This presentation will explore how sustained collaboration between a university academic library publishing program and department of English grew from faculty creation and development of open educational resources (OER) for classroom use into a workforce-aligned undergraduate certificate in publishing and editing available for students campus-wide. With the English department’s commitment to open practices, partnerships developed to support OER creation and publication expanded to include the library publishing program’s support of an existing undergraduate literary journal previously published as a website. Shifting the journal publication process to workflows developed as part of the library publishing program gave students the opportunity to explore discoverability, permanent identifiers, and become familiar with terms and roles used in commercial publishing ventures. The library publishing program coordinator and the advisor for the journal’s undergraduate editing team realized that not only were the students producing scholarly and creative work, they were also gaining structured, hands-on experience with the editorial, production and ethical aspects of publishing. Recognizing this opportunity, the library and English department designed a certificate that would help make this experiential learning visible, coherent, and meaningful beyond their time on campus. The undergraduate certificate in publishing and editing is implemented by both the English department and library faculty, and introduces students to editorial workflows, copyright and licensing, peer review, accessibility, and discoverability strategies. The collaborators used labor market reports to ground the certificate proposal in language used by workforce partners describing the skills they are seeking in potential employees. These reports helped highlight how publishing related competencies such as written and verbal communication, project management, problem-solving, and digital fluency align with skills currently emphasized by workforce and career readiness initiatives. Using the vocabulary of workforce development has helped position the certificate as both academically rigorous and strategically responsive to needs communicated by university and state leadership.
This session presents an innovative model that bridges undergraduate research mentorship with formal scholarly publishing training through the strategic convergence of two complementary initiatives: an in-house undergraduate scholarly journal and a credit-bearing summer course on the publication journey. Our undergraduate journal was established to provide students with authentic experience in scholarly communication, from manuscript development with faculty mentors through peer review and publication. Recognizing the need for more structured pedagogical support around this process, we developed a companion summer course that demystifies the research-to-publication pipeline. Co-taught by an instruction and outreach librarian and a writing faculty who happen to be our Associate Dean for Community Excellence, the course guides students through identifying research questions, understanding disciplinary conventions, navigating peer review, and engaging with publishing ethics, skills traditionally learned implicitly during graduate education. The convergence of these initiatives creates a comprehensive ecosystem for undergraduate scholarly development. Students in the course produce work suitable for journal submission, while journal contributors benefit from course resources and workshops. This integration aims to yield measurable outcomes: increase submission quality, higher acceptance rates, reduce revision cycles, and greater student confidence in scholarly communication. Operating at an American branch campus in Qatar with over 70 nationalities represented, our program inherently incorporates diverse epistemological frameworks and research traditions. Students bring varied perspectives on citation practices, authorship conventions, and knowledge dissemination, enriching peer review discussions and editorial decisions. This session will share our implementation timeline, budget considerations, metrics for success, and lessons learned. Attendees will receive practical resources including course syllabi, journal submission guidelines adapted for undergraduate writers, peer reviewer training materials, and assessment rubrics. We will discuss how this scalable model can be adapted across institutional contexts while maintaining responsiveness to local student populations and disciplinary needs.
In 2022-23, librarians at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) conducted a mixed methods research study to understand graduate students’ publishing needs. We learned that publishing is often unevenly taught to graduate students who expressed a need for more comprehensive publishing guidance. In addition to learning that students miss opportunities when they are unfamiliar with publishing, interview and survey data demonstrated that students publish at different times and need just-in-time, asynchronous resources to learn about publishing as they navigate the process. Consequently, the Scholarly Communication Librarian shifted from teaching synchronous workshops to creating accessible, discipline-agnostic resources from which graduate students may learn about publishing whenever needed. In Fall 2024, she launched UCSC’s Publishing Tip Series–a weekly e-mail series shared alongside identical podcast episodes–succesfully reaching 80 graduate students and other participants. The second season in Fall 2025 reached 116 participants. This session focuses on the next step: creating an open educational resource (OER) to offer a centralized tool for graduate students to learn about publishing. Simultaneously, UCSC’s OER Librarian has been investigating infrastructure for OER and researching how OER may further student belonging. This Publishing OER, which is in early development, brings an important opportunity to collaborate around OER platforms and creation. Our session describes the goals for the Publishing OER, which include centering student experiences and demystifying the hidden curriculum of publishing, and the value of our collaboration, including takeaways for collaboration with faculty on OER. The session is useful for participants who have ideas for what new authors need to learn and want to make their publishing literacy outreach more widely accessible. We also present one model for Scholarly Communication and OER librarians partnering to achieve shared but distinct goals. Participants will have a chance to engage with and contribute to the Publishing OER.
