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.
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.
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 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.
