Tuesday, May 22, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: Heritage Gallery

Think Like an Editor

Patrick Hogan, American Library Association

Description: Library publishing initiatives offer library expertise in digital formats, institutional repositories, and metadata in order to create access to the institution’s scholarship. Simply publicizing the service to faculty, researchers, or students, however, may not be enough. While digital workflows and open access break from publishing tradition, the challenge of obtaining compelling content remains constant. In a traditional publishing operation, the acquisitions editor proactively recruits writers, coordinates with production and marketing, and develops positive author relationships along the way. Relegating that role risks a lack of cohesion or of content itself. Editorial plans, schedules, and strategic initiatives drive an editor’s work. Communication is central, and it’s not so different than the outreach of librarians to their university communities. Patrick Hogan will speak from 20+ years experience as an editor with the American Library Association and with professional/trade business books. By thinking like editors, library publishers can adapt traditional publisher practices to direct library publishing resources toward delivering the greatest value and meeting the program’s goals.

The Pain of Peer-Review for a Small Press

Amy Filiatreau, Lynn University

Description: This presentation will be a warts-and-all confessional about how a small press fought (and fought, and fought some more) to implement a rigorous peer-review process for our books.

The Lynn University Digital Press is tiny. We publish iBooks written by faculty that are used as textbooks for our students, given to them for free. The press, a part of the library, has only one full-time employee. There is very little infrastructure or administrative help. So how does a small press do peer-review?

The answer is: painfully.

It was certainly a learning process, with little help out there from vendors or partners. Over the past two years we have piloted peer-review in fits and starts, and finally have hammered out a somewhat successful program for rigorous peer-review. The presentation will show how we’ve done it: how we tried to hire a company to help us (that tactic failed), how we chose our pilot books for review, chose reviewers, requested their input, organized the responses, and more. I will share what worked, and what definitely did not. I will also propose some ways that small presses can work with one another to streamline peer-review.

Support for Multilingual Journals using Open Journal Systems 

Camille Thomas and Jessica Kirschner, Texas Tech University; Vanessa Gabler and Timothy Deliyannides, University of Pittsburgh

Description: In open access publishing, the theoretical global reach of research is not enough. This study will focus on how language affects the process of open access journal publishing at two public research institutions. This study includes cases from Texas Tech University Libraries and University of Pittsburgh Libraries.