The Library Publishing Workflows project is gearing up for a whole set of major releases — starting next week with the full workflow documentation for all twelve of our partner libraries. This week, we have a couple of teasers to whet your appetite and get you thinking about publishing workflows! For those of you who like to start with the nitty gritty, we are sharing our workflow framework. And for those of you who want to skip right to the big questions (Why do we publish? How do our workflows reflect our values?), we have a fantastic recorded panel discussion.
Workflow framework
Our goal in this project is to document a variety of journal publishing workflows. The “right” workflow for one library won’t necessarily fit the needs of another, but all current and prospective library publishers could benefit from seeing how different programs are staffing and carrying out the publishing process. The differences in workflows between our partners occur for many different reasons, including the mission and goals of the library publishing program, staffing and budget, preferences of editors, and historical contingencies of the library and publishing programs.
That said, in the course of our data collection and analysis, the project team has developed a framework for the kinds of work that go into library journal publication. The workflow activities our partners undertake fall roughly into five high-level phases—Submission, Review, Production, Publication, Post-Publication. This framework is both less detailed and more comprehensive than any individual publishing workflow, but it has helped us to understand the broader context and compare different workflows. We hope that this framework will be useful to you both in thinking about your own workflow, and in contextualizing the partner workflows we will release next week.
Note: We have listed each activity only once in the framework, though one of the ways that workflows differ is the order in which activities occur, so something like the licensing agreement could take place as part of a variety of different phases.
- Submission: Manuscript submission, license/author agreement
- Review: Desk review, peer review, developmental editing, prior publication check
- Production: Copyediting, typesetting, galley review, XML (and other format) conversion, fact checking, checking DOIs in references, processing PDFs, cataloging, create journal issue
- Publication: Quality review, publication, assign DOIs, OCR PDF, print
- Post-Publication: Communications and marketing (notifying authors, social media, etc), preservation, indexing
Recorded panel: Our workflows, our values
In this 38 minute-long recorded panel discussion, representatives of six of our partner libraries—Jennifer Beamer (Claremont Colleges Library), Paige Mann (Armacost Library (University of Redlands)), Justin Gonder (California Digital Library), Michelle Wilson (Columbia University Libraries), Sonya Betz (University of Alberta Library), and Vanessa Gabler (The University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh)—grapple with the big questions raised by creating and documenting publishing workflows, including: “What role do library publishers play in ensuring high quality fact-based scholarly publishing,” “What role do they play in social justice and increasing access to means of production,” and “What is the role of library publishing in the Open Access movement and scholarly communications models?”
Coming soon
Keep an eye out next week for the release of the full workflow documentation for each partner library, and then watch this space over the next few months for more workflows-related content and tools!