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


Title: A Library + University Press Collaboration: Big Ten Open Books

Presenters:

  • Jason Colman (he/him), Director of Publishing Services, University of Michigan Library
  • Kate McCready (she/her), Librarian and Visiting Program Officer for Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing, University of Minnesota & Big Ten Academic Alliance

Description: A collaboration between the university presses and libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Big Ten Open Books [http://bigtenopenbooks.org] connects readers everywhere to fully accessible, open access, trusted books from leading university presses. The first collection, 100 books published in August of 2023, on the subject of Gender and Sexuality studies, required bringing together experts from both libraries and presses to create a mutually agreed-to plan of action. In both the processes and necessary expertise, deep collaboration is occurring between presses and libraries in areas such as copyright, discovery, accessibility, metrics, and preservation.

The Big Ten Open Books project is now building on the initial undertaking in scholarly publishing collective action – creating open content, on open infrastructure, using open distribution models – to envision a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. At the core of this work is the partnership between libraries and presses to create a sustainable business and service model for open access editions of previously published scholarly monographs. Information shared during the session about this case study will include timelines, costs and metrics for success.

Additionally, the established best practices and lessons learned will also be covered along with the issues that surfaced during the building of the first collection that require further study. Those include identifying a more standardized method of processing copyright permissions, determining methods for ensuring accessibility, discoverability, and preservation of works published through collective action, and establishing a sustainable financial structure that supports the values of both the libraries who contribute financially and the presses and library publishers that are facilitating the work.


Title: The Great Migration: A New Home for the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive

Presenters:

  • Jason Boczar (he/him), Digital Scholarship and Publishing Librarian, University of South Florida
  • Paul “Alex” Onac, Institutional Repository Manager, University of South Florida

Description: Upon learning from a local partner that the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive (SORA), a collection of open access ornithological publications hosted by the University of New Mexico, hadn’t been uploading new materials for a few years and was thinking about shutting down the project, the University of South Florida (USF) libraries reached out to be the new home of SORA. In addition to its commitment to open access journals, USF is also the home to a robust Florida Environment and Natural History collection with an emphasis on ornithological archives.

This individual session will look at the migration from the USF point of view, including partnering with UNM to contact journal editors, creating new memorandums of understanding for journal editors, getting new journal pages set up with bepress, and the technical aspects of content migration into the USF system. Building upon the already highly renowned SORA collection, USF’s migration seeks to add value into the project by improving accessibility features and ensuring all collections have OCR optimization for keyword searching, the search-engine optimization of bepress’ Digital Commons, and an editorial system for the contributors. Finally, with USF’s interest and capacity to grow the journal archive, the SORA migration will provide a roadmap for universities to collaborate through shifting priorities to ensure digital publishing projects have an extended shelf-life, as well as provide valuable tools for cross-walking systems to complete migrations in timely and efficient ways.


Title: The Power of Partnership: Reflections on Ten Years of Publishing a Novel Interdisciplinary Journal

Presenters:

  • Elizabeth Weinfurter, MLIS (she/her), Liaison and Instruction Librarian; Production Editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies; Health Sciences Library, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities
  • Teddie Potter, PhD, RN, FAAN, FNAP (she/her), Clinical Professor, Director Center for Planetary Health and Environmental Justice; Executive Editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies; School of Nursing, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Description: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies (IJPS) is a unique open access journal that blends global academic, community, and artistic voices into a single, collaborative entity that follows the format of a scholarly journal. IJPS was launched in November 2014 as a mechanism to share new knowledge and successful applications of Riane Eisler’s partnership paradigm, and these partnership theories drive the journal at every level. IJPS is published as a shared effort between multiple institutions, and the lessons learned over the ten years of publishing the journal are instructive for others considering similarly collaborative publications. The presentation, given by two of the journal’s founding editors (one a faculty member in the School of Nursing, and one a librarian) will cover the philosophical aspects of publishing an open interdisciplinary journal, as well as practical knowledge relevant to the realm of library publishing.