Consortial and collective library publishing models provide a critical opportunity for libraries facing growing challenges, including funding cuts, the effect of AI on many aspects of the publishing process, new accessibility regulations, and the need to demonstrate value and impact. By working together, libraries can share infrastructure, expertise, and operational costs, making it possible to sustain publishing programs that would be difficult or impossible to run alone. Collective approaches also improve resilience, reduce duplication of effort, and amplify the visibility of library-published scholarship, especially critical in a political climate where diverse perspectives are being marginalized. To achieve the benefits of consortial publishing, shared infrastructure is essential. This session will provide updates on Meru, a unified display layer for library published content, specifically in the context of the consortial or collective publishing use case. Between 2024 and 2025, the Next Generation Library Publishing team and Cast Iron Coding completed a major new phase of Meru development, funded by IMLS, UNC Press, and the Big Ten Academic Alliance, with a strong focus on scalability, interoperability, and usability for library publishers. A new management system now allows Meru sites to be created, updated, and scaled much more easily, reducing technical overhead for hosting and long-term maintenance. Meru’s presentation layer was redesigned so that journals, books, and collections can be displayed using flexible layouts defined by configuration rather than custom code. This makes it far simpler to introduce new publication types or adjust how content appears. Additional improvements to search, performance, and editorial administration further enhance Meru as a sustainable, library-centered publishing platform. Participants will learn about how these new features and Meru’s flexible architecture provide a basis for building robust collective publishing programs, and how they can get involved.
For the presentation of publications—whether monographs or journal articles—there is a need for documents that look contemporary and are offered in various formats. For university presses in particular, it is crucial that these formats can be produced easily and cost-effectively. At the same time, standards must be met and legal requirements such as accessibility must be taken into account. Most of the time, however, authors submit their source texts in Word. So how can we, given these requirements, end up with attractive PDFs and usable HTML documents? OS-APS is an open-source software for producing Diamond Open Access publications, which is already being expanded through various project grants. Its goal is to map complex publishing workflows within a single-source environment. Input formats can include Word documents or LibreOffice documents, and to a limited extent also TeX formats. Output formats include PDF, EPUB, HTML, and common XML formats. Document editing takes place in an online editor with functionalities adapted to the needs of publishers. Among the software’s special features are an accessible online viewer for HTML and JATS/BITS, freely configurable templates for journals and monographs, and alternative text support for graphics. This contribution discusses, from the perspective of FAU University Press, the developments achieved in the BMBF-funded projects and outlines the need for such software. In addition, the use of the OS-APS software in combination with Open Journal Systems (OJS) is explained.
In this presentation, I will review lessons learned about taking a publishing approach to digital scholarship after 10 years with a particularly popular platform and how we plan to move forward. I will also revisit tiered service models for library technology from the LIS literature based on our experiences and emerging trends in the field. For the past decade, as a result of perceived need and based on research on digital publishing needs in the humanities, our library publishing service has used Scalar as one of a small number of platforms we support. Chosen due to its support for multimodal writing, it has been our most popular long-form platform for research publications, including particularly for our Black Studies series, but it has posed challenges due to its aging tech stack and a gap with accessibility expectations that will soon have additional legal force. In spring of 2025, the centrally hosted version of Scalar suffered significant technical challenges, blocking all use for several months. While our local instance was not affected, we paused acceptance of new proposals using Scalar and gave a deadline to existing works in progress for final publication, moving towards an exclusively maintenance and preservation mode for our instance. Our experiences with Scalar raise considerations for successful digital scholarship web publications and related services, and this presentation will explore successes, pain points, and opportunities for moving forward after sunsetting a platform.
