Forum

March 21, 2023

Panel: May 11 2:45

Day/time: May 11, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD

Title: Metadata for Everyone: Identifying Metadata Quality Issues across Cultures

Presenter: Julie Shi, Digital Preservation Librarian, Scholars Portal

Description: Metadata is crucial to the dissemination and communication of research. Well-formed metadata facilitates discovery and access and provides contextual, technical, and administrative information in a standard form. Yet metadata are also sites of tension between sociocultural representations, resource constraints, and standardized systems. Formal and informal interventions in metadata spaces may be interpreted as metadata quality issues, political acts to assert identity, or strategic curatorial choices to maximize discoverability and visibility. In this context, we engaged with Crossref on the Metadata for Everyone project to understand how metadata quality, consistency, and completeness impact individuals and communities.

Working from a sample of records known to have erroneous, incomplete, or otherwise imperfect metadata, this project set out to identify and classify the issues stemming from how metadata and communities press up against each other to intentionally reflect (or not) cultural meanings. Beginning with an overview of the context and our qualitative approach, this presentation will go on to discuss various metadata quality issues that were identified and the typology we developed to better understand them. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and describing next steps.

Title: Puppies as a Veneer for Cheering Genocide: How Should a Press React When an Accepted Manuscript is Problematic?

Presenters:

• Abram Shalom Himelstein, Editor-in-Chief, University of New Orleans Press
• Chelsey Shannon, Editor, University of New Orleans Press

Description: It was good enough to make it into the accepted stack, but a deeper editorial dive found racist language and a pro-colonial genocide epistemological framing in a book about a certain dog breed. This editorial crisis coincided with the national reckoning in the summer following the murder of George Floyd, and the collective conversation about structural racism underpinned our analysis of how we had arrived at this moment: with a racist book, a signed contract, and an author who was ready to dig in his heels.

In working through the manuscript and this blunder, we created a language through which we figured out how to move forward, both with the manuscript and as an office, creating policies and processes to prevent a recurrence of such a problematic manuscript in the accepted stack.

Chelsey Shannon (she/her[s]), editor of the University of New Orleans Press, raised the alarm and began the conversation. Ultimately, Chelsey created a heuristic for (future) manuscript intake and consideration, and editor-in-chief Abram Shalom Himelstein (he/his) took on the role of demanding changes from the author or, in the case of refusal, withdrawing the publication agreement. (Hi… it is us writing about ourselves in the third person.)

This stumbling block ultimately moved the Press toward a systematized way both of evaluating possible acquisitions and of distributing the psychically difficult work of dealing with authors who are unwilling to engage honestly with the racism and other forms of prejudice in their work and make changes.

March 21, 2023

Active Session: Discovering, Using, and Getting Involved with the Library Publishing Curriculum

Day/time: May 11, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD

Title: Discovering, Using, and Getting Involved with the Library Publishing Curriculum

Presenters:

• John W. Warren, Director and Associate Professor, Publishing, MPS in Publishing, George Washington University
• Johanna Meetz, Publishing & Repository Services Librarian, Assistant Professor, Ohio State University

Description: The Library Publishing Curriculum (https://librarypublishing.org/resources/library-publishing-curriculum/) encompasses a suite of synchronous and asynchronous professional development offerings for librarians, which are open and free to use and adapt under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This dynamic, extensible curriculum is intended to empower library publishers to meet local demands to launch and/or enhance scholarly publishing activities. The Library Publishing Curriculum Editorial Board has been working to develop a new Introduction Module, to complement the existing Content, Impact, Sustainability, and Policy Modules.

In this interactive session, we will introduce the new Introduction Module, explore its content, and participate in a brief activity from the introduction’s Instructor Manual. We will also discuss how you can use the Curriculum in your outreach efforts at your institution, and how you can get involved in the future development of the Curriculum.

