Day/Time: Tuesday, May 11, 4:00 PM to 5 PM


Migration and More: Moving from DigitalCommons

Presenters:

  • Laura Baird, Systems & Applications Librarian, Pacific University
  • Johanna Meetz, Publishing & Repository Services Librarian, The Ohio State University

Description:

Pacific University transitioned from BePress’s DigitalCommons to Ubiquity’s Hyku and publishing platforms between 2018 and 2020. We migrated journals that were published in Digital Commons as well as the content in the institutional repository itself. When the transition was made from DigitalCommons to Ubiquity’s publishing platform, Pacific also reduced the number of journals published from 7 to 3. This presentation will share the entire process of that transition including selection, design decisions, migration, and user adoption. We will discuss the lessons learned, workload commitment, and recommended roles for similar migration projects. We will also share a brief overview of differences between the platforms and how these changes impacted user experiences. As one of the first institutional users of Ubiquity’s Hyku, these experiences may inform future migrations.


After the migration: What editors like (and miss) after moving from bepress to OJS

Presenters:

  • Kristin Hoffmann, University of Western Ontario
  • Emily Carlisle-Johnston, University of Western Ontario

Description:

Between 2017 and 2020, librarians at the University of Western Ontario migrated 26 journals from the bepress Digital Commons (DC) platform to PKP’s Open Journals System (OJS) platform. We moved journals to OJS largely because we, and some editors, were concerned about potential implications of Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress in August 2017, but we also expected that OJS would give editors more flexibility and autonomy.

Have editors experienced the benefits we anticipated with OJS? How has their work changed as a result of the move? What new challenges do they face? Our session will draw on a post-migration survey of editors to answer these questions. Because some editorial teams now have several years’ experience working with OJS, while others have only a few months (due to turnover or when they migrated), we will address the learning curve that editors may experience over time as they adjust to a new platform.

We will draw on our experiences working with editors to share what our publishing support looked like with DC and how it has changed since moving to OJS. For example, with DC, bepress staff provided most of the technical and operational support for editorial teams. With OJS, library staff provide more direct support. We will discuss the implications this has had for our work as a library publisher, and how it informs the development of our publishing services.

Sessions at previous LPFs have discussed platform migrations, including migrations from bepress to OJS. Those sessions have focused on the processes involved in migrations. While we will briefly do the same, our presentation will largely emphasize the experiences of journal editors and librarians with the two platforms. This will also inform library publishers who are determining which platform is best for their publishing program, based on their resources and objectives.


A Consortium Approach to Library Publishing Via the Open Journal System and the Texas Digital Library

Presenters:

  • Taylor Davis-Van Atta, University of Houston
  • Lea DeForest, Texas Digital Library
  • Susan Elkins, Sam Houston State University
  • Bruce Herbert, Texas A&M University
  • David Lowe, Texas A&M University
  • Alexa Hight (chair), Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
  • Laura Heinz, Texas Tech University
  • Kristi Park, Texas Digital Library
  • Denyse Rodgers, Baylor University
  • Laura Waugh, Texas State University
  • Justin White, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
  • Amanda Zerangue, Texas Woman’s University
  • Adrian Shapiro, Texas Woman’s University
  • Alex Suarez, Texas Digital Library
  • N. Woodward, Texas Digital Library

Description:

The Texas Digital Library is a collaborative consortium of Texas universities that builds capacity among its membership for ensuring equitable access to and preservation of digital content of value to research, instruction, cultural heritage, and institutional memory.  The Texas Digital Library supports the TDL Electronic Journals, where faculty members, libraries, and universities can produce refereed, open-access scholarly journals, ensuring the availability of important scholarship to researchers across the world. TDL Electronic Journals are powered by Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open-source journal management and publication software produced by the Public Knowledge Project.

In 2019, the TDL OJS User Group was formed.  TDL’s OJS Users Group is comprised of library liaisons for campus journals. The group works to create an active community among TDL’s users of the Open Journal System hosting service in the following ways:

  • By facilitating mutual support among library managers of the OJS hosting service, including the sharing of resources about library publishing policies and good practices to benefit from distributed expertise
  • By facilitating better communication between TDL staff and libraries using this service to identify emerging needs on specific campuses
  • By identifying areas of work that could be undertaken by member-led working groups

The goals for 2019-20 were to:

  • Use monthly meetings to develop knowledge around OJS 3
  • Develop two toolkits for journal managers including decision-making toolkit for prospective journal managers and a toolkit for starting a new journal

The user group benefited by reduced costs through shared IT resources and distributed expertise to better support the creation and management of open access journals.  In this talk we will discuss the function of the user group, as well as the costs and outcomes associated with a consortium approach to library publishing through the OJS system.