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.
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.
Working with authors can be a rewarding, complex, and sometimes frustrating process. Expectations can vary, emotions can run high, and communication can be misinterpreted. How can publishing professionals more effectively provide and receive constructive feedback to facilitate meaningful conversations? In 2024, Angela Watters and Corinne Guimont were assigned as peer mentors through the LPC Peer Mentor program and through our conversations we shared our experiences working with complex projects and authors and the strategies we took to navigate these situations. In this workshop, we plan to share some of our strategies within the framework from the books Crucial Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback. We will examine the three types of feedback (appreciation, coaching, and evaluation) and how to both give and receive feedback especially when the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions are strong (as is often the case when working with an author who is sharing work they have been committed to for several years). We will share the general frameworks and ideas presented by the two books and then provide publishing specific scenarios for attendees to discuss in small groups and then share back to the larger group. We will also provide time for attendees to share their own experiences and strategies for navigating complex, yet constructive, conversations with authors.
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.
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.
Scholarly publication metadata is scattered across multiple platforms, but can be linked together to gain a more complete understanding of research networks and research outputs. This workshop provides practical skills for systematically collecting metadata from the Crossref, ROR, and ORCID APIs. Participants will work with customizable code notebooks, learning to navigate API documentation, configure authentication credentials, and execute requests to retrieve relational metadata relevant to their publications, institutions, and authors.
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.
Library publishers often exist in a liminal space between “technical host” and “strategic publisher.” For years, eScholarship operated largely in the former category – providing platforming for important niche scholarship but lacking the mechanisms to encourage adoption of professional standards. We now recognize that this passive model was ultimately a disservice to our editors, authors, and readers: without adhering to transparent, community-established standards, journals risk being less discoverable, less relevant, and less likely to achieve sustainable funding. To bridge this gap, eScholarship has, in the past several years, pivoted to a proactive, standards-based approach. In 2025, drawing on the JPPS framework, DOAJ criteria, and COPE guidelines, we developed a suite of evaluation rubrics to assess new journal proposals, audit existing journals, and measure the overall health of our own publishing program. These tools have allowed us to replace subjective “gut feeling” decision-making with more objective, transparent, and equitable processes, ensuring our limited resources are invested where they make the most impact. This session offers a replicable framework for similarly professionalizing library publishing portfolios. After presenting our methodology and results, we will review the 3 rubrics in detail before shifting to a hands-on workshop. Attendees will receive modifiable rubric templates and work in small, host-facilitated groups to discuss how adapting these standards to their own local contexts could move us collectively towards a shared model of quality and accountability in library-based publishing.
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.
