Moving Forward Locally and Collectively

Project Management Tools to Get Us Up and Running Kate McCready, University of Minnesota Eighteen months ago, the University of Minnesota launched an initiative to help support the creation of scholarly works. Within that time, we\u27ve evaluated publishing software, created a service model, established a Publishing Services Team, and adopted a variety of tools to help publish and manage our projects. Since we settled on our initial publication platforms, we’ve been able to publish 8 scholarly serials, 1 conference proceeding, and 10 open textbooks. In this session we will give an overview of what it took to get the structure in place at the University of Minnesota Libraries. What evaluation processes did we undertake (both software analysis and needs assessments)? What criteria did we use to evaluate different tools? What policies did we need to develop? How did we get the resources we needed in order to support the work we’d outlined as a priority? We will discuss how we decided which publication types and projects to support along with which policies and guidelines we needed to establish. We will outline how we’re involving the library liaisons and directors in the publications being developed from their departments and colleges. And, we will also present on how we are using project management tools to keep each publication development process in order. Conducting a Comprehensive Survey of Publishing Activity at Your Institution Meredith Kahn, University of Michigan As library publishers expand their range of services and cultivate partnerships with campus units, finding suitable partners can be a challenge. There is likely a significant amount of publishing activity already happening on your campus, some of which could be better served by the library. But how do you find those existing programs and sort out the ones whose needs best meet your service offerings? This lightning talk will describe how we conducted a comprehensive survey of publishing activity at the University of Michigan, trends in our results, and possible methodologies for conducting a similar survey of publishing activity at your own institution. This talk addresses: 1) Diversity: Publishing partners can be found across a range of disciplines, campus units, and publication types. The methodology we present will allow library publishers to discover potential partners beyond the usual suspects, which could contribute to more diversity in the partners and publications that libraries recruit. 2) Bootstrapping: In order to thrive, publishing programs will need to attract a critical mass of partners, particularly if they are expected to recovers costs or generate revenue. Finding these partners from among your own campus units can keep the administrative burden of cost recovery low, as transactions with external partners can be complex from a university accounting standpoint. In addition, local partners can increase the visibility of a library publishing program and yield even more collaborations. Project Meerkat: The Publishing Analytics Data Trust Sarah Melton, Emory University Technology has made collecting data and producing metrics easier than ever before. In the realm of research communication, data from the digital distribution of scholarly content provides new opportunities to understand the publishing ecosystem. However, there is growing concern about ownership of, access to, and analysis of this data, as evidenced by the recently published NISO Consensus Principles on Users\u27 Digital Privacy in Library, Publisher, and Software-Provided Systems. Furthermore, the practical challenges associated with gathering, integrating, interpreting, and reporting usage data limit the ability of individual publishers and libraries to identify—much less predict—important usage trends and opportunities through which they might extend their impact. Project Meerkat (https://educopia.org/research/meerkat) seeks to inform nascent standards and create a neutral apparatus for the ongoing collection and aggregation of usage data related to digital scholarly monographs. Project Meerkat will build a new cooperative—the Publishing Analytics Data Trust—in which members will collaborate to represent the interests of all stakeholders in academic publishing, including researchers and administrators, to sustain the outcomes of Project Meerkat and provide its members with shared governance of collected data. While the organizational model of the cooperative is still to be determined, member organizations will agree to a code of practice as a condition of membership. This talk will present the project and preliminary vision for the cooperative in more detail