Journal Programs and Cross-Disciplinary Research

This white paper expands upon a presentation made by the author at the Merrill Advanced Studies Center Research Retreat, July 10-12, 2019. The presentation slides can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/1808/29927.In order for innovative cross-disciplinary research to find its audience, it must be easily discovered by scholars, professional practitioners, and the public. Journal publishing programs in libraries operate under the principle that investment in open access publishing of quality peer-reviewed research is the best way to make that research visible to a global audience and to shift control of publishing from commercial entities to the academy. Library publishers are therefore not constrained, as commercial publishers are, by the need to publish only research that will ensure a profit. This means that library publishing programs can provide a home for cross-disciplinary journals that break new ground and that may take time to find an audience. The lack of a profit imperative for library publishing programs also means that the platform for hosting journals is provided to journals at little or no cost, which makes library publishing very attractive to editors looking for a place to publish a new journal. Once the infrastructure is operational, the cost to add a new journal to the system is negligible because the costs of maintaining the technology are already covered. This lowers the financial barriers to starting new journals, allowing editors to focus on the task of finding and publishing excellent peer-reviewed research instead of fundraising. Journal platforms used by library publishers are designed so that journals published on those systems automatically follow best practices and standards, such as those outlined by the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-MPH) that make the content readily discoverable by internet search engines. These platforms also integrate the use of machine-readable licenses that clearly indicate how the content can be used. In addition to infrastructure that ensures visibility, library publishing programs benefit from existing library expertise in collaboration, technology, copyright, data management, scholarly publishing, information literacy, digital preservation, and the effective promotion of online research

If They See Them, They Will Come​: Improving Visibility and Re-use of Library-Published Journals

This presentation was given at the Library Publishing Forum, held May 21-23, 2018 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Library-published journals all need visibility in order to survive and thrive. Visibility increases the journal’s standing in the scholarly community and attracts readers, submissions, reviewers, and editors. It’s especially important for niche journals or those that are just launching to take steps to make sure that journal content reaches as wide an audience as possible. The success and visibility of library-published journals also enhances the prestige of the library publishing program and encourages more journals to publish with the library. This presentation outlines the practical steps that the University of Kansas Libraries' Digital Publishing Services and our editors have taken together to successfully increase the visibility of our journals and their content. Our strategies include making almost all of our journals open access, with machine-readable Creative Commons licenses added wherever possible; adding back issues to the journal website; providing DOIs for journal articles through CrossRef; adding journals and article metadata to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); encouraging editors/authors to talk about the journal/articles at their discipline's conferences and on discussion lists; putting policies on sharing in the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publisher policies; advising editors about working with aggregators, as well as more unusual methods such as providing a venue for editor-hosted meetings of reviewers and other members of the scholarly community in that discipline and offering layout services free of charge

Open Access Week: It Takes a Village

This presentation outlines the strategies used at the University of Kansas Libraries to plan successful Open Access Week programming and offers pointers for other libraries planning Open Access Week events

Open Access Electronic Journal Publishing: Opportunities at KU

This presentation was given at the University of Kansas Medical Center Research & Discovery Grand Rounds session held on January 10, 2020. The video recording of the presentation is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/90oMqWBmD7M .This presentation discusses journal publishing opportunities offered by the University of Kansas Libraries, the reasons why library journal publishing programs were developed, and how that affects the motivations and publishing models of these programs. In addition, this presentation outlines the mechanisms that library publishers use to increase the visibility and impact of the scholarly research that they publish

Supplementary Files in Theses and Dissertations

This presentation was given at the conference "Beyond the PDF: Planning for the Future of the Dissertation" on March 15, 2018, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa.When students submit their born-digital theses and dissertations to universities as a condition of graduation, they sometimes include supplementary files in a variety of formats other than PDFs. This presentation presents the results of an analysis of the supplementary files in the Dissertations and Theses community in KU ScholarWorks, the online institutional repository of the University of Kansas. The presentation includes statistics about the number of theses and dissertations that include supplementary files, as well as details about the number of supplementary files and their formats. It concludes with an open discussion of possible strategies employed by universities for preservation and long-term use of these materials

Sowing the Seeds of Journal Success: Cultivating Relationships with Journal Editors and Staff

The slides in this article were originally presented at the IFLA 2016 Satellite Meeting -- Libraries as Publishers: Building a Global Community, held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 10-12, 2016.Since 2007, the University of Kansas Libraries has provided support to the KU community for the management and distribution of online scholarly journals and other publications, and currents hosts over 20 scholarly journals. While much of the literature about library publishing focuses on issues such as technical infrastructure, policies and processes, skills and training, or economic models–all important areas to address, to be sure–this presentation will focus on a less documented aspect of library-based publishing: building and maintaining relationships with journal editors and staff. This is often time consuming and hidden labor, but has been key to the ongoing viability of our program. Through regular and ongoing engagement with our journal partners we can keep abreast of their evolving needs, catch potential issues before they blossom into problems, and create goodwill and trust that we can tap into down the road when advocating to administrators about the value of the publishing program. We will share and discuss the various outreach and engagement efforts (successful and unsuccessful) that we have pursued, including regular meetings of our “Editors Forum”, an email listserv for journal editors and staff, regular check-ins regarding journal operations, and coordinated efforts with related library initiatives such as open access and digital humanities. We will advocate for an intentional, multi-faceted approach to building relationships with journal editors as a key aspect of a sustainable publishing program

Digital Publishing Services at KU Libraries

This poster and accompanying materials were presented at the Library Publishing Coalition Forum held in Kansas City, MO on March 5, 2014

Copyright & Online Courses

Presentation given at a Lunch & Learn session hosted by the KU Center for Online and Distance Learning on November 13, 2012. The slides in this presentation were based upon an earlier presentation given by Ada Emmett, Scholarly Communication program head, KU Libraries, and Rachel Rolf, Associate Counsel, Office of the General Counsel. A video recording of this presentation is available by clicking on the Published Version link in this record

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETD) Formatting & Copyright workshop

This is the recording of the December 3, 2015 Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Formatting & Copyright workshop. See the links used in the presentation, as well as information updated since the presentation, in the Additional Resources file in this record. Note: The Copyright section of the ETD Release Form referred to in the latter part of the presentation has since changed to include a third choice: "Copyrighted material used with owner’s permission (provide documentation of permissions)."This workshop is for graduate students at any stage of the thesis or dissertation process. If you're just starting out, you can build your own template for future use. If you’re nearing the end, come join us for some quick tips that will save you some time and trouble as you move forward. Here are the ETD Formatting topics covered: 1. General information about the thesis/dissertation process, 2. Content order, 3. Title and acceptance pages, 4. Page numbering, 5. Building an automatic table of contents using heading styles, 6. Generating a table of contents, 7. Captioning figures, equations, tables and more, 8. Embedding fonts, and 9. Converting to PDF. The workshop also covers the basics of copyright for grad students as scholars and teachers, including copyright considerations for theses and dissertations, and resources in the KU Libraries that can help. Here are the Copyright topics covered: 1. General information about copyrights in the U.S., 2. Copyrights and scholarly publications, including theses and dissertations, 3. Fair Use and scholarly work, 4. The Copyright Decision Tree – A tool developed at KU to help users decide whether they are using copyrighted materials in compliance with U.S. copyright law and/or fair use, 5. Copyright services provided by the Libraries’ Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright