Due to the new regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), library publishers are responsible for making their publications—both the content and their platforms—accessible. This roundtable discussion will have representatives from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Tech, Penn State University, and University of Minnesota discuss the unique challenges of creating accessible content. These challenges include working with different publishing platforms, publication types, and accessibility tools; applying best practices and creating workflows; and working with publication outputs, namely PDFs. Panelists will also discuss how changes in publishing and accessibility technologies have changed their approaches to remediation work (e.g., updates to screen readers) as well as specific remediation challenges, like writing and placing long descriptions for complex images and tagging tables. This presentation will address best practices and challenges creating accessible content, from the source file or platform export to the final tagged PDF. Panelists will also discuss the unique needs and use cases of scholarly publications and their experiences communicating those needs to their universities.
This workshop will provide insights into the ongoing activities to adopt open workflows within library publishing. Via the example of Iowa State University Digital Press, we will explore how libraries can collaborate with open infrastructures such as Thoth Open Metadata, Janeway, and Pressbooks to implement open practices utilising open data and open protocols to improve findability of their valuable outputs. ISU Digital Press is considering the adoption of an open ecosystem of interoperable, community-led infrastructures, covering aspects of editorial (Janeway & Pressbooks) and metadata management (Thoth Open Metadata), hosting and distribution (Thoth Open Metadata & OAPEN), discoverability (Directory of Open Access Books, multiple aggregators via Thoth), archiving (Thoth Open Archiving Network), and usage monitoring (OPERAS/Thoth) of open access books. By collaborating to ensure interoperability and accessible, seamless workflows across vital infrastructures that meet individual publisher needs, we showcase how a more robust, sustainable, and equitable ecosystem for open access books is being embedded by library publishers. We will also seek to shed light on questions and issues that have emerged during the adoption of those open workflows, such as that of mapping different forms of long-form publishing outputs (e.g. textbooks, OER in a broader sense) onto metadata management, dissemination, and archiving processes to ensure long-term availability of those open resources, Following a round of brief introductory presentations from Iowa State University Digital Press, and the infrastructures involved, we invite participants to engage in an open discussion of the topics raised, to learn more about attendants’ backgrounds, needs, and recommendations – with an aim to scope applicability of the proposed workflows to different national and regional contexts and corresponding specificities that exist in library publishing across the globe.
Open course publications offer students meaningful, real-world experience with the scholarly publishing process, positioning them as knowledge creators rather than passive consumers. As an example of open pedagogy in action, course books created as part of credit-bearing courses allow students to engage directly with research, authorship, editorial workflows, and publication practices. Supporting these projects has become one of the most impactful contributions of library digital publishing programs, advancing student engagement and learning while reinforcing the value of open access and publicly engaged scholarship. This session presents a case study of supporting in-class course book publishing through a sustained collaboration between the library and an instructor. It describes how academic librarians work with instructors to plan and support a course publication from the classroom to final publication. This includes scoping the assignment, aligning pedagogical goals with publishing workflows, delivering in-class instruction on scholarly publishing concepts, and providing ongoing consultation and production support throughout the term. We examine course books as a form of library publishing practice and reflect on the benefits and challenges of embedding publishing into the curriculum. This presentation highlights how in-class publishing projects enable collaboration, knowledge sharing, and student engagement, while also requiring coordination, communication, and labour planning. By situating course books within the broader library publishing ecosystem, this session offers insight into how libraries can support meaningful, curriculum-integrated publishing projects that extend student work beyond the classroom and into the scholarly record.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all watch party 1 presentations.
Student belonging continues to be an important professional development topic for instructors because of its connection to increased retention. At the same time, because Open Educational Resources (OER) can be edited, they have been touted as a potential solution for furthering Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the classroom. But which edits to OER would be most impactful for actually furthering students’ sense of belonging? And what role do library publishers play in encouraging faculty authors to implement these best practices? This session will present results from a qualitative research study that asked fourteen UC Santa Cruz undergraduate students to reflect on existing OER in order to better understand what impedes their sense of belonging. The study’s more exploratory and open-ended approach, which invited students to reflect on OER as they currently are with minimal prompting, was intended to identify barriers that may not have previously surfaced when assessing modified OER. The webinar will highlight key questions faculty authors should ask themselves about course reading language, organization, and purpose in order to edit OER with student belonging in mind. The presentation will conclude with a reflection about library publishers might operationalize best practices such as the ones found in our study. In University Presses, developmental editors often take on this role, prompting authors to follow style guides, refine the organization of their arguments, and advocate for potential readers’ needs. But in library publishing, where roles are less well-defined and faculty may be more reticent to follow such guidelines, how might we ensure that the OER that are created as part of our programs are most effective for learners? Whose responsibility is this and how do we keep learners at the forefront of our publishing process?
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all watch party 1 presentations.
Crafting a compelling book proposal is both an art and a strategic exercise that sits at the intersection of scholarly rigor, craft, and market awareness. Faculty authors from R2 institutions struggle with navigating a complex and competitive scholarly publishing landscape, and many need assistance developing a book proposal, which has become a genre of its own. Library publishers and university presses now find a shared purpose in helping faculty scholars articulate their ideas, find relevant presses, work with editors, and get published. This presentation explores how university presses and library publishers can collaborate through the book proposal development process to help aspiring faculty authors develop book proposals that catch the attention of editors and lead to book deals. Using a case study from Appalachian State University, this presentation will describe how library publishers and university presses can partner to support faculty during the book proposal development stage, using collaborative models, such as workshops and consultations, to help faculty craft stronger book proposals. This presentation will also examine how library publishers can identify and build sustainable cross-campus partnerships that improve the overall faculty author experience and strengthen publishing pipelines that support both open and traditional models of dissemination. Finally, this presentation will examine the core components of an effective proposal and highlight how library publishers are uniquely positioned to facilitate relationships between university presses and faculty authors.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all watch party 1 presentations.
Through spring and Summer 2025 our library publishing team embarked on a zero textbook cost (ZTC) campus tour. With the goal of talking to every department on campus, we engaged with librarians, the students’ union, and we delivered 28 presentations across campus about our ZTC program and supporting library services! This presentation would highlight the process of coordinating this outreach on a large campus, share the faulty perspectives we encountered and reflect on our experience for others interest in engaging their campus around ZTC.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all watch party 1 presentations.
Building on work by the Association of University Presses’ Library Relations Committee and initiatives spearheaded by leaders of the HBCU Library Alliance, University of Vermont Press, and University of Guam Press, this panel demonstrates how libraries and university presses can develop and sustain support models for Black and Indigenous scholars. We will discuss training and mentoring programs, intentional acquisitions and peer review practices, open access and other equity concerns.
Academic journals are foundational infrastructure for emerging scholarly fields, yet launching and sustaining one within a library publishing context presents unique operational, staffing, and governance challenges. This session presents a detailed case study of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE), tracing its evolution from a three-person passion project to a structured, values-guided publishing initiative with a robust editorial and production ecosystem. In this session, we outline the processes and scaffolding that have supported JOERHE’s growth, including: establishing governance roles and workflows; recruiting and training editorial and production staff; defining quality assurance checkpoints; implementing publication platforms and tooling; and crafting documentation for consistency and onboarding. We’ll share practical metrics and milestones, such as editorial turnaround times, role definitions, and staffing transitions, to illustrate how operational choices impact sustainability. Attendees will gain insights into balancing volunteer contributions with structured responsibilities, aligning journal values with operational practices, and leveraging library publishing resources to support emerging scholars. We’ll also discuss how we manage cross-institutional collaboration, inclusive recruitment practices, and capacity building for early-career contributors interested in editorial participation. By focusing on what it takes to manage and grow a library-supported journal, this session offers actionable guidance for academic libraries, library publishing programs, and collaborative publishing initiatives seeking to launch, refine, or scale their own journals. Participants will leave with concrete strategies and templates to help them operationalize editorial standards, build resilient workflows, and support community participation in scholarly publishing.
Access Services in Libraries, Inc. (ASIL), a small, volunteer-run nonprofit best known for the Access Services Conference, has long supported practitioner scholarship but lacked a formal publishing venue. In 2025, ASIL began developing a publishing arm, including a new open-access journal and structured conference proceedings. This case study shares how the organization uses AI tools to accelerate planning, documentation, and workflow design while maintaining strong human oversight. The session will outline how AI supported early-stage work such as shaping the journal’s scope, drafting policies and reviewer guidelines, developing metadata and workflow structures, and generating a multi-phase implementation roadmap. It will also discuss the organizational considerations necessary for sustainability, including governance models, staffing, and technical infrastructure.
