ve seen library publishing grow into a full-fledged movement that shares close ties to the open access, open source, and open infrastructure movements. This talk will take us back to revisit the vision and aims declared in the early years and look at the ways these have manifested since that time. Skinner will sketch out the story of how that initial moment has spurred the larger movement of “library publishing” and look at its connections to other social movements both past and present. Skinner will also challenge us to think together about our current momentum and plans and will ask us what stories we want to tell at the celebration in 2034 of our second decade together.

PANEL: Workflows and Tools

Day/Time/Room
May 16, 2024 | 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. | Ski-U-Mah Room

Title: Piloting Publishing Platforms for Infrastructure and Equity

Presenters:

• Karen Lauritsen (she/her), Senior Director, Publishing, Open Education Network, University of Minnesota
• Jamie Witman (she/her), Open Educational Practices Specialist, Open Education Network, University of Minnesota

Description: The Open Education Network (OEN) supports the development, publishing and distribution of open textbooks through community, programs and services to make higher education more equitable for students. We aspire to support anyone who wants to publish an open textbook. This vision is guiding our development of new pathways and programs, and towards what we hope is a more equitable publishing landscape that includes more voices. That translates into creating multiple pathways and infrastructure to support our diverse community. We want to support people at institutions that may not have access to publishing infrastructure. With that in mind, we are piloting Manifold and Ketida. In this presentation, we’ll talk about what we’ve learned so far. We’ll discuss both the tool tradeoffs and the human process involved.

Title: One Path, Many Tools: Publishing Getty’s Open-Access Journal

Presenter: Greg Albers (he/him), Getty

Description: The path for publishing an academic journal is well established. You collect submissions, manage peer review, edit the articles, prep and organize images and other assets, create the publication, and get it out into the world. This is the standard publishing path, from point A to point B, but the tools you can use to follow it are as varied as the path is straight.

Some journal publishing tools bundle all the pieces together, while others are highly specialized and meant to be chained together ad hoc. Some tools are hosted for you, while others you maintain on your own. Some tools stick to the tried and true process, and others offer unique features and alternate ways of doing things. You might make the tools, you might buy them, or you might get them for free. There are myriad options, each with their benefits and drawbacks, the goal is to find the tools that work best for you.

In this presentation, we’ll share the tools we used at Getty (Scholastica, Microsoft Word, Pandoc and ImageMagick, Quire, GitHub, Netlify) when we relaunched the Getty Research Journal as a self-hosted multiformat publication, under an open-access license. This will include a brief look at each tool, what it offers, and why we chose it, along with some open discussion about the many other options out there.

Title: Platforms, Policies, and Formats of Undergraduate Journals in North America: Preliminary Results from a Systematic Analysis of 100 Journals

Presenter: Christopher Barnes (he/him), Digital Publishing Librarian, Adelphi University

Description: Library publishers are frequently involved with undergraduate journals on their campuses, from providing guidance to editorial teams and technical support when issues arise to serving as their publisher and handling all aspects of the production workflow. While there are many resources available to publishers of undergraduate journals, there are no recent studies of undergraduate journals published in North America that look at their platforms, policies, and formats. Having obtained a list of over 300 undergraduate journals published in North America from the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR), I have developed a rubric which I can use to evaluate various components of the publications themselves, as well as the way they are run by students and faculty members.

I will use the list from CUR to identify 100 undergraduate journals in North America which have been published for at least three years, are spread across the region, and represent a wide range of institution types, from community and liberal arts colleges to large state and private research universities. Technical aspects to be analyzed include the platform used (e.g., WordPress or Weebly), the final format (e.g., PDF or HTML), the presence of a copyright or OA license statement, levels of compliance with web accessibility guidelines, and whether a DOI is assigned to the issue or individual works. I also intend to examine the websites for information about sponsoring departments, structures of editorial boards, the roles played by faculty advisors, and how review is conducted by editors, peers, and members of the faculty. In this presentation, I will share my preliminary findings and discuss the second part of the project in which I intend to contact each journal with a short survey about their internal workflows to inform a follow-up article.

PANEL: Open Access

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. | Ski-U-Mah Room

Title: Flipping to Diamond Open Access: Interviews with LIS Journal Editors

Presenters:

• DeDe Dawson (she/her), Science & Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Saskatchewan
• Rachel Borchardt (she/her), Scholarly Communications Librarian, American University
• Teresa Schultz (she/her), Scholarly Communications & Social Sciences Librarian, University of Nevada, Reno

Description: Librarians are often at the forefront of advocacy for a transition to an equitable open access (OA) publishing system, but many of our own journals remain behind paywalls or charge inequitable author fees to publish OA. About half of Library and Information Science (LIS) journals use such hybrid models or do not offer OA publishing at all. We recently conducted a survey of editors of LIS journals that have not transitioned to a diamond OA model (without fees for authors) and learned that a journal’s financial situation is a barrier and many editors indicated a lack of awareness of their journal’s budget. It was also apparent that editors may not be fully aware of the diversity of diamond OA funding options available to support this transition.