Open access (OA) publishing is growing rapidly. Article processing charges (APCs) now significantly impact scholarly equity and institutional budgets. The University of Houston (UH) is a research-intensive public university with diverse disciplines. As UH is expanding its research output and engaging more in open access publishing, analyzing APC expenditures helps the UH Libraries enhance the current open publishing services and institutional agreements with publishers. This study combines OpenAlex metadata with records from UH’s Open Access and APC support program. This study analyzes publishing behavior from 2021 to 2025. This study classifies publications using OpenAlex primary fields as top-level concepts. An author fractional contribution method assesses cost burdens across collaborative outputs more accurately. The analysis examines temporal and disciplinary APC patterns: annual expenditure, median and average costs, and publication volumes. Building on this foundation, the study investigates three critical dimensions: 1) Comparisons between UH’s APC publishing trends and broader North American institutional patterns; 2) Disciplinary variations in APCs and their evolution over the five-year period; 3) The extent of APC concentration at the publisher and journal levels. The findings will provide UH Libraries with evidence-based insights for developing OA support programs that are tailored to the needs of different disciplines. This approach aims to mitigate inequitable cost burdens, evaluate APC agreements and encourage sustainable access to scholarly publishing at the University of Houston.
Traditional metrics are meaningless in the age of AI. This is the hardest story to tell both researchers and administrations without devaluing the work of the IR and open scholarship in general. The temptation is to play whack-a-mole with scraper traffic, implementing technical barriers to distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” access. But this approach both fails technically and misses the deeper problem: download metrics were never adequate measures of repository value, and AI scraping simply makes that inadequacy impossible to ignore. We should stop telling that story. This presentation argues that we need an entirely new set of stories to tell about what repositories (and by extension OA) do. Rather than trying to galvanize compromised metrics, I will propose frameworks for thought around how to talk about IR value that don’t depend on circulation, downloads, and outmoded ideas of engagement. In what is meant to be a participatory discussion, I ask: What stories can we tell about our value and the value of our material if we throw metrics to the wind? How can we reposition the work of digital publishing and also reposition the IR as a pedagogical tool to leverage in AI literacy discussions on campus? Drawing on experiences at Syracuse University, this presentation provides space for collective brainstorming as well as concrete strategies for shifting administrative and faculty conversations away from the download metric entirely—not by fixing it, but by telling better stories about what repositories actually do for institutions and scholarly communities.
As a global infrastructure for knowledge dissemination based on good publishing practices, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) must navigate a difficult tension: maintaining rigorous global standards without reinforcing colonial power imbalances. This presentation interrogates the politics of classification (Bowker & Star, 2000) within open knowledge infrastructures, focusing on how standardized criteria can inadvertently create barriers for journals in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), leading to epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). I’ll present the DOAJ indexing criteria as a case of the complex process of ‘infrastructuring’ inclusive open access. DOAJ is not a static technical platform but a living infrastructure co-constructed and maintained by a diverse global community. As such, DOAJ is in a constant state of change: journals are added immediately upon acceptance and removed regularly when they no longer meet the required standards. Beyond formal review, DOAJ also listens to its user community, responding to concerns by investigating journals or publishers flagged through public discourse or internal monitoring. In this way, DOAJ functions not only as an index but as a responsive system shaped by the practices and trust of its global community. The history of DOAJ criteria demonstrates that defining and promoting best practices in OA is not a one-time design challenge, but a continuous, reflexive process.
The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) has professional certifications on disability and accessibility core competencies, web accessibility, and document accessibility. The certification is based on 3 domains: Disabilities, Challenges, and Assistive Technologies Accessibility and Universal Design Standards, Laws, and Management Strategies This presentation from the Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing program will focus on how two members studied, took, and passed the IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) exam. The presentation will cover the content of the certification, the importance of certifications, the process of becoming certified, the study tips that proved useful, and how to apply lessons learned to your publishing program.