Since generative artificial intelligence (AI) models hit the big time in 2023, many involved in scholarly communications have pushed for rules and policies around how authors and peer reviewers may or may not use these tools in their work and how they should disclose such use if they do, with many publishers enacting such policies. However, little attention has been paid to whether and how scholarly publishers disclose their own use of AI. This can include using AI in their publishing workflows, such as copy editing and image creation, but extends beyond as well. News items have reported on multi-million dollar deals publishers have made with tech companies to license their content to train AI tools or how scholarly publishers are creating their own AI tools based on their corpus of content. This presentation seeks to bring more attention to this issue by sharing the results of a content analysis of the largest scholarly publishers’ websites as well as the websites of their top journals. The analysis looked for publicly available language provided by the publishers about how they use AI and then analyzed the content through a lens of performative disclosure vs. meaningful disclosure. The presentation will also discuss how this issue affects library publishing programs and best practices that libraries should consider when deciding whether they need their own disclosure policies or how they should advise their editors and other participants. Even those who are not actively using AI are still part of the scholarly communications ecosystem, which means they are likely affected indirectly by AI.
Although editorial processes vary among library publishers and university presses, advisory boards are often a common means of providing guidance for publishing programs and publication review at various stages. In 2024, Virginia Tech Publishing & Press (VTP&P) sought to create an advisory board to support strategic planning, review publication proposals, and represent the university and scholarly community at large. In this presentation, we will share our process for establishing our advisory board, from creating a charge for the group, identifying members, building rapport and communication among the group, and creating a workflow for reviewing incoming proposals. We will cover the various ways publishers and presses can work with an advisory board and what role they may play in the publishing process. We will also share some of the challenges and opportunities this process provided and continues to provide, such as the ongoing challenge to determine how much we share with the board and what level of decision making power they have, as well as the opportunity to use the board as a sounding board for new ideas and potential areas of growth. The presentation will cover how we have built in reflection points to learn what is working and what is not and how we have used that feedback to implement change over time and improve the process for both our board members and our program.
Library publishing often relies on librarians taking on journal “hosting” or publishing roles, despite having little experience with publishing. Key to this role is working with editors, who may also be new to the “back end” of publishing. Whether nurturing a collection of existing journals, or guiding a new journal toward its first issue, it can be challenging to build relationships with editors, understand the needs of the journals, and build the necessary skills. As a librarian who is still relatively new to library publishing, I am interested in the practices, ideas, and challenges of others who are working with similar programs. The session will be a semi-structured discussion intended to provide librarians an opportunity to ask questions and share strategies. Likely discussion topics include: • Strategies for communicating with editors and understanding their needs • Identifying and prioritizing useful library interventions (some possibilities: indexing, preservation, and accessibility) • Resources and strategies for learning about publishing • Decision making around taking on new journals • Development of policies to guide this work In order to help attendees turn this conversation into action, we will use a notes document to gather suggestions and resources.
Working with authors can be a rewarding, complex, and sometimes frustrating process. Expectations can vary, emotions can run high, and communication can be misinterpreted. How can publishing professionals more effectively provide and receive constructive feedback to facilitate meaningful conversations? In 2024, Angela Watters and Corinne Guimont were assigned as peer mentors through the LPC Peer Mentor program and through our conversations we shared our experiences working with complex projects and authors and the strategies we took to navigate these situations. In this workshop, we plan to share some of our strategies within the framework from the books Crucial Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback. We will examine the three types of feedback (appreciation, coaching, and evaluation) and how to both give and receive feedback especially when the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions are strong (as is often the case when working with an author who is sharing work they have been committed to for several years). We will share the general frameworks and ideas presented by the two books and then provide publishing specific scenarios for attendees to discuss in small groups and then share back to the larger group. We will also provide time for attendees to share their own experiences and strategies for navigating complex, yet constructive, conversations with authors.
This session is part of the Gates Foundation funded project, Mapping Diamond Open Access Journals: A Nationwide Study of the U.S. Scholarly Publishing Landscape, conducted by Lyrasis, the Big Ten Academic Alliance Center for Library Programs, and the California Digital Library, with assessment support from Goff Group LLC. The project seeks to generate a comprehensive understanding of the U.S. Diamond Open Access (OA) publishing ecosystem to strengthen non-commercial scholarly communication and mobilize stakeholders for investment, infrastructure, and policy guidance. A central component of the project is a national survey of Diamond OA publishers, complemented by interviews and focus groups, to better understand who is publishing Diamond OA journals, how this work is organized and resourced, and where key challenges and opportunities lie. In this interactive session, we will share a preview of preliminary survey results, inviting library publishers, the core constituency for this project, to engage in the early stages of meaning making of the data. Participants will be asked to reflect on whether the findings align with lived experience, what feels missing or mischaracterized, and what additional questions or areas of focus should shape the next phase of the project. Feedback from the library publishing community is essential for validating findings, identifying gaps, and ensuring the project reflects community priorities. Facilitated discussion will allow attendees to share needs, highlight challenges and successes, and explore what forms of support would most meaningfully strengthen Diamond OA journal publishing. Participants will engage directly with project team members, contributing insights that surveys alone cannot capture and helping guide subsequent analysis and project directions.
