This presentation shares an update on the Public Knowledge Project’s research into the needs of open publishing programs oriented towards books and other standalone content. It will summarise the findings of the Open Monograph Press (OMP) Under the Spotlight report, including the technical roadmap for OMP, an evaluation of publication type metadata that is informing efforts to better support more formats in scholarly communication, and highlight partnerships advocating for bibliodiversity across the global publishing ecosystem. Finally, it will outline the path forward for further exploration of the unique needs, technical and otherwise, of institutional publishers seeking to support long form content.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all but one of the watch party 2 presentations. The link to view From Vulnerabilities to Verification is different; see the presentation's description for the link to view.
This short presentation will share how our institution enabled Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Open Journal Systems (OJS) to improve the security of editorial and administrative accounts. After a joint review with central IT, we addressed common vulnerabilities, outdated accounts, shared logins, and weak password practices through a careful cleanup and role reassignment to protect the integrity of our hosted journals. With an upgrade, staged testing, and steady collaboration across departments, we introduced MFA through the PKP OpenID Connect plugin and supported users through a smooth transition. The result is a more secure publishing environment with stronger protection for privileged accounts in line with institutional standards and a more dependable editorial publishing process. The talk will share the steps we followed, the problems we encountered, and the lessons that helped guide the process, offering practical direction and valuable guidance for libraries planning similar improvements.
NOTE: The video stream link for this presentation is separate and different from the link that goes to the playlist.
In 2025, the University of Ottawa Library was approached by an affiliated professor whose academic society, the Society for Transparency, Openness, and Replication in Kinesiology (STORK), was about to lose funding for hosting its publishing activities on Open Monograph Press (OMP), Open Journal Systems (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS). Initially, the professor asked if the library could provide financial support. However, since the library already hosted journals on OJS, it made more sense to migrate over the journal. The problem, though, was that at the time, the uOttawa Library did not operate instances of OMP or OPS, and with a constrained budget, setting up new platforms with additional costs seemed uncertain. To the rescue comes the consortia model! Leveraging the library’s membership with Scholars Portal and its shared infrastructure approach, the library was able to implement new instances of OMP and OPS at no additional cost and begin migrating STORK’s publishing activities. Sounds simple, right? In reality, it was doable but not seamless. We encountered technical hurdles, it required additional staff time to sort out and develop new internal workflows as well as devote time to training, and we learned valuable lessons along the way. In this session, we will provide an overview of the project, share lessons learned, and discuss the partnership between the library and the consortium, including the roles we each played. For this project, the shared infrastructure model proved essential to sustaining STORK’s three open publishing activities using the Public Knowledge Project’s software and highlights how consortia models can support sustainability for openness, with benefits like reducing costs, distributing workload across the teams, minimizing technical burden, and enabling knowledge sharing across teams.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all but one of the watch party 2 presentations. The link to view From Vulnerabilities to Verification is different; see the presentation's description for the link to view.
This presentation will introduce participants to an open, community-maintained dataset that inventories active and historical Canadian scholarly journals, compiled and stewarded by the Érudit research team as part of Coalition Publica. The dataset documents various characteristics of over a thousand Canadian peer-reviewed journals, including ownership, access models, language, and indexing status among others, and offers rich insight into a national publishing ecosystem. Designed as an open resource, the dataset is continuously improved through community contributions, ensuring it remains accurate, current, and responsive to evolving library and publishing needs. The presentation will briefly outline key characteristics of the journals represented in the dataset and discuss how libraries are already incorporating this open data into local tools to surface diamond open access journals alongside APC-based titles in read-and-publish agreements. By positioning non-commercial journals within the same decision-making and discovery contexts as commercial titles, this information helps libraries present a more values-aligned and complete picture of publishing options available to their research communities. The presentation concludes by reflecting on lessons learned from community engagement, opportunities for further collaboration, and the broader implications for library publishing in Canada and beyond.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all but one of the watch party 2 presentations. The link to view From Vulnerabilities to Verification is different; see the presentation's description for the link to view.