This presentation offers as a case study a Wikipedia archive assignment that connects classrooms across levels and institutions at CUNY. This project asks graduate students to collaborate with community college students in a hands-on application of key concepts in digital pedagogy and open publishing that also brings visibility to CUNY archival materials. We will give an overview of our assignment and suggest ways others can replicate it to organize initiatives that publish archival materials at their own institutions. We piloted this assignment in Fall 2025, connecting the MA seminar we co-taught at the CUNY Graduate Center, “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” and a first-year developmental writing course taught by Dr. Michael at CUNY Hostos Community College. Our graduate students were introduced to archival work through a guest lecture by CUNY Digital Archivist Bridget Day on “Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory,” a three-year Mellon-funded project that aims to digitize and coordinate the archives held at CUNY’s 25 campuses. We then partnered with a new library publishing initiative, the CUNY Craig Newmark Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel, who introduced students to Wikipedia editing. These conversations came together in our week on DH pedagogy, where students got into groups to prepare small Wikipedia assignments that undergraduates would complete in a single session. At the same time, Dr. Michael’s undergraduates were completing a unit on the 1970’s “Save Hostos Movement” that included exploration of the campus archives. At the end of this unit, Knipel and representatives from our graduate class introduced students to Wikipedia editing and the assignments they had prepared. These assignments asked the undergraduates to cite primary and secondary sources in adding a section on the “Save Hostos Movement” to the Hostos Wikipedia page. This assignment brought together library special collections and digital publishing in ways that connect the dots between local knowledge and public scholarship.
In 2024, Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) launched the OPEN FL Publishing Program for its 40 member institutions with the primary purpose of facilitating OER adoption, adaption, and authoring in Florida public higher education. As a state-funded consortium, FLVC’s OER publishing initiative offers a unique perspective on navigating the legislative landscape, launching a program without grant funding, and acting/reacting promptly, per government requirements and member needs. Importantly, FLVC’s OPEN FL Publishing request needed to be carefully crafted through multiple steps for approval by LBR (legislative budget request) which is not guaranteed. Then, once the request was approved, the consortium had to move quickly with next steps: arranging contracts with vendors, training staff, and advertising to members with no grant funding to support textbook development. After the fast and furious creation of the program, member participation had grown slowly, but steadily. This slow growth in community uptake has proven to be a boon for team and member learning and organic spread of the program’s worth among institutions. The process of creation and launch of an OER publishing program is best understood in terms of a series of challenges and wins. The speakers will engage in a lively exchange, presenting obstacles encountered in the launch phase of the project, followed by solutions which represent a win for OER publishing and, ultimately, students. The dramatization of decision points in this session will entertain, inform, and inspire attendees.
The most recent LPC Directory received responses from 179 publishers across 18 countries, which has increased from 116 library publishers when the Directory was first launched. Each publishing program is unique in its operation with different staffing models, size, level of output, and publication goals. This suggests that library based publishing is growing as a field and warrants further investigation into its labor practices. In an effort to gain a deeper understanding of how library publishing work operates, the LPC established the Staffing Survey Task Force in 2024. The goal of this initiative is to identify effective practices, common challenges, and opportunities for improvement within our community of library publishers. The survey we created was open from June-July 2025 and explores how library publishers quantify their staffing, utilize volunteer labor, compensate publishing work, and incorporate publishing tasks with other job responsibilities. The survey was distributed to LPC members and in other relevant library publishing spaces. After the completion of the survey and analysis of results, we present our report to the LPC community.
In 2023 the Open Education Network launched a two-year pilot program with Ketty, a web-based book production platform and open source project built by the Coko Foundation. (Ketty was first known as Editoria and also Ketida.) The OEN invited a self-selected group of community members to experiment with Ketty and the Open Textbook Planner, an embedded tool, to write and publish open textbooks. Our goals were to test the tools, gather feedback, inform future development, and consider if Ketty could become the foundation of community-owned infrastructure. We also wanted to strengthen and diversify our OER publishing community and publish new open textbooks. Well, it’s two years later and we’ve learned (and published!) some things. We’ll discuss Accessible Appalachia, published by Eastern Kentucky University, and highlight the behind-the-scenes process that brought that project to life. Join this session to learn more about the pilot’s structure, members, feedback, accomplishments, and challenges. We’ll talk about both internal and external influences on the pilot’s progress, how the tool continues to change, and how we’re working to move forward in an uncertain environment.