March 21, 2023

Full Session: Making Beautiful Books and Articles: Lowering the Costs of Open Access and OER Publishing via Automated Typesetting

Day/time: May 11, 2023, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. ETD

Title: Making Beautiful Books and Articles: Lowering the Costs of Open Access and OER Publishing via Automated Typesetting

Presenters:

• Dione Mentis, Coko Foundation COO
• Christina Tromp, Ketida Project Manager
• Julie Blanc, Paged.js Developer
• Julien Taquet, Paged.js Developer
• Karen Lauritsen, Open Education Network, Publishing Director

Description: Library publishers are often beholden to contractual typesetting processes which can cost $3 – $5 per page and add weeks onto the production timeline. Pagedjs is an automated typesetting solution that is 100% open source and community driven which can drive down the cost and time to almost zero. The Coko Foundation team and the Open Education Network Publishing Director will present Paged.js and how it is used to produce beautiful books and articles for open access and OER publishing. Learn about the realities of automated typesetting from a team of experts with real word experience.

March 21, 2023

Panel: May 11 1:15

Day/time: May 11, 2023, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. ETD

Title: When Does Your OER Program Become a Library Publishing Program?

Presenters:

• Stephanie Western, OER Program Manager, Utah State University Libraries
• Becky Thoms, Head of Digital Initiatives, Utah State University Libraries
• Erica Finch, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Utah State University Libraries

Description: The OER program at this large, public institution began as a grassroots effort between the library and two faculty members in 2013. Today it is an established program that has awarded more than $60,000 in grants and facilitated student saving exceeding $3.7 million. And, as our program enters its tenth year, it is at a crossroads. We will discuss our OER Team’s journey into OER publishing. What kind of support we’ve offered, what platforms our authors are using, what we have learned and improved. Major questions at the forefront as we assess our future:

• Should the library take on the role of publisher?
• How much oversight should the library have over quality control, diversity and equity, and ensuring accessibility through the creation of alternate formats?
• Are OER considered author publications in the same way that commercially-published textbooks are?
• How is this reflected in the library catalog and stacks, and how is it represented in the tenure process?

We will conclude with a discussion of the potential risks and rewards of scaling up the OER Program to fully embrace the role of library publisher and suggestions for how to assess your own program and facilitate these discussions at your institution.

Title: Indexing of Student Journals: Barriers and Opportunities for Discoverability

Presenter: Mariya Maistrovskaya, Digital Publishing Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries

Description: Despite the growing number of student-run academic journals and the predominant electronic and open access nature of their publication, their content is not easily discoverable online. Traditionally, academic journals seek to expose their content via commercial or non-commercial indexes, aggregators, and databases, many of which have specific (often very strict) inclusion criteria. Do any of those criteria present barriers to the inclusion of student journals? How well (or poorly) are student journals represented in the major indexes and databases? And finally, what does discoverability mean to student journals, and do they actually aim to be included in academic indexes or do they pursue other content promotion opportunities?

This presentation reports on the results of an original study of Canadian student journals that looks at the above questions from two perspectives: that of indexes and their requirements, and that of student journal editors and their views on discoverability. It features student journal specific indexing tips, discoverability do’s and don’t’s, and insights from interviews with index representatives and student journal editors.

Title: Going Wayback: Digitally Preserving a Defunct Student Journal

Presenters: 

• Noah Churchill-Baird, MLIS Student, Western University
• Kristin Hoffmann, Research and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Western University
• Emily Carlisle-Johnston, Research and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Western University

Description: Regular turnover in student journal editorial teams is a challenge to maintaining consistent publication and succession planning for student journals. This precariousness can contribute to a greater frequency of student journals that come and go over time. Library publishers need to work towards robust preservation programs that can address the need to preserve journal content when journals cease or become inactive, as discussed by the LPC’s Preservation Task Force during the October 2022 Community Call.

There are also specific challenges with preserving content from student journals that began and ceased before a library publisher was even aware of their existence. What strategies can we use to preserve content we were not involved in publishing in the first place?

