Forum

April 3, 2024

BOAF: Scaling OER Publishing: Supporting Authors

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. | Memorial Hall

Title: Scaling OER Publishing: Supporting Authors while Prioritizing Staff Well-being

Presenter: Abbey K. Elder (she/they), Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Iowa State University

Description: In this session, Abbey K. Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University, will discuss with participants how they can scale their OER publishing efforts to meet the needs of faculty authors while prioritizing the needs of their staff. Whether publishing efforts are supported by an individual or a team, scaling support can be a daunting endeavor. Aspects to consider might include: staffing, budgets, grant support, and publishing infrastructure. In addition to sharing her own lessons learned navigating this space, Abbey will facilitate open sharing, discussion, and problem-solving among participants who share a common goal: supporting authors without overloading themselves.

April 3, 2024

FULL SESSION: Stronger Together: Diamond OA in North America

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. | Memorial Hall

Title: Stronger Together: Diamond OA in North America

Presenters:

• Brad Hemminger (he/his), Associate Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Jessica Clark (she/her), Senior Coordinator, Open Access Development, Érudit / Coalition Publica
• Sharla Lair (she/her), Senior Strategist, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Lyrasis
• Stacy Lavin (she/her), Journals Manager, University of North Carolina Press
• Kate McCready (she/her), Visiting Program Officer for Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing, Big Ten Academic Alliance
• Catherine Mitchell (she/her), Director of Publishing, Archives, and Digitization, California Digital Library, University of California

Description: An impressive number of institutions in both the United States and Canada directly support academic publishing through library publishing programs and other publishing services. Despite often limited resources, this work is frequently in alignment with the principles of Diamond Open Access, a scholarly publishing model that does not require payment from either readers or authors to participate in the exchange of knowledge. While library publishers have built significant networks through grassroots initiatives and with the help of leading organizations such as the Library Publishing Coalition, networking at the national and international level remains a challenge. Collective action and the pooling of resources at this scale may prove to be an important part of developing a robust Diamond OA publishing system.

A group of representatives from American and Canadian organizations (Big Ten Academic Alliance, Coalition Publica, Érudit, Lyrasis, University of California, University of Michigan) recently met in Toluca, Mexico at the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access and began discussing how to support North American “capacity centers” for Diamond OA, in line with the recommendations of the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access published in 2022. This panel of representatives of those organizations will share their perspectives on international action around Diamond OA, present some of our early discussions, and welcome ideas on how to expand collective action on Diamond OA in Canada and the US. Engaging across sectors, building understanding of common challenges, and identifying problems that can be solved through collaboration are essential ingredients for supporting Diamond OA long-term.

April 3, 2024

PANEL: Policies and Student Engagement

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. | Ski-U-Mah Room

Title: Library Publishing Policy Writing: A Case Study of Challenges, Successes, and Student Engagement

Presenters:

• Ally Laird (she/her/hers), Open Publishing Program Coordinator, Penn State University
• Angel Peterson (she/her/hers), Open Publishing Production Specialist, Penn State University

Description: In Fall 2021, the Penn State Libraries Open Publishing Program began the process to draft and adopt formal policies to govern our work. We treated this process as a student engagement and learning opportunity and began by hiring a student intern to review the values from our university, the Penn State Libraires, and the Library Publishing Coalition to help inform the values we wanted to adopt for our program. Our intern reviewed additional resources before drafting our policy document, including sample policy documents from peer institutions, the Policy Module from the LPC Curriculum, various COPE guidelines, the DOAJ indexing guide, and more. After reviewing these documents, our intern reviewed our Journal Publishing Service Agreement and worked to map the outlined services and requirements for editors to our needed policy sections. Of note, the “Accessibility and User Accommodations” and “Copyright, Permission, and Open Access” sections were important as they support editor requirements in our journal agreement, while the DEIA sections proved tricky as we cannot make assurances for content we do have editorial control over.

Once an outline of needed policies was created, the full Open Publishing unit came together and worked collaboratively to flesh out the policies and ensure it would govern the whole of the Open Publishing program. We also drafted our first set of publication-type specific policies to support our scholarly bibliographies, as they are our most unique publication. Both documents were reviewed by our Publishing Advisory Board and members of our department prior to being formally adopted. This presentation will serve as an example of how one library publisher went about creating policies for our program, how we engaged our students in this work, the lessons we learned along the way, and the aspects of our policy design that present questions not yet fully resolved.

