Thanks, all, for a great THATCamp Publishing. If you want to refer back to a discussion, check the THATCamp Publishing Google Docs folder created by Aram Zucker-Scharff. You rock, Aram.
One outcome of a very rich discussion this morning that was a consolidation of a few sessions about publishing consultation services and academic outreach is Libpub, a mailing list in Google Groups where we can build community around issues, challenges, questions, and solutions addressed by libraries engaged in scholarly publishing ventures, whether solo or in collaboration with university presses. This is an opportunity for us to learn what each other is doing, both in the hope of sharing knowledge (and thus not reinventing the wheel), furthering it, and working toward common approaches and practices.
The awesome Aram created a Google Doc folder where everyone is dumping their notes. Head over thisaway to check it out.
I’m interested in having a session on new forms of peer review and how this may fit in to the changing modes of tenure. Sarah Werner (@wynkenhimself)’s experience with Shakespeare Quarterly is instructive, as well as Kathleen Fitzgerald’s work.
Should scholars change peer review to something that takes place post-publication rather than pre-publication? And how does this change our review processes, and service work?
Hi all — if you’re on a Mac, to connect to the wi-fi you’ll need to change the DNS settings on your machine. To do so, first
This might be a bit similar to what Mike Furlough and Monica McCormick proposed in “Professional Cultures”, but I’m proposing a session in which we wrestle specifically with how, exactly (I’m thinking we draw up a list), the Digital Library Federation can help people who want to do publishing in libraries. Is it a technical infrastructure? Policy changes? Institutional reorganization? Best practices documents? All or none of the above?
It isn’t just a theoretical question, either — we’ll have an opportunity to present the results of this session at the DLF meeting the very next day, in our panel on “New Modes of Publishing.”
The impulse for THATCamp Publishing came out of the organizers’ participation in a series of workshops on Library Publishing Services, offered by the libraries at Purdue, Georgia Tech, and the University of Utah as part of a project designed “to advance the professionalism of library-based publishing by identifying successful… strategies and services, highlighting best practices, and recommending priorities for building capacity.” We organized THATCamp Publishing not only to enable training in relevant technologies, but also to provide a venue where publishers from a variety of settings–including university presses–could exchange ideas, opinions, and experience.
As luck would have it, the first version of the Library Publishing Services project white paper has just been made available for comment here: wp.sparc.arl.org/lps/
I propose a session to discuss the report–or perhaps just its recommendations (listed below). Many of these are things that university presses are already doing. Others might be simpler for nascent digital library publishers to implement. How are UP practices a model for library publishing? What can library publishers learn from UP experience? What do digital publishers in libraries have to teach UPs?
General Recommendations: “Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success”
Develop Best Practices for Library Publishing
· Develop meaningful impact metrics for library publishing services to demonstrate the effectiveness and value of library-based publishing programs and inform resource allocations.
· Establish editorial quality and performance criteria to increase the value and longevity of the publications that library programs support.
· Promote sustainability best practices to improve the long-term strength and stability of library publishing programs.
· Develop return-on-investment justifications for funding library publishing programs to support increased library budget allocations in support of such programs.
Collaborate to Create Community-based Resources
· Create a shared repository of policies, tools, and templates to improve and accelerate adherence to best practices and encourage community sharing and participation.
· Develop centrally hosted software solutions for publishing platforms to facilitate cost sharing and support robust system functionality and capacity.
· Share service models and revenue approaches to increase library publishing program funding options and facilitate the efficient implementation of successful programs.
· Promote collaborations and partnerships to leverage resources within campuses, across institutions, and between university presses, scholarly societies, and other partners.
Formalize Skills & Training
· Create formal and informal training venues to provide training and community-building resources, including virtual online conferences and seminars.
· Articulate the particular value delivered by library publishing programs to define the role played by library publishing and position such programs with authors/editors, university administrators, funders, and others.
· Establish dedicated library publishing positions to provide program champions and improve program continuity and success.
Session leaders: Kevin Hawkins and Shana Kimball
(Posted on behalf of our colleagues at the University of Michigan Library)
HathiTrust, a shared digital repository, is archiving and providing access to reformatted library holdings and monographs submitted by university presses at partner institutions. However, HathiTrust does not yet have a capacity to archive and provide access to born-digital publisher content.
The University of Michigan Library plans to build a suite of publication tools tied to the HathiTrust, and hopes to eventually offer the tools as a hosted service for HathiTrust members. What are the needs and opportunities for a shared infrastructure for journal publishing?
I’d like to propose a conversation about the issues associated with publishing heavily illustrated books. (As an university press acquisitions editor for art and architectural history, I admit I have a vested interest in this conversation.) Art and architectural history books are particularly complicated enterprises. High quality images are essential to the text and the argument in a scholarly art history monograph, they are not simply “bells-and-whistles.” And art history monographs are substantially more expensive to produce than scholarly books in other fields—indeed they generally cost 60-75% more to publish than un-illustrated history or literature titles. Design requirements, the relationship between image and text, image quality, and permissions fees and restrictions all come into play in terms of the printed book. In the context of electronic publishing, these questions become even more prominent. For example, it can be even more difficult and expensive to obtain electronic publication rights than traditional print rights, especially in the case of works by well-known artists that are still under copyright—think Kahlo or Picasso. In addition, there are still many open questions about how to best exploit the digital medium to convey art historical interpretation in the most effective way. As a consequence, digital publishing in art history has lagged behind electronic publishing in other fields. There have been notable and impressive forays into the enterprise, but they have for the most part centered on museum collections or exhibitions.
By way of some background: The Penn State University Press is a member of a four-press consortium recently funded by the Mellon Foundation to explore these very issues. The presses involved in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI www.arthistorypi.org/) include University of Washington Press (lead), Duke University Press, the University of Pennsylvania press, and Penn State. The AHPI’s goal is to move forward toward creating viable models for publishing electronic scholarly monographs in art history, as well as addressing key issues associated with obtaining images and their pendant permissions.
Topics might include: which tools you like most (and why), what features you find most valuable and what features are still needed, what variables seem most important in determining whether readers are successfully engaged, tips and tricks you’ve found useful, etc.