To further investigate these financial and other perceived barriers preventing LIS journals from transitioning to a more equitable diamond OA model, we interviewed 15 lead editors of LIS journals: eight from journals that remain behind a paywall and seven from journals that have successfully transitioned from subscription to a fully diamond OA model. In this session we will discuss preliminary results from this qualitative research, including dominant themes emerging from the initial coding of interview transcripts and our early interpretation of these themes. Ultimately, we hope the results from this research will assist in the development of solutions and supports for LIS journals in making this transition to an equitable diamond OA publishing model. And we anticipate that members of the Library Publishing Coalition may be critical partners in the success of such potential solutions and supports in the future.

Title: Subscribe to Open (S2O) as a DEIA-Friendly Open Access Model

Presenter: Elizabeth W. Brown, Publisher Relations Manager, Project MUSE, Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press

Description: Publishers and authors should seek more equitable and inclusive business models for publishing open access content. Subscribe to Open (S2O) is one such model that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a library subscription model, S2O has no APCs or other costs to authors or publishers and no limits on authors due to institutional affiliation or geographical location. While not limited to any particular kind of publisher, S2O certainly has been a boon for non-profit scholarly publishing, which plays a vital role in ensuring diversity in scholarly publishers. Some S2O offerings have also given a much-needed impetus for journals in humanities, which often do not have the funding streams of other fields such as STEM, to embrace open access.

I will dig further into the DEIA implications of S2O, providing a general overview of the model and current offerings available as well as drawing from Project MUSE’s experience in preparing to launch what is the largest S2O offer of its kind. As one of the first to offer S2O through an aggregation, Project MUSE is not just providing convenience for libraries; through Project MUSE, university presses, societies, academic departments, and other non-profit publishers can now sustainably publish open access journal content, which they could not have done on their own.

Title: Analyzing the Publishing Output of an R1 Research Institution: The First Four Years

Presenter: Elaine Walker (she/her), Scholarly Communications Librarian, The University of Alabama

Description: In 2018, The University of Alabama earned the status of Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity, formerly known as R1, from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education framework. This session will provide an update on the findings of analyzing the institutional publishing output using data from Web of Science, with a focus on open access publishing, in the first four years after achieving this highly regarded status. Open Access publishing allows research findings to be available and accessible to all while advancing the growth of its relative discipline to drive innovation. Some of the key findings included are the top journals and publishers, percentage of publications published under an OA model, and an annual average of funds spent on Gold Open Access publishing. Conclusions drawn from the data indicate the departments where open access publishing is being practiced and identifies areas that would benefit from increased open access publishing. This research will inform the foundation for developing targeted open access awareness campaigns, backing a potential publishing fund, and supporting a campus-wide open access initiative to utilize the institutional repository that will not only benefit individual faculty’s research citations and impact, but will also enhance the university’s overall standing, building upon its current reputation and research output.

PANEL: Student Publishing

Day/Time/Room
May 16, 2024 | 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. | Heritage Gallery

Title: Publishing Pedagogy: How Institutional Repositories Empower Undergraduate Research

Presenter: Dylan Mohr, Syracuse University

Description: This presentation explores the transformative role of institutional repositories (IRs) as pedagogical instruments rather than just platforms for sharing research. While IRs traditionally serve as endpoints for academic work in higher education, this talk challenges this notion by emphasizing the critical inclusion of undergraduate contributions.

Beyond merely housing student work, this discussion delves into why integrating student work into IRs matters and how it can benefit undergraduates. By framing publication as a pedagogical strategy within undergraduate classrooms, the session draws on a growing body of scholarship showcasing the positive impact of publishing student work beyond the confines of a single instructor’s assessment. This approach has demonstrated notable increases in student engagement and performance.

Furthermore, the talk highlights the unique position of IRs in offering experiential learning opportunities across diverse disciplines. It specifically delves into the case of SURFACE (Syracuse University’s Institutional Repository), illustrating how its integration into syllabi across four courses facilitated diverse learning outcomes. The discussion extends to how leveraging different facets of the IR, such as addressing issues in scholarly communication and navigating copyright concerns, supported educational goals within these classrooms. Ultimately, this presentation aims to spark a conversation on harnessing IRs as versatile pedagogical tools.

Title: Dynamic Texts: Student Voices in Course Materials

Presenter: Micah Gjeltema (he/him), Open Education & Affordable Content Librarian, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Description: In contrast to traditional textbook models, Open Educational Practices enable students to engage and respond to assigned materials in order to enhance their own learning while adding the unique context of their experience for future students to benefit from and build upon. This session will explore several student-centered learning materials projects supported by University of Minnesota Libraries. Projects include a STEM textbook assembled and edited by students, student-designed learning modules for K-12 education, and Freshman Seminar materials contributed by students as topic experts. We will explore potential structures for facilitating student creation including collaborative texts, individual contributions, and curated collections while examining ways in which libraries can support these endeavors. These illustrations will allow for a broader conversation on Open Educational Practices and the opportunities and challenges inherent to the solicitation, creation, and use of student-authored learning materials, including representation, motivation, and privacy.