Library Publishing Programs at Capacity: Addressing Issues of Sustainability and Scalability

This article discusses the changes to overall goals, direction, and services that were made to two library publishing programs at University A and University B when they were no longer able to grow their programs due to an inability to hire additional staff and COVID-19-instigated staff reassignments. Description of Programs University A's publishing program grew out of its institutional repository, and, at its peak, published 7 open access journals. In addition, University A's Libraries founded a University Press in 2016, which has published 6 books as of 2021. University B's publishing program began publishing open access journals in 2008, and it has grown to include over 20 journals. Lessons Learned Both University A and University B's publishing programs have faced scalability and sustainability issues, which were further exacerbated by COVID-19. The focus of our library publishing programs, as well as many others, has been on continual growth, which is not sustainable without the ability to hire additional staff or allocate staff time differently. We argue that standardizing services as well as creating a business plan can help ensure publishing programs are sustainable and scalable. Next Steps We hope to begin a conversation among library publishers about acknowledging limits and creating achievable definitions of success outside of continual growth.

Cross-functional policy development for a Data Repository

Policy can articulate the scope of work. For repositories that house data, policy can help users manage expectations,especially for individuals who are new to data sharing, or where expectations for sharing data havechanged. We cover some of the current literature around the process for writing policy, specifically focusingon policy for data collections and repositories, factors that encouraged us to create a repository policy, ourcollaborative process for creating the policy, and lessons learned. We hope that others can use our processesto build their own policy that reflects the needs of their campuses and scholars and further moves the needletoward the “Library as Publisher” model.

How about this for a Big Deal? Read & Let Read

In March 2021, the University of California and Elsevier announced a new transformative deal which included slightly-discounted article processing fees as UC's route to open access in Elsevier journals. Librarians and researchers expressed immediate concern that this deal upheld inequities in the research system. The UC/Elsevier transformative deal, however, is just one of many that include expensive pay-to-publish structures. This commentary proposes an alternative contract between libraries and publishers that would enable wider reading and lower costs, called Read & Let Read. The three main points of a Read & Let Read deal include a half-dollar valuation of individual journal articles, prepayment on a university’s estimated usage, and an equal payment made for usage outside of the university. If a Read & Let Read deal were implemented at UC, UC would pay a slightly higher amount of money to Elsevier than they are expected to at present, and would not flip any articles to open access. Instead, they would contribute toward a more equitably-distributed system of scholarly readership.

The practical and the aspirational: Managing the student employee experience in library publishing efforts

Student employees are a critical component in the workforce of academic libraries. While more established library services have the benefit of attracting student employees specifically interested in their work, scholarly communication programs, and library publishing efforts in particular, have more difficulty describing and garnering interest in their work. This article describes the journey of the Digital Initiatives Unit at Utah State University Libraries as we navigated the particular trials that come with library publishing—specifically delving into the work of our institutional repository (IR) and the role of student employees in those efforts. The labor of our program is variable and largely project-based, which has presented a number of challenges related to our student employees: understanding the larger context of their work; retention of knowledge and skills alongside their ability to prioritize; and a struggle to transfer skills from one project to another. Addressing these problems involved more intentional gathering of student feedback, colleague brainstorming, and trial and error; through which process and results we are gaining a more developed understanding of the critical importance of the student experience. When student employees see their work as more than just a job, and recognize the skills they are learning, they come away with greater satisfaction and our unit benefits from improved outputs. Using what we have learned, we will be able to continue our efforts for a better student experience as well as creating future goals for our unit.

Review of Mapping Scholarly Communication Infrastructure: A Bibliographic Scan of Digital Scholarly Communication Infrastructure

In The Bibliographic Scan of Digital Scholarly Communication Infrastructure, author David Lewis provides a useful and succinct overview of recent literature and trendsetters in digital infrastructure that supports the publishing cycle.

Review: Creative Commons. (2020). Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians. Chicago: ALA Editions. ISBN: 978-0-8389-1946-0.

This article reviews the book "Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians," a guide to the application of the Creative Commons system for open access licenses. In addition to providing an assessment of the book as an instructional text in critical skills of copyright and licensing applications among librarians and educators, it discusses pedagogical features of the text and gives a brief overview of its content.

The No-nonsense Guide to Research Support and Scholarly Communication

A brief review of The No-nonsense Guide to Research Support and Scholarly Communication. It articulates the scope of the book, who is to benefit from it.

Knowledge and Practice changes following a student data focused data management education program.

Introduction It is known that graduate students work with research data more intimately than their faculty mentors. Because of this, much data management education is geared toward this population. However, student learning has predominantly been assessed through measures of satisfaction and attendance rather than through evaluating knowledge and skills acquired. This study attempts to advance assessment efforts by asking students to report their knowledge and practice changes before, immediately after, and six months following education. Methods Graduate students in STEM and Health sciences disciplines self-enrolled in an eight-week data management program that used their research projects as the focus for learning. Three surveys were administered (pre, post, and six months following) to determine changes in students’ knowledge and practices regarding data management skills. The survey consisted of approximately 115 Likert-style questions and covered major aspects of the data life cycle. Results & discussion Overall students increased their data management knowledge and improved their skills in all areas of the data life cycle. Students readily adopted practices for straightforward tasks like determining storage and improving file naming. Students improved but struggled with tasks that were more involved like sharing data and documenting code. For most of these practices, students consistently implemented them through the six month follow up period. Conclusion Impact of data management education lasts significantly beyond immediate instruction. In depth assessment of student knowledge and practices indicates where this education is effective and where it needs further support. It is likely that this effect is due to the program length and focus on implementation.

Academic Librarians, Open Access, and the Ethics of Care

This paper explores the value of applying the ethics of care to scholarly communications work, particularly that of open-access (OA) librarians. The ethics of care is a feminist philosophical perspective that sees in the personal a new way to approach other facets of life, including the political and the professional. Care, in this context, is broadly construed as “a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). Joan Tronto outlined four elements of care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, and highlighted the value of care beyond the domestic sphere (1993). The ethics of care values care and relationships as instructive ways of framing and examining work, and has been applied in diverse disciplines, including education, nursing, social work, and even business. Several LIS professionals have considered the ethics of care in the context of library technologies (Henry, 2016) and digital humanities (Dohe, 2019), among others. The ethics of care can also provide inspiration for OA librarians as we think about the scope and nature of our work. What could open access librarians learn from the ethics of care? How might our practice change or evolve with the ethics of care as an underpinning philosophy? Who do we include in our circle of care while we undertake our work? The ethics of care provides a more expansive way to think about OA librarianship.