March 31, 2022
Documentation and Reflection Tools
One of the goals of the Library Publishing Workflows project team is to encourage and enable members of the library publishing community to create their own publishing workflow documentation. The documentation process can be quite daunting, and it can be difficult to determine where to start with documentation. These tools will help library publishers of all sizes and experience levels create documentation and use it to reflect on and improve their practices.
As part of the grant project, we created and released a complete set of documentation for our twelve partner libraries. These tools have been informed by the work we did with those partner libraries, and the experience and feedback the participants gave throughout the project. We encourage you to read through that documentation to get a feel for what those institutions’ documentation looks like, keeping in mind that yours may end up looking a bit different than any of the others.
We have created two types of tools: documentation tools and reflection tools. The documentation tools will guide you in the work of describing your current publishing workflow, while the reflection tools will help you use that documentation to reflect critically on your practice in a number of areas. These tools are available as copyable or downloadable Google Docs, or as a PDF.
Documentation tools:
- Documenting Your Journal Publishing Workflow, a guide to creating detailed documentation about your journal publishing workflow. The output of this exercise is captured in a spreadsheet version of your workflow.
- Diagramming Your Journal Publishing Workflow, a guide to help you to create the type of graphic representation of your journal publishing workflow that we included in our partner documentation packets.
Reflection tools:
- Are Our Values Reflected in Our Workflow?, a tool for reflecting on your publishing program’s values and how they are reflected in your publishing workflows
- Is Our Work Sustainable and Scalable?, a tool for reflecting on capacity and costs
- What Standards and Policies Are We Using?, a tool for identifying where standards and policies are enacted and where others could be added
- What Other Documentation Do We Need?, a tool for helping you identify where you may benefit from additional documentation
Additional resources:
- Workflow Documentation Spreadsheet Template, a spreadsheet-style template that can be used to document your workflow and complete the Is our work sustainable and scalable? and What standards and policies are we using? reflection exercises
- Detailed Workflow Template, a document-style template that can be used to document your workflow
- A single workflow template, or a multi-workflow template, for creating LPW-style workflow diagrams in diagrams.net
- A a shape library, to make LPW-style workflow diagrams in diagrams.net
We are grateful to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for its generous support of this project work, and to our project partners for willingly and excitedly participating in every step of this work with us.
About Library Publishing Workflows
Library Publishing Workflows (2019-2022) is a project to investigate, synchronize, and model a range of library publishing workflows. Library Publishing Coalition and Educopia Institute are working with 12 partner libraries to document these processes, with the goal of increasing the capacity of libraries to publish open access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. We hope the resulting workflow documentation will be an essential resource for library publishers in creating or evolving their own workflows, and will allow for peer learning and cross-comparison. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services LG-36-19-0133-19.
This publication is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)