Building content and community: digital publishing services at the University of Kansas: The Session Blog
July 10th, 2009 at 2:30pm
Presenters: Brian Rosenblum and Scott Hanrath
Background
(Source)
Contact: brianlee@ku.edu
Brian Rosenblum is Scholarly Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Kansas Libraries, where he has administrative, production and outreach responsibilities in support of a variety of digital initiatives and scholarly communication activities, including KU’s institutional repository and digital publishing services. Prior to joining the Kansas digital initiatives program in 2005, Brian worked at the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University Library, University of Michigan, where he helped develop numerous electronic journals and digital scholarly projects.
Session Overview
Brian Rosenblum outlined that in 2006 the University of Kansas (KU) library looked at new roles to support scholarship on campus. A survey was undertaken to determine campus needs. The university comprises some 28,000 students and 2,300 faculty.
Initially it was hard to ascertain which journals were asscociated with faculty research. The library is still encountering new journal activities. Local journal editors were interviewed to discuss needs, and a forum was formed to build relationships with editors.
New roles for the library included stewardship of scholarship production at Kansas, as well as working directly with faculty in terms of metadata tools and tagging systems. A mandate was established for the digital publishing services, including supporting faculty in all forms of digital publishing, exploring new publishing models, and promoting increased visibility and access. In 2005 the KU Scholarworks Repository was launched; however this does not have author submission or peer review tools that OJS has.
Rosenblum gave some examples of KU digital publishing. The Biodiversity Informatics journal was launched by a single professor using OJS. This would not have been possible within the standard printing process. Several journals are available as back issues online (subject to a 3 year lag), enabling much wider access, of particular relevance to South America. Other journals are in traditional print, but also available online with immediate access. Rosenblum showed some download statistics, but these are coarse measures at present, needing more informatics for detailed records.
KU is the first public US university to have an open access research policy, announced in June 2009.
Scott Hanrath, as technical lead, outlined the technical aspects of digital publishing at KU. Technical roles have been split up between different departments, so there is a need for careful communication , planning, and identification of who does what. Customization of OJS has been mainly cosmetic, altering the look and feel of sites. Un-needed options have been stripped out. IT support staff have created the ‘KUdifier’ plug-in to personalize OJS. For the import process it’s been found to be better to work in smaller chunks, either 2 – 4 years of a journal or less than 400 articles at a time.
Rosenblum outlined the following points for the future: a more sustainable workflow, a need to outline the value of this service (especially in the light of budgetary cuts), improved OJS training, editorial advisory board meetings, and hosting a larger editors’ forum.
Question
A member of the audience asked about the process that led to the university adopting open access. Rosenblum replied that the tenured librarians encouraged the initiative to originate from the education department. There was a small, but vocal opposition. A visit from John Willinsky for consultation in February encouraged the process. The motion was passed with 22 in favour, and one abstention.
Resources
Brian Rosenblum Scientific Commons
