Library Publishing Forum - Recorded Sessions

Library and university-press publishers are driven by two different but overlapping missions. Libraries publish as an extension of their traditional function of preserving and disseminating knowledge. University presses are also tasked with distributing knowledge, but through peer review, they are engaged with what Martin Eve at last year’s meeting called the “symbolic economy of prestige.” Both are constrained by financial forces and the marketplace. This panel examines how and why different publishers select projects, and how each group decides where to invest its scarce resources. It also addresses how campus hierarchies affect these choices, especially when a university’s press and library are institutionally connected.

The participants will include both library and university-press publishers, representing a range of reporting relationships on their campuses. Each panelist will respond to questions from the moderator, followed by what we hope will be lively questions from the floor. The conversation should shed light on the strategic priorities that drive our publishing decisions, as well as how we can most effectively cooperate.

Helping Fledgling Journals Leave the Nest

R. Philip Reynolds, Stephen F. Austin State University

Many libraries are starting to take on the task of helping faculty in the publishing of new fledgling journals. The editorial staff of faculty often look to the library for guidance in many aspects of journal publishing. One issue that can be particularly difficult is to solicit enough articles of high enough quality to get the journal up and rolling. After the first issue is launched, the solicitation of articles tends to become easier after each new issue is published. In my lightning talk I will discuss how the library can step in and provide a service usually provided by traditional publishers; how the library can advise and assist faculty in the launch of a new journal by giving editorial boards guidance in how to solicit those first crucial articles. I will describe case studies of success stories of various strategies employed by editors to acquire submissions of potential articles. I will also provide additional methods for soliciting manuscripts that have been used successfully by other journal editors.

How Library Publishing Programs can Support Journals Leaving a Major Publisher in Favor of OA

Ted Polley, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Recent events in scholarly publishing, such as the editorial board of Elsevier’s Lingua resigning en masse, have sparked the interest of other journal editors in searching for more open and sustainable models of publishing. This past fall, the IUPUI University Library received two separate inquiries from editors on our campus who are considering leaving a major publisher in favor of creating an open access journal with the library’s publishing program. There are undoubtedly other editors on IUPUI’s campus and at institutions around the world who are wrestling with similar issues.

This lightning talk will present insight from initial conversations with the editors who are considering leaving a major publisher, how libraries can best support this endeavor, and IUPUI’s previous experience in helping two journals transition from a subscription-based model to an open access one. In many ways, leaving a major publisher looks similar to starting a new journal, but this situation presents unique challenges, such as cessation of editor compensation, and unique opportunities, such as the potential for a journal buyback.

Specifically, this talk will outline the steps involved in leaving a major publisher to create an open access journal, how editors can leverage existing infrastructure and social networks to successfully make the transition, guidance for library publishing programs working with journals making the change, and thoughts on which types of journals are ideal candidates.

Getting Titles into Link Resolvers

Wendy Robertson, University of Iowa

Libraries rely on link resolvers to connect faculty and students to subscribed/licensed content. Having titles in link resolvers and in discover systems is a way people learn to find quality content. It is important that the library published titles are included in link resolvers. This presentation will give an overview of KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools), GOKb, Knowledge Base+, and the experience of a library publisher getting titles into link revolver systems. Attendees will learn how to submit their content to link resolvers.

Publishing Undergraduate Scholarship: Should you be afraid?

Emily Symonds Stenberg, Washington University in St. Louis
Kelly Riddle, University of San Diego
Jeffrey Rubin, Tulane University
Allegra Swift, The Claremont Colleges

With a growing emphasis on undergraduate engagement in academia, library publishers are discovering that it is vital to negotiate the conflicting directives of publishing, protecting, and promoting undergraduate scholarship. Some faculty are concerned that publishing student work online is harmful to both the student and faculty publishing prospects; while others may make publication a course requirement with little concern about copyright or reputation. Students themselves often have little understanding of privacy and intellectual property. This panel will explore some of the questions and concerns libraries must answer in order to build stronger relationships and successful publishing opportunities for all.

Emily Stenberg, Washington University in St. Louis

While the repository at Washington University in St. Louis was created in response to a faculty open access initiative, the majority of the materials and publications hosted on the site have been created by students. More undergraduate course collections are being developed in the repository; at the same time, the Libraries and Scholarly Publishing have a growing relationship with the university’s Office of Undergraduate Research. Scholarly Publishing, a unit within the University Libraries, offers customized, flexible publishing options, including copyright assistance, platform hosting, editorial and design services, preservation, and education and training. However, connecting with the university’s undergraduate publications has been a challenge. This points to a continuing issue: how to demonstrate the library’s value as a publishing resource to undergraduates who are developing themselves as independent scholars while not alienating faculty, some of whom have expressed growing concern about students publicly sharing highly personal work or research that may contain sensitive data. The speaker will discuss the issues and opportunities the Scholarly Publishing unit at Washington University and other libraries face when engaging with and educating students about publishing, whether the publications are capstone projects, senior papers, or journals.