To explore this question, we will draw on our experiences of migrating a defunct student journal — the NeoAmericanist—to Open Journal Systems (OJS) in fall 2022. We will share our observations about the project’s implication for the work of supporting student journals as a library publisher. We will discuss what we have learned from this process and some of the key decisions we had to make without knowledge or insight into how decisions were made in the first place.

Previous LPF sessions have discussed reasons why student journals have ceased and methods for supporting the preservation of publications from student journals. While our presentation will briefly touch on these elements, we will explore the NeoAmericanist migration to OJS as a case study in managing journal preservation projects. We’ll discuss using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to access missing content from lost webpages, and how this exercise in journal preservation has informed how we engage with student editors of active journals to support their publications.

March 21, 2023

Keynote: Deborah Poff

Day/time: May 11, 2023, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. ETD

Title: to come

Description: to come

March 21, 2023

Panel: May 10 2:45

Day/time: May 10, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD

Title: Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing at the Big Ten Academic Alliance

Presenter: Kate McCready, BTAA Visiting Program Officer for Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing, Big Ten Academic Alliance + University of Minnesota Libraries

Description: Collective action between University-based publishing programs is rare. Library publishing programs often make-do with shallow budgets and generally focus on serving internal affiliate needs. University presses cross institutional boundaries with their authors, but the presses themselves are in direct competition with one another. They also have complex financial structures that can constrain them from working on multi-institutional efforts beyond outsourceable production work. At the same time, many university-based publishing programs desire to eliminate, or severely limit, the influence of commercial publishers in the scholarly publishing arena. They also desire to bring their work to a scale that greatly expands academy-owned open access publishing capacity. This landscape is ripe for exploration.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance’s [BTAA] Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing initiative is striving to understand the common challenges and shared strengths of university-based publishing with the goal of identifying avenues for collective action. This initiative is part of the work to advance the BTAA’s BIG Collection’s work to unite the collections of the Big Ten university libraries and to achieve the primary goal of: “Within the Big Ten: Any content, from anywhere, to anyone ….now and into the future.” This initiative has the goal of participating in the transformation of academic publishing and scholarly communication through investigating and outlining a multifaceted, sustainable course of action to strengthen academy-owned publishing within the BTAA.

This presentation will showcase the initial work of the initiative which began with an inventory of publishing activity across the Big Ten that both examined the processes being employed and the publications being produced, and also asked publishing experts where there were common challenges and opportunities for collaboration. The presenter will share the main themes that were identified through the survey, interviews, and focus groups, and will also explore the possibilities for collaboration that have surfaced.

Title: The Role of Library Publishing in Making Non-Traditional Research Outputs Count

Presenters:

• Christie Hurrell, Director, Lab NEXT, University of Calgary
• Robyn Hall, Scholarly Communications Librarian, MacEwan University

Description: Researchers across disciplines are increasingly expected by institutions and funders to engage in knowledge mobilization activities and to openly share a variety of research outputs for the benefit of both researchers and knowledge users in a wide range of contexts. Researchers engaged in knowledge mobilization efforts often create non-traditional outputs that may not easily find a home with established scholarly publishers, who largely remain focused on traditional forms such as journal articles, monographs, and textbooks. As such, researchers may face barriers to openly disseminate, preserve, and track the impact of non-traditional outputs.

Library publishing services are well-placed to support researchers producing non-traditional outputs such as reports, policy briefs, data sets, podcasts, digital multimedia projects, and infographics. Research repositories can typically host and preserve a wide variety of content and format types, make these works widely discoverable, and track downloads and other measures of impact. In addition, librarians and library publishing staff have expertise in copyright, research metrics, and digital preservation. By leveraging this infrastructure and expertise, libraries have the opportunity to more broadly disseminate non-traditional outputs, package them in a professional fashion, and assist researchers in more precisely articulating their impact. As such, exploring the ways in which libraries can support this growing area is important as publishing teams expand their scope to include a diverse range of research outputs. It may also help libraries support new research impact evaluation practices and bolster the knowledge mobilization goals of their institutions and researchers.

