Library publishing often relies on librarians taking on journal “hosting” or publishing roles, despite having little experience with publishing. Key to this role is working with editors, who may also be new to the “back end” of publishing. Whether nurturing a collection of existing journals, or guiding a new journal toward its first issue, it can be challenging to build relationships with editors, understand the needs of the journals, and build the necessary skills. As a librarian who is still relatively new to library publishing, I am interested in the practices, ideas, and challenges of others who are working with similar programs. The session will be a semi-structured discussion intended to provide librarians an opportunity to ask questions and share strategies. Likely discussion topics include: • Strategies for communicating with editors and understanding their needs • Identifying and prioritizing useful library interventions (some possibilities: indexing, preservation, and accessibility) • Resources and strategies for learning about publishing • Decision making around taking on new journals • Development of policies to guide this work In order to help attendees turn this conversation into action, we will use a notes document to gather suggestions and resources.
Library publishers are responsible for more than just the content we publish; we are responsible for the containers we put it in. While we champion Open Access, the infrastructure we lease from vendors often undermines the values we claim to uphold. Consider the reality of our vendor platforms: You can have perfectly accessible PDFs, but if a blind author cannot navigate the submission dashboard, your program is exclusionary. Similarly, you can remove the financial paywall for your readers, but if your vendor replaces it with a surveillance dragnet, you haven’t made the research free—you’ve just changed the currency. The commercial surveillance of user data in academic systems continues to grow unchecked. The April 2026 Department of Justice (DOJ) deadline for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance has passed, leaving libraries to face legal liability for the accessibility of these third-party platforms. We cannot code our way out of these problems; we must negotiate our way out. This session frames the license agreement as the library’s and library publisher’s most powerful tool for enforcing equity. We will present SPARC’s work on privacy contract negotiation alongside an initial landscape analysis of accessibility clauses. Participants will discuss how to move beyond checking the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) to demanding binding contract language that protects user data and ensures legal compliance. Join us to strategize how we can hold our infrastructure vendors accountable to our values and the law.
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.
