Due to the new regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), library publishers are responsible for making their publications—both the content and their platforms—accessible. This roundtable discussion will have representatives from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Tech, Penn State University, and University of Minnesota discuss the unique challenges of creating accessible content. These challenges include working with different publishing platforms, publication types, and accessibility tools; applying best practices and creating workflows; and working with publication outputs, namely PDFs. Panelists will also discuss how changes in publishing and accessibility technologies have changed their approaches to remediation work (e.g., updates to screen readers) as well as specific remediation challenges, like writing and placing long descriptions for complex images and tagging tables. This presentation will address best practices and challenges creating accessible content, from the source file or platform export to the final tagged PDF. Panelists will also discuss the unique needs and use cases of scholarly publications and their experiences communicating those needs to their universities.
Building on work by the Association of University Presses’ Library Relations Committee and initiatives spearheaded by leaders of the HBCU Library Alliance, University of Vermont Press, and University of Guam Press, this panel demonstrates how libraries and university presses can develop and sustain support models for Black and Indigenous scholars. We will discuss training and mentoring programs, intentional acquisitions and peer review practices, open access and other equity concerns.
Academic journals are foundational infrastructure for emerging scholarly fields, yet launching and sustaining one within a library publishing context presents unique operational, staffing, and governance challenges. This session presents a detailed case study of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE), tracing its evolution from a three-person passion project to a structured, values-guided publishing initiative with a robust editorial and production ecosystem. In this session, we outline the processes and scaffolding that have supported JOERHE’s growth, including: establishing governance roles and workflows; recruiting and training editorial and production staff; defining quality assurance checkpoints; implementing publication platforms and tooling; and crafting documentation for consistency and onboarding. We’ll share practical metrics and milestones, such as editorial turnaround times, role definitions, and staffing transitions, to illustrate how operational choices impact sustainability. Attendees will gain insights into balancing volunteer contributions with structured responsibilities, aligning journal values with operational practices, and leveraging library publishing resources to support emerging scholars. We’ll also discuss how we manage cross-institutional collaboration, inclusive recruitment practices, and capacity building for early-career contributors interested in editorial participation. By focusing on what it takes to manage and grow a library-supported journal, this session offers actionable guidance for academic libraries, library publishing programs, and collaborative publishing initiatives seeking to launch, refine, or scale their own journals. Participants will leave with concrete strategies and templates to help them operationalize editorial standards, build resilient workflows, and support community participation in scholarly publishing.
TEI is a mature technology for encoding scholarly texts, but publishing those texts on the web in a sustainable, maintainable way can be challenging. Projects invest significant effort in encoding content, only to find that rendering and long-term maintenance present their own set of problems. And while XSLT has long been the default tool for TEI transformation, it comes with tradeoffs—browser support is being deprecated, the learning curve is steep, and many projects find themselves maintaining bespoke pipelines that are difficult to update or hand off to new staff. When the University of Rochester’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library received NEH funding to modernize the Middle English Text Series (METS), the goal was straightforward: replace an aging Drupal site with something modern and sustainable. What emerged was a modern alternative to XSLT-based rendering: a Rails GraphQL API with a React frontend that harvests TEI documents, normalizes them, and renders them in a responsive web reader. The same TEI files also flow to InDesign for print production, giving Rochester a true single-source publishing pipeline. A year later, the California Digital Library faced a related problem. They had nearly 1,900 UC Press e-books encoded in TEI, but the in-house system used to render them had become difficult to maintain. Standard XSLT transformation tools proved unworkable for their collection. But the parsing engine developed for Rochester offered a path forward. CDL commissioned an adaptation to convert their TEI into static, sustainable HTML, a concrete example of library publishers building on each other’s investments. This panel brings together the library publishers and developers behind both projects to discuss the promises and pain points of TEI-based publishing. We’ll share practical lessons on building modern TEI pipelines and reflect on how grant-funded infrastructure can benefit institutions beyond the original project.
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.
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.
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.