Allegra Swift, The Claremont Colleges

Scholarly communications are evolving rapidly; there are shifts in how research is communicated, what counts for scholarship, and who is doing the communicating. Undergraduates are contributing to the scholarly conversation but with little education in what it means to participate online as a scholar, much less as a global digital citizen. Many faculty members engage in scholarly communication as they always have and are often unaware of the rapid developments in publishing and sharing research. Librarians with responsibilities in publishing, scholarly communication, and instruction are especially challenged to meet these gaps in digital literacy. Publishing undergraduate scholarship can be perceived as a risk to reputation and prospects for both students and faculty. At the Claremont Colleges, the need to address digital literacy gaps and support new forms of scholarship had initially became apparent through mandates for senior thesis publishing in the Claremont Colleges’ online and open access repository Scholarship @ Claremont. This presentation will discuss the digital literacy gap in publishing undergraduate scholarship and opportunities for mitigating risk while benefiting from the evolution of scholarly communication.

Kelly Riddle, University of San Diego

Library publishers often encounter unique conundrums when working with student-produced content, chief among them questions about what is “appropriate” to publish. These questions might vary according to the type of publication or work, the standards and preferences of sponsoring faculty or programs, or the culture and policies of the institution. At the University of San Diego, the library publishing program has encountered several questions about what undergraduate works are appropriate to host in its repository and the processes by which these works are published. In working to publish undergraduate honors theses and digitize legacy undergraduate and masters theses, several connected academic programs have hesitated at a broad approach to both publication and retroactive digitization. When working with the Digital Initiatives Librarian to establish an undergraduate literary journal, the journal's student editorial board raised questions surrounding their autonomy as editors to determine appropriate content for a journal hosted on a publishing platform provided by the university. Answering these questions requires sensitivity to college and university faculty and deep thought about the place of undergraduate work in the library publishing program. This portion of the panel will discuss how librarians have worked with students and faculty to resolve these questions.

Jeff Rubin, Tulane University

The Tulane Undergraduate Research Journal published its first issue in 2014 after more than a year of planning and building a strong foundation. Now, between its second and third issue, there are several concerns specific to undergraduate publishing that the TURJ editorial board and Tulane Journal Publishing are currently addressing that will have a direct impact on the direction of the journal.

1. Should the journal serve a pedagogical role and how would that be incorporated into the curricula?

2. How can the editorial board incentivize more students to submit work?

3. Does peer-review create problems for students by limiting the future publication of pieces in professional journals? Does peer-review interfere with faculty rights when the students want to publish materials related to that faculty research?

4. How can the journal become integrated into the curricula so that the outcome from a class is steered towards the journal?

That these questions from the editorial board and Tulane Journal Publishing are being asked after publishing only two full issues demonstrates a deep concern for both the undergraduate experience and in creating a publication that provides more than a citation for a CV. This process of continual improvement provides a built-in method for finding solutions to problems that spark anxiety and fear around undergraduate publishing.

Project Management Tools to Get Us Up and Running

Kate McCready, University of Minnesota

Eighteen months ago, the University of Minnesota launched an initiative to help support the creation of scholarly works. Within that time, we've evaluated publishing software, created a service model, established a Publishing Services Team, and adopted a variety of tools to help publish and manage our projects. Since we settled on our initial publication platforms, we’ve been able to publish 8 scholarly serials, 1 conference proceeding, and 10 open textbooks.

In this session we will give an overview of what it took to get the structure in place at the University of Minnesota Libraries. What evaluation processes did we undertake (both software analysis and needs assessments)? What criteria did we use to evaluate different tools? What policies did we need to develop? How did we get the resources we needed in order to support the work we’d outlined as a priority?

We will discuss how we decided which publication types and projects to support along with which policies and guidelines we needed to establish. We will outline how we’re involving the library liaisons and directors in the publications being developed from their departments and colleges. And, we will also present on how we are using project management tools to keep each publication development process in order.

Conducting a Comprehensive Survey of Publishing Activity at Your Institution

Meredith Kahn, University of Michigan

As library publishers expand their range of services and cultivate partnerships with campus units, finding suitable partners can be a challenge. There is likely a significant amount of publishing activity already happening on your campus, some of which could be better served by the library. But how do you find those existing programs and sort out the ones whose needs best meet your service offerings?

This lightning talk will describe how we conducted a comprehensive survey of publishing activity at the University of Michigan, trends in our results, and possible methodologies for conducting a similar survey of publishing activity at your own institution.

This talk addresses:

1) Diversity: Publishing partners can be found across a range of disciplines, campus units, and publication types. The methodology we present will allow library publishers to discover potential partners beyond the "usual suspects," which could contribute to more diversity in the partners and publications that libraries recruit.