This presentation will outline preliminary research results focused on researcher perspectives and library practices in Canada and the United Kingdom concerning the role and function of non-traditional research outputs. Attendees will be encouraged to consider ways that library publishing services, including but not limited to research repositories, can make these works more discoverable, visible, and measurable.

Title: Ethics, Epistemology, and Scholarly Communication: How Epistemic Injustice Emerges throughout the Scholarly Communication Lifecycle

Presenter: Emily Cox, Collections & Research Librarian for Humanities, Social Sciences, & Digital Media, NC State University

Description: This presentation will discuss how recent work in the area of epistemic injustice can help us better understand the inequities in the scholarly communication lifecycle. Broadly speaking, epistemic injustice is when a person is not recognized as a knower. More specifically, there are two types of epistemic injustice particularly relevant to scholarly communication: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker suffers a credibility deficit due to prejudice. Exploring this injustice can shed light on barriers marginalized scholars face in scholarly publishing that are potentially unjust and harmful. Hermeneutical injustice is related to a lack of shared social understandings between communities. This kind of injustice can help to clarify the injustices marginalized scholars encounter at professional developments events, such as conferences. By examining some aspects of scholarly communication through the lens of epistemic injustice, we can more clearly examine practices which are inequitable and develop an understanding of how scholars are impacted by these practices.

March 21, 2023

Full Session: Practice What You Preach: A Conversation about Transparent Publishing with the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

Day/time: May 10, 2023, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. ETD

Title: Practice What You Preach: A Conversation about Transparent Publishing with the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

Presenters:

• Kristina Clement, Editor in Chief of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (Student Outreach & Sponsored Programs Librarian, Kennesaw State University)
• Hilary Baribeau, Managing Editor of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (Scholarly Communication Librarian at-Large)
• Casey McCoy-Simmons, author of “OER State Policy Discourse: Adding Equity to the Cost Savings Conversation” from the first issue of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (PhD Candidate in Higher Education at the University of Denver)
• (Moderator) Chelsee Dickson, Associate Editor for Innovative Practices, Columns, & Reviews for the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Kennesaw State University)

Description: Transparent publishing practices in academic publishing is becoming a major topic of conversation as authors navigate an increasingly complex scholarly communications landscape. However, it is still rare to see journal publishers, rather than scholars and librarians, engage meaningfully in this conversation. This presentation will be an open conversation between editor-in-chief, Kristina Clement, the managing editor, Hilary Baribeau (both of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE)), and first-issue author, Casey McCoy-Simmons, a doctoral student at the University of Denver. JOERHE is a new, diamond open access journal for higher education practitioners to feature, discuss, and share information related to open educational resources. A large portion of the conversation will focus on the mission of the journal, which is to practice what it preaches: transparency and openness for its authors, readers, reviewers, editorial staff, and editorial board. JOERHE practices transparency in its publishing practices by openly peer reviewing research articles. Authors know the identities of their reviewers and reviewers know the identity of the authors whose articles they are reviewing. Authors and reviewers can converse through the journal platform throughout the review process, and all reviews are published alongside successful articles. This process provides visibility and transparency in the progress of the articles from submitted drafts to final publications. Additionally, the editors and the author will discuss the reasons why it is important for library publishers to practice openness and transparency in our contributions to scholarly conversation. The panel will be moderated by Chelsee Dickson, Associate Editor for Innovative Practices, Columns, & Reviews for JOERHE, who will ask a series of prepared questions. We will also solicit questions ahead of the conference and presentation and select a few questions to be featured in the presentation. There will be a sizable portion of the session dedicated to audience Q&A so that an authentic conversation can take place in addition to the prepared conversation.