Library publishers are responsible for more than just the content we publish; we are responsible for the containers we put it in. While we champion Open Access, the infrastructure we lease from vendors often undermines the values we claim to uphold. Consider the reality of our vendor platforms: You can have perfectly accessible PDFs, but if a blind author cannot navigate the submission dashboard, your program is exclusionary. Similarly, you can remove the financial paywall for your readers, but if your vendor replaces it with a surveillance dragnet, you haven’t made the research free—you’ve just changed the currency. The commercial surveillance of user data in academic systems continues to grow unchecked. The April 2026 Department of Justice (DOJ) deadline for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance has passed, leaving libraries to face legal liability for the accessibility of these third-party platforms. We cannot code our way out of these problems; we must negotiate our way out. This session frames the license agreement as the library’s and library publisher’s most powerful tool for enforcing equity. We will present SPARC’s work on privacy contract negotiation alongside an initial landscape analysis of accessibility clauses. Participants will discuss how to move beyond checking the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) to demanding binding contract language that protects user data and ensures legal compliance. Join us to strategize how we can hold our infrastructure vendors accountable to our values and the law.
TEI is a mature technology for encoding scholarly texts, but publishing those texts on the web in a sustainable, maintainable way can be challenging. Projects invest significant effort in encoding content, only to find that rendering and long-term maintenance present their own set of problems. And while XSLT has long been the default tool for TEI transformation, it comes with tradeoffs—browser support is being deprecated, the learning curve is steep, and many projects find themselves maintaining bespoke pipelines that are difficult to update or hand off to new staff. When the University of Rochester’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library received NEH funding to modernize the Middle English Text Series (METS), the goal was straightforward: replace an aging Drupal site with something modern and sustainable. What emerged was a modern alternative to XSLT-based rendering: a Rails GraphQL API with a React frontend that harvests TEI documents, normalizes them, and renders them in a responsive web reader. The same TEI files also flow to InDesign for print production, giving Rochester a true single-source publishing pipeline. A year later, the California Digital Library faced a related problem. They had nearly 1,900 UC Press e-books encoded in TEI, but the in-house system used to render them had become difficult to maintain. Standard XSLT transformation tools proved unworkable for their collection. But the parsing engine developed for Rochester offered a path forward. CDL commissioned an adaptation to convert their TEI into static, sustainable HTML, a concrete example of library publishers building on each other’s investments. This panel brings together the library publishers and developers behind both projects to discuss the promises and pain points of TEI-based publishing. We’ll share practical lessons on building modern TEI pipelines and reflect on how grant-funded infrastructure can benefit institutions beyond the original project.
Library publishers have developed robust workflows for digital journals and open educational resources (OER). Yet, the vast majority of our physical collections remain static, “finished” products of a traditional, often exclusionary canon. While critical pedagogy encourages students to “remix” and “intervene” in these texts, libraries lack the publishing infrastructure to legitimize and preserve these physical interventions. This workshop proposes a new model: “Guerilla Publishing.” In this model, libraries do not just host finished books; they act as platforms for student-authored “tipped-in” pages, marginalia, and physical inserts that critique or expand the existing collection, utilizing weeded, discarded, or non-library books. Since this model challenges standard library operations, this session functions as a design charrette. Participants will work collaboratively to blueprint the infrastructure required to turn “student projects” into a “published record.” We will allow attendees to self select into one of two core operational hurdles to engage with: 1. The Policy Layer: How do we distinguish between “defacement” and “enrichment”? We will draft a “Statement of Participatory Stewardship.” 2. The Metadata Layer: How can cataloging workflows be adapted (e.g., local notes, 590 fields, linked digital surrogates) to make ephemeral student contributions discoverable? Participants will leave with a collaborative “Guerilla Publishing Toolkit”—a draft framework for managing student-authored physical interventions in their own libraries. This session bridges the gap between critical library instruction and the operational realities of library publishing.