Title: My First Rodeo: Developing Publisher-Level Policy in an Emerging Library Publishing Program

Presenter: Miranda Phair, Publishing & Open Scholarship Librarian, Towson University

Description: Libraries play an increasingly important role in scholarly communication as publishing practices evolve. This shift results in a growing number of publishing programs managed by librarians who, while knowledgeable about information access and scholarly communication practices, may not have prior experience in academic publishing on the publisher’s side. Besides technical considerations such as selecting, implementing, and maintaining a publishing platform and journal-level considerations like mission and vision, publication frequency, and journal policy, managers of a library publishing program must also consider policies at a publisher level, a task some librarian-journal managers may not have undertaken before. Transparent and accessible publisher guidelines are not only recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), but they can also help libraries address questions of copyright, open access, and diverse representation as these programs expand. Clear policy is also crucial for promoting a set of values related to access, diversity, and equity in attracting and onboarding new and existing journals that fit with these values. In this presentation, I present some of my experiences as a new scholarly communications librarian at a mid-sized M1 university in the mid-Atlantic region, including challenges, triumphs, and lessons learned as a policy novice who has managed to establish publisher-level policy for our library journal program through collaboration with colleagues and guidance from university-level policy. I will share how I identified the need for publisher level policy and how I met that need and how I decided which policies to leave up to the journal editors.

Title: Top 10 Reasons for and against Student-Based Press Operations: What We Learned in our First Seven Years at the Press at Cal Poly Humboldt

Presenter: Kyle Morgan (he/him), Scholarly Communications and Digital Scholarship Librarian, Cal Poly Humboldt

Description: The Press at Cal Poly Humboldt launched as a full-service press in 2015. In 2016, the first two students joined and so started what has become a student training ground in publishing. Early on, we had little time for training and let students operate with an abundance of independence. Relying on students in this way had drawbacks that will be no surprise to anyone, but also benefits, many unanticipated. Kyle Morgan, the Scholarly Communications and Digital Scholarship Librarian and head of the Press, will talk about how students have been added and integrated into workflows, how the Press has adapted, and the top ten drawbacks and benefits of relying on student employment for professional work.

April 3, 2024

PANEL: OER Program Development

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. | Heritage Gallery

Title: From Grantor to Reluctant Publisher: Adding Publishing to an Open Education Program

Presenters: 

• Jessica Kirschner (she/her), Digital Publishing Coordinator, VIVA
• Stephanie Westcott (she/her/hers), Open and Sustainable Learning Coordinator, VIVA

Description: This presentation will introduce the restructuring and growth of the OER arm of VIVA, Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium, to include publishing. When our established OER grant program was awarded increased funding, we realized that we could not meet the demands of a larger program without increased capacity. With this issue in mind, VIVA decided to restructure our program to provide support for what seemed to be the biggest hurdle for awarded faculty in producing a high-quality final product: publishing services. Previously, VIVA did not engage in publishing efforts, so this required that we build the program from the ground up, with new staff, workflows, policies, and a new vendor partner to support certain services, such as copyediting and print-on-demand.

We invite attendees to join us on our journey of developing a new publishing program from the ground up while working within an existing program’s structure and goals. We will review how we developed key policies and workflows, built relationships with the new vendor, and engaged with the first of these new services. We will also share how the partnership and our new role as OER publisher are going so far and how we continue to iterate with program outcomes and faculty needs in mind.

Title: PALSave Textbook Creation Grant Program: A Practical Open Textbook Publishing Case Study

Presenters: 

• Amanda Hurford, PALNI
• Sylvia Yang, Music Librarian and Coordinator of the Music and Performing Arts Library, DePauw University

Description: PALNI’s PALSave Textbook Creation Grant Program started in 2020 as part of a larger, grant-funded consortial affordable learning program. To date, five peer-reviewed textbooks have been completed, with ten more in various stages of development, spanning multiple disciplines and institutions. This presentation will examine the process of developing, executing, evaluating, and marketing the program. The project team has shared its resources under a CC-BY license, including the call for proposals, application, agreements, schedules, peer review guide, rubric, and more, in the desire to serve as a practical, replicable model for other projects. The session will also explore the personnel involved in the project, including the team of project managers working across institutional boundaries to support authors during their writing journeys. Consortial collaboration is a key component of the PALSave Textbook Creation Grant Program, but the session will be of interest to anyone interested in developing OER textbooks.

