As library-based publishing and OER programs mature, they encounter a predictable set of operational, technical, and strategic challenges that are often under-discussed until they arise. This panel brings together representatives from several institutions who have navigated common “growing pains” and developed sustainable strategies to strengthen their publishing programs over time. Panelists will share real-world approaches to issues such as supporting authors who start but do not complete projects; managing user accounts and contributor turnover; planning for new editions and post-grant sustainability; establishing or refining peer-review, copyediting, and accessibility workflows; and responsibly stewarding student-authored open pedagogy publications. Panelists will also discuss challenges that emerge as publishing programs mature, including supporting faculty who have limited time or digital publishing experience; coordinating multi-step pre-publication editorial processes; maintaining consistent metadata and licensing practices; ensuring accessibility compliance at scale; supporting teaching & learning initiatives and improving student success; and marketing and promoting successful publications. Examples may include implementing structured author onboarding, developing editorial style guidelines, introducing checklists or QA workflows, integrating analytics to monitor impact, incorporating formative assessment opportunities directly into teaching and learning material, and achieving tighter integration between published content with an institution’s learning management system. The session will be structured as a panel discussion with panelists discussing specific challenges, followed by concrete demonstrations of strategies, workflows, and tools they’ve adopted to address the challenge. Solutions will encompass a range of ongoing approaches, including the creation or adoption of policies, workflows, training and development opportunities, and software tools (including Pressbooks) that have enabled library publishers to better accomplish their key priorities. The session will include a moderated discussion and audience Q&A, giving attendees the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned, share their own experiences, and explore how these strategies can be applied in their own institutions.
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.
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.
In an time of digital exhaustion, zines offer a tactile way to express ideas, foster creativity, and build community. This workshop invites participants to explore zines as versatile tools for teaching, publishing, and personal expression. Drawing on our experience using zines both professionally and personally, presenters will demonstrate how these DIY publications can complement formal publishing programs, enliven classroom activities, and serve as a medium for self-care and reflection. Participants will participate in brainstorming exercises, create their own mini-zines, and discuss the logistics of zines in the classroom. Along the way, we will share practical strategies for integrating zines into academic and professional contexts—whether to showcase research, encourage student engagement, or cultivate inclusive spaces for dialogue. We will also highlight the role of zines in promoting wellness and levity, offering a creative outlet that balances the demands of scholarly and professional life. By the end of the workshop, attendees will leave with a completed zine, actionable ideas for incorporating zines into their work, and a renewed appreciation for the power of low-tech publishing to inspire connection and creativity.
