Forum

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.

---

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  [video] [slides]

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  [video] [slides]

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?  [video]

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  [video] [slides]

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  [video] [slides] [speaker notes]

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

Presenter: Deborah Poff, retired Professor of Philosophy and Senior Academic Administrator

Title: The State of Play in Current Major Forms of Deception in Publishing: Predatory Publishing, Paper Mills and ChatGPTe   [video] [Five questions]

Description: to come

---