University libraries in the United States play a critical and growing role in supporting open access (OA) scholarly journals, yet the labor required to sustain these publications—who performs it, how much time it demands, and how it is compensated—remains underexamined. Recent research by Lange & Severson examined labor in Canadian open access journals, providing valuable insights into editorial structures and compensation models in that national context. However, their study did not include journals hosted or published by U.S. university libraries. To expand this conversation and develop evidence to support local decision-making, the presenters conducted a complementary research study focused specifically on U.S. members of the Library Publishing Coalition. Our study mirrors Lange & Severson’s methodological approach to allow for direct comparison between the two countries. This presentation will share early findings from the U.S. survey and highlight noteworthy similarities and differences between U.S. and Canadian journal labor structures. By offering concrete data about how editorial labor is distributed and supported, our goal is to equip library publishers with evidence they can use to shape their service models, advocate for staffing and funding, and better understand the sustainability needs of the journals they support.
NOTE: Video stream link goes to a YouTube playlist containing all but one of the watch party 2 presentations. The link to view From Vulnerabilities to Verification is different; see the presentation's description for the link to view.
Many downstream users of open educational resources (OER) have concerns about the availability of supplemental materials such as presentation slides, homework, and lecture notes. Authors can make these materials available in several ways; however, many of the solutions commonly used obfuscate the availability of materials or put undue pressure on authors. In this presentation, we introduce Digital Press +, a repository that houses supplemental materials for books published by the Digital Press, a publishing unit housed in the Iowa State University Library. The Digital Press+, funded by Iowa State University’s Course Affordability Jump Start Initiative, was developed in partnership with the technology developers at the Open Library of Humanities alongside several updates to the team’s Books plug-in. The project connects content in the Digital Press’ repository plug-in to the materials in their books catalog, allowing the simple cross-linking of connected materials. This also allows for external submissions, which can facilitate the sharing of new materials to supplement and support previously published OER. The collaborators who worked on the development of this project will share how the Digital Press + utilizes the capabilities of the linked repository and books plug-ins for the publication of OER. For others interested in supporting open source development projects like this one, the presenters will share the process by which the team got grant funding for their work, the steps it took to develop the project, and other potential use cases of OLH’s repository plug-in for library publishers.
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.
Free and open source software (FOSS) powers much of the library publishing ecosystem, yet many potential contributors are uncertain about how they belong in open source software communities. Barriers such as perceived technical requirements, fear of making mistakes, unclear onboarding processes, outdated documentation, exclusionary language, and a lack of visible mentorship can discourage participation, particularly from those without formal software development backgrounds. This interactive, hands-on workshop will provide a welcoming, inclusive, and practical introduction to contributing to open source software projects, emphasizing that meaningful contributions extend far beyond writing code. Led by maintainers and leaders from major open source publishing projects (Pressbooks, Manifold, Coko/Ketty, and the Public Knowledge Project), this session will guide participants through a variety of contribution pathways, including proposing features/reporting issues, improving documentation, testing usability and accessibility, and providing translations. After a brief framing presentation, participants will work in small, facilitated breakout groups with project representatives to explore real project repositories, issue trackers, and contribution guidelines. Attendees will identify contribution opportunities aligned with their interests and skills and take concrete first steps toward participation. The workshop is designed to resemble a supportive edit-a-thon rather than a traditional hackathon, prioritizing learning, confidence-building, and community connection over technical output. This session requires a hands-on format to ensure participants leave not only with conceptual knowledge, but with direct experience navigating open source contribution workflows and engaging with project communities. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how open source projects function, how their expertise is valuable, and how to continue contributing beyond the conference.
In the spring of 2026, the Open Education Network offered Pub101 for Authors for the first time. An adaptation of Pub101, an informal and popular orientation to open textbook publishing for librarians and project managers, Pub101 for Authors was designed to support potential authors who may not have local publishing support, as well as be a building block for librarians who may appreciate infrastructure to scale their program. Using community input from Open Education Network Tea Times and a hands-on 2024 Library Publishing Forum session, the Pub101 Committee adapted the existing open curriculum for an author audience, and identified guest presenters to speak to curricular themes and share their experiences. In this session, we’ll talk about how the adaptation process worked, including how we chose to integrate generative AI considerations into the curriculum, and reflect on the eight hosted synchronous sessions. We’ll talk about what went well, what we plan to revise, and discuss plans for the future. As part of that reflection, we will invite feedback and suggestions for how we can continue to improve and support the OER publishing community.