2) Bootstrapping: In order to thrive, publishing programs will need to attract a critical mass of partners, particularly if they are expected to recovers costs or generate revenue. Finding these partners from among your own campus units can keep the administrative burden of cost recovery low, as transactions with external partners can be complex from a university accounting standpoint. In addition, local partners can increase the visibility of a library publishing program and yield even more collaborations.

Project Meerkat: The Publishing Analytics Data Trust

Sarah Melton, Emory University

Technology has made collecting data and producing metrics easier than ever before. In the realm of research communication, data from the digital distribution of scholarly content provides new opportunities to understand the publishing ecosystem. However, there is growing concern about ownership of, access to, and analysis of this data, as evidenced by the recently published NISO Consensus Principles on Users' Digital Privacy in Library, Publisher, and Software-Provided Systems. Furthermore, the practical challenges associated with gathering, integrating, interpreting, and reporting usage data limit the ability of individual publishers and libraries to identify—much less predict—important usage trends and opportunities through which they might extend their impact.

Project Meerkat (https://educopia.org/research/meerkat) seeks to inform nascent standards and create a neutral apparatus for the ongoing collection and aggregation of usage data related to digital scholarly monographs. Project Meerkat will build a new cooperative—the Publishing Analytics Data Trust—in which members will collaborate to represent the interests of all stakeholders in academic publishing, including researchers and administrators, to sustain the outcomes of Project Meerkat and provide its members with shared governance of collected data. While the organizational model of the cooperative is still to be determined, member organizations will agree to a code of practice as a condition of membership.

This talk will present the project and preliminary vision for the cooperative in more detail.

In 2014, the Oberlin Group - a consortium of selective liberal-arts college libraries - convened a task force to explore the possibility of developing a collaborative, open access publishing pathway for scholarship in the arts and humanities. After a year of work and study, developing a request for proposals and selecting a publishing partner, crafting a business model and returning to the member libraries for commitments of support, the Lever Press will be launched in early 2016 with thirty-nine library partners making a five-year commitment totaling more than a million dollars in overall resources.

Our panel proposes to tell the story (so far) of how the Lever Press came to be, and how its principal partners—the Oberlin Group, the Amherst College Press, and Michigan Publishing—are collaborating to develop a plan for realizing this vision. We’ll offer presentations on the content problems librarians have experienced and are working to solve; the assumptions that guide our work; the partnership between the two library-based presses that will implement the vision; and the next steps we see ahead of us in translating our proposals for governance and editorial oversight into an operational library publishing entity.

Even though most open-access, library-published journals operate on a shoestring, in our experience, securing a small amount of consistent funding—to defray production and editorial costs, reduce the burden on editors, etc.—has a significant impact on the long-term success of a journal. This presentation offers a model for guiding editors and authors through the process of securing funding to support their journal. We do not propose a single business model. On the contrary, we focus on opening up options in ways that are imaginative and open-ended, empowering editors to articulate a story of meaning around their journal. We’ll address the following questions:

*At Michigan, beginning in fiscal year 2017, we will start charging fees to our publishing partners. How do we prepare internally for this transition, and how do we break this news in a way that retains trust and a strong relationship with our partners?

*What alternative funding options and opportunities—besides toll-access and author-pays—are available to journal editors? We’ll share some of the ideas our journal editors have come up with.

*How can we help publishing partners make a strong case for the importance of their publication? What’s the best way to communicate impact?

*How can we prepare ourselves and our publishing partners to manage and track their finances?

George Kuh’s 2008 report High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, demonstrated the link between high impact practices, experiential learning and student success. Since then, libraries, as part of their parent institutions, have joined the discussion on ways to offer experiential learning opportunities. One long-standing practice is through student internships. Library publishing programs have readily adopted student interns to advance their work; however, such internships are often ad hoc, focusing less on student learning outcomes and more on production and project completion. With Kuh’s call to foreground high impact practices and experiential learning to advance student success, it is worthwhile to revisit library publishing internships and develop programmatic models.

OSU Libraries Publishing began offering internships as one way to firmly link the program to the library and university teaching mission. Along the way, questions about implementation surfaced. We will consider what best practices are emerging and examine current internship models within library publishing, digital scholarship centers, and academic libraries more broadly. We will also explore what counts as a successful internship (and from whose perspective) and look at some effective ways to evaluate and assess students’ experiences. By focusing on student impact, we aim to broaden the discussion around creating a successful library publishing program. Join us to discuss how library publishing programs can create intentional, meaningful internships.

Kuh, George D. Excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2008.

O’Neill, Nancy. "Internships as a high-impact practice: Some reflections on quality." Peer Review 12.4 (2010): 4-8. https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/internships-high-impact-practice-some-reflections-quality

York, Amy, Christy Groves, and William Black. "Enriching the academic experience: The library and experiential learning." Collaborative Librarianship 2.4 (2010): 193-203. http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/viewArticle/92