Title: Defining Expectations and Programmatic Support for Creating OER

Presenters: 

• Ariana Santiago (she/her), Head of Open Education Services, University of Houston
• Kate McNally Carter (she/her), Open Educational Resources Librarian, University of Houston

Description: Academic libraries are increasingly playing active roles in supporting the creation, authorship, and publication of open educational resources (OER), often in the form of open textbooks, and including various types of learning materials. At the University of Houston Libraries, our OER initiative began with an emphasis on encouraging OER adoption to address textbook affordability concerns and quickly saw interest from instructors in developing their own customized learning materials. Over time we continually developed our ability to support OER creation, though experienced challenges due to our initially ill-defined expectations for published OER and limited capacity to provide robust support.

In this session, we will describe our process for developing and using a “Quality Checklist for Creating OER,” with an emphasis on how the checklist serves as a resource for OER authors throughout the process of creating their material, and an internal tool for us in reviewing and finalizing the publication of their work. The checklist provides criteria and additional resources in the following categories: open licensing, attributions and citations, accessibility, and publication. Using the new checklist has led to improvements in defining and clearly communicating expectations to OER authors, supporting their work within our available capacity, and clarifying processes for publishing completed works. We will share lessons learned from our experience supporting OER creation and encourage attendees to consider how similar documentation or approaches can be applied in their programs.

April 3, 2024

PANEL: Production Workflows

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. | Ski-U-Mah Room

Title: Single Source Publishing

Presenter: Dione Mentis, COO and Senior Architect, Coko

Description: Traditional publishing workflows involve a fragmented process – content is created in isolation, converted to multiple file formats, then passed between teams handling editing, production, distribution and preservation. This convoluted workflow hampers efficiency and heightens overhead for publishers and librarians alike.

However, an emergent approach called single source publishing (SSP) offers respite by streamlining publishing using a unified file format across the entire process. Rather than a serialized hand-off of content between siloed teams working in different formats, SSP enables concurrent collaboration within one system using shared source files.

For librarians, the advantages of this consolidated workflow are multi-fold. SSP lowers resource demands by reducing hand-offs, production steps, version proliferation and duplications. Content can shift smoothly from creation to dissemination without format conversion bottlenecks.

Preservation also benefits since SSP utilizes fewer intermediate file representations, limiting risks of data loss or corruption. The unified format persisting across the workflow remains viable for the long-term.

By employing web standards like HTML, SSP further ensures continuity and guards against format obsolescence. Librarians can depend on HTML viability over decades. For distribution, SSP streamlines exports to various end-user formats from this single standards-based source.

With publishing labor reduced through workflow consolidation, librarians may redirect efforts from production logistics to higher-value tasks around service enhancement and community support. Staff workload rebalances from technical publishing minutiae to more impactful objectives.

In essence, SSP promises librarians savings in time, costs and headaches through a unified publishing chain – allowing fuller focus on reader experience. This emerging approach warrants consideration by libraries seeking relief from fragmentary workflows.

Title: Automating JATS XML Tagging With ChatGPT

Presenter: Matthew Vaughn (he/him/his), Open Publishing Librarian, Indiana University

Description: While significant progress has been made in streamlining JATS XML publication workflows, efficiently converting article submission files into JATS XML galleys remains challenging for smaller publishers. The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is a global standard for scholarly journal publishing, indexing, sharing, and archiving. Motivated by the advantages of XML publishing, the Indiana University open access journal publishing program has explored a number of options to expand our use of JATS. In 2023, we began experimenting with the generative AI tool ChatGPT to assess its potential in automating the JATS conversion step in our publishing workflow. Our results demonstrated that ChatGPT can effectively tag plain-text research article content in accurate, publishable JATS.

