Open education work—particularly where it intersects with library publishing, open access, OER creation, and open pedagogy—plays an increasingly visible role in how libraries support teaching, learning, and scholarly communication. While this work is widely valued, approaches to describing, supporting, and recognizing open education roles and contributions vary across institutions and contexts. This Birds-of-a-Feather session will bring together library publishers, open education practitioners, scholars, and collaborators for an informal, facilitated conversation about how open education work is understood, supported, and sustained within library publishing ecosystems. The first portion of the session will focus on surfacing how participants currently navigate recognition and legitimacy for open education work within existing institutional and professional structures, drawing on lived experience in their professional roles. The second half of the session will turn toward collective reflection and possibility. Participants will discuss what it could look like for professional communities and groups like the emerging Open Education Association to serve as convening spaces for shared learning, visibility, and coordination. Rather than proposing fixed frameworks, the conversation will center on identifying common values, open questions, and areas where collaboration could help professionalize the field of open education in relation to open publishing. The session will be guided by structured prompts, group discussion, and a Padlet facilitating collective note-taking to highlight themes, tensions, and opportunities. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how peers across the library publishing and open education communities are approaching professional recognition in open publishing, as well as a shared set of questions, considerations, and conversation starters that can inform future collaboration at local, regional, and national levels.
Consortial programs arise when higher education institutions seize opportunities to operate at scale to better serve their faculty, students, and communities. Whether by delivering cost savings or leveraging shared resources, technology, and infrastructure, consortia offer opportunities to do more together. Also, emerging from a desire to serve their institutional communities, library publishing programs seem like a natural fit for consortia to operate at scale through shared resources, technology, and infrastructure. But has this occurred in practice? This birds of a feather session uses the results of survey of consortial publishing efforts as a starting point of conversation with those who are publishing at a consortial scale, whether central office staff or those partnering with consortia to publish. We will consider: –What seems to work for your consortia and how can others learn from you? –What hurdles emerge from offering publishing services at scale? Are there any tensions between the expectations/needs/values of the various institutions you serve? –How do you make sure you serve all of your institutions, not just those that are well resourced? How do you make sure that you are reaching and interacting with underserved institutions? –What aspects seem most valued by consortial members (staffing, money, technology, other infrastructure)? –Are there ways that consortia can work together to operate at a larger scale? –Is there need for a separate group for communication of consortia involved in publishing? We hope to leave the session with an action plan for both individual consortia but also potentially organize a community of practice across US consortia. While the session is aimed at consortial publishers, those who are interested in building capacity for publishing at scale are also welcome to join the discussion.
