Thursday, May 9, 11:15am-12:15pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)
Aperio: UVA’s Open Publishing Partnership—Shared Values, Not Reporting Lines 
Dave S. Ghamandi, Open Publishing Librarian and Aperio Journals Managing Editor, University of Virginia Library; Hanni Nabahe, Resident Librarian, University of Virginia Library; Chip German, Senior Director for Scholarly Communication, University of Virginia Library
Description: Aperio, the new open publishing collaboration at the University of Virginia, was unveiled to the academic community in the spring of 2018, with the publication of its first scholarly journal articles this January and its first open monograph published last November. So, did the venerable University of Virginia Press expand into open journal publishing, or did the University Library subsume the Press in a new wider-ranging publishing enterprise? Neither.
Aperio is a strong partnership between the Press, which was founded in 1963 and has a reputation as a high-quality academic publisher of between 50 and 60 new titles each year, and a start-up unit in the University Library where success will only come to its open journal publishing if discernible academic rigor establishes the new operation’s credibility. The two units both report to the provost, albeit with different reporting lines, funding streams, and business models. So exactly how is that the formula for a successful partnership?
The key, of course, is how the people involved make the relationship work. That starts with a sense of common mission, mutual respect, and reasonable flexibility. Then there is the happy discovery that the different motivations that drive each partner’s desire to make the partnership a success can flourish together.
Our presentation will sketch our process of partnership building, identifying the success factors that have enabled our progress to date and that are essential for our shared future.
Launching HSU Press: The First Three Years
Kyle Morgan, Humboldt State University
Description: So you want to start a library-based press? Humboldt State University Press recently launched as an open-access service of the HSU Library. Scholarly Communications Librarian Kyle Morgan will discuss the mission of the press, the publishing model, and the trajectory of the press from 2016-2019, including:
Year 1: Chaos
- Open-access textbooks
- Yes to everything
- Mistakes, failures, and politics
Year 2: Laying a foundation
- Experiential learning
- Community building
- Limits of time and resources
Year 3: Knowing who you are
- Open pedagogy
- Professionalization
- Student agency
Ideas in Open Access: A Case Study on a Series Collaboration Between the MIT Press and the MIT Libraries
Catherine Ahearn, Knowledge Futures Group
Description: Publishing open access texts toward the efficient and equitable dissemination of research has long been part of the mission of the MIT Press. The MIT Libraries consistently provides support for open access in publishing, including a fund for MIT authors who want to publish in fully open access journals, and arrangements with publishers. Recently, the MITP and MIT Libraries came together to jointly publish the open access <strong>Ideas series.
We believe that universities must assert greater ownership and influence over the ecosystems for sharing knowledge given how critical it is to their core mission. It is with this in mind that the Libraries provided financial support for the series to be published in two formats—traditional print copies for sale in bookstores and complete digital open access editions available on the PubPub platform. This presentation will outline the nature of our collaboration, from the shared mission of the Press and Libraries to the experiments conducted, issues encountered, and lessons learned along the way. The purpose of the talk is to provide transparent insight into this process and provide attendees with a potential model for implementing similar or related collaborations at their own institutions.
Key themes include: UP/Libraries collaboration, open access publishing, experimentation, community review, and reader engagement.