In an effort to automate XML tagging for the journal Studies in Digital Heritage (SDH), we designed several prompts to direct ChatGPT in tagging each section of a research article in our specific JATS format. Guided by prompts that provided relevant XML examples, ChatGPT was able to produce JATS-compliant tagging from plain-text article content. At the section level, the JATS produced by ChatGPT was comparable in accuracy to our vendor-produced JATS. Eventually, this approach along with several additional steps was able to produce a publication-ready JATS galley which we then posted to SDH.

While our experiment with automating JATS XML tagging demonstrates that large language models like ChatGPT are capable of performing this type of work with high accuracy, the current token limitations of ChatGPT 3.5 necessitate a piecemeal approach which makes this method too unwieldy for large scale adoption at this point. Nevertheless, if the token limit were substantially increased, and if we could input all our prompts simultaneously, fully automated JATS tagging may be within reach.

April 3, 2024

BOAF SESSION: Are We a Publisher?

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. | Memorial Hall

Title: Are We a Publisher?

Presenter: Jessica Kirschner (she/her), Digital Publishing Coordinator, VIVA

Description: Library publishing programs support the creation and dissemination of scholarly works. But should libraries with publishing programs consider themselves the “publisher” of the works they help produce? Traditional publishers, such as commercial academic publishers or university presses, are known for standardized services, workflows, and publishing outputs. Library publishing programs, however, don’t always mimic this standardization. Some library programs share resources in institutional repositories, some offer hosting services for publishing platforms, some provide services and workflows resembling those of traditional publishers, and many other programs fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Although vast effort is required to support library publishing programs regardless of the services, workflows, or publishing outputs they support, without standardization and a full scope of services, can or should these varied programs consider themselves publishers?

Inspired by conversations at my own institution, this birds of a feather session invites attendees to consider if or when library publishers should label themselves as the publisher of the works they support and why this matters–or if it should. Questions considered could include:

• How is the label of “publisher” viewed by content creators, parent institutions, and the greater scholarly communication landscape?
• Is there a certain threshold of services a library publisher must provide before listing themselves as the work’s publisher?
• How is the designation designation viewed by faculty and/or the institution?
• What are the benefits or disadvantages of labeling the program or institution a “publisher”?
• How does this designation (or lack thereof) impact the reception of the works supported by the library publishing program?

While we don’t expect to reach definite answers, we hope to begin to develop a community understanding of what is a “publisher.” We also hope attendees will leave with a better understanding of their own publishing program and whether they wish to label the program as “publisher.”

April 3, 2024

PANEL: OER and Copyright

Day/Time/Room
May 15, 2024 | 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. | Heritage Gallery

Title: Author Name Removed at Request of Original Publisher”: an OER Adventure

Presenters:

• Nancy Sims, any pronouns, Director, Copyright & Scholarly Communication, University of Minnesota Libraries
• Shane Nackerud (he/him) Director, Affordable Learning and Open Education (ALOE), University of Minnesota Libraries

Description: The University of Minnesota Libraries updated and republished numerous open textbooks starting about a decade ago. The publisher of those books changed their business model, and stopped offering their own copies with open licenses. Although the original open license remained valid, specific elements of the older Creative Commons license they used did enable them to require removal of all attribution on the books. As the books aged, we considered updating them, but decided against it based on this complex history of interaction. In this brief session, we will share more details of this history, our decision-making about these books, and we will discuss open licensing and OER sustainability in general.

Title: Rights Reversion to OER: Four Stories from the Field

Presenter: Anita Walz, Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Virginia Tech

Description: Rights-reversion is a powerful tool for broadening access to books which are still-in-demand but paywalled or out-of-print. Converting these works to Open Educational Resources (OER) broadens their availability and meets reader and instructional needs while utilizing workflows and services most library publishers already have in place. This presentation presents stories of four different rights-reverted works, project rationale, processes, lessons learned, and current outcomes. Due to existing “good customer” relationships with commercial publishers, Library Publishers may have more leverage than we realize to release valuable content more openly. Titles to be discussed are all textbooks used for instruction and include: Veterinary Epidemiology, Construction Contracting 2nd edition, Radio Systems Engineering, and Composite Construction: Design for Buildings.