Next Generation Library Publishing

Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field explores the relationship between today’s varied scholarly publishing service providers and the academic values that we believe should guide their work.

We begin with a brief definition of the academic mission and then briefly probe how profit motivations have come to dominate the current scholarly publishing marketplace. We consider and analyze how academic players from a range of stakeholder backgrounds have produced a broad range of “values and principles” statements, documents, and manifestos in hopes of recalibrating the scholarly publishing landscape. We contextualize this work within the broader landscape of assessment against values and principles.

Based on our findings, we recommend that academic stakeholders more concretely define their values and principles in terms of measurable actions, so these statements can be readily assessed and audited. We propose a methodology for auditing publishing service providers to ensure adherence to agreed-upon academic values and principles, with the dual goals of helping to guide values-informed decision making by academic stakeholders and encouraging values alignment efforts by infrastructure providers. We also explore ways to structure this assessment framework both to avoid barriers to entry and to discourage the kinds of “gaming the system” activities that so often accompany audits and ranking mechanisms. We close by pointing to work we have recently undertaken: the development of the Values and Principles Framework and Assessment Checklist, which were issued for public comment in July-August, 2020 on CommonPlace (hosted by the Knowledge Futures Group).  

• Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field (October 2020)

Errata (Nov 5, 2020): Corrections and clarifications to this publication are specified in the text, with a footnote providing notification that a change occurred and on what date that change occurred. On page 5, the authors mistakenly included Frontiers in (an independent, mixed model OA publisher) instead of F1000 (an OA publisher whose acquisition by Taylor & Francis was announced 10-Jan-2020) in a list of organizations that have been acquired by or merged with larger, profit-driven publishers and publishing infrastructure providers. This error was corrected, and a footnote documents the change.

Following more than a year of research and engagement with library publishers, the Next Gen Library Publishing (NGLP) project is pleased to announce its technical development directions.

We are now commissioning the build of two components: a cross-content web delivery/discovery platform and a cross-platform administrative dashboard for journal publishing. These elements will be designed to help bridge journal publishing platforms (e.g., Open Journal Systems, Janeway) and repository platforms (e.g.,  DSpace). All of our work will be released with open source licenses, and we will be working directly with at least three service providers that plan to provide hosted publishing services based in part on this development work: California Digital Library, Longleaf Services, Inc., and LYRASIS. 

We hope to continue building strong partnerships with library publishers throughout this development phase, and we invite participation and feedback from all practitioners in library publishing and campus-based publishing efforts. Please sign up to participate.

Background

In August 2019, the Next Generation Library Publishing project was launched through a partnership of Educopia Institute, California Digital Library, and Stratos, and in close collaboration with LYRASIS, Longleaf, and COAR. Funded with generous support from Arcadia, the purpose of this 2.5 year project is to improve the publishing pathways and choices available to authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructures to support library and other campus-based publishing activities. 

In the first year of this project, the NGLP team conducted focus groups, workshops, interviews, and issued a “Request for Ideas” in order to identify the needs, challenges, and gaps experienced by more than 150 library publishing community members, including library publishers, university presses, tool developers, service providers, authors, and editors. We also held information sessions with seven open-source publishing platforms that align with our research findings, in order to evaluate their current offerings, roadmaps, and business/community models. 

Library publishers were clear and consistent about their needs. Across our array of communications and assessments, library publishers asked us to integrate existing open source content delivery and publishing platforms and to focus the project’s budget for software development on filling gaps and building out integrations. Library publishers also specified their need for mission-aligned yet affordable service providers to offer turnkey and supported solutions based on open infrastructure. Additional needs included better tools for multi-journal/consortial publishing, robust reporting across open source platforms, more advanced digital publishing, supporting infrastructure for metadata, and, finally, migration support to the new emerging hosted services that come from this effort. The library publishing community expressed a desire to begin with journal support and integrated journal and IR solutions, and then to expand from this strong foundation to include other types of publications in the future. 

The synthesized findings from the NGLP team’s varied research instruments and processes have now informed our technical development roadmap. Our goal is to offer the community a modular suite of platforms and components that can be combined flexibly to meet the needs of different stakeholder groups, depending on whether their need is a new journal solution or a combined IR and journal solution. 

NGLP will support the use of existing open source technologies by building two new components that 1) improve cross-content web delivery and discovery and 2) improve cross-platform data analysis. NGLP will also investigate how best to integrate existing and new tools and migrate early adopters onto the new architecture. A critical piece of the success of this project will be seeding an ecosystem of mission-aligned service providers as many library publishers do not want to host and run their own open source software. 

With this roadmap in mind, our next step is to commission the build of two software components.

1. The first component is the cross-content web delivery and discovery platform that can pull in content from journal manuscript submission systems such as OJS and Janeway, and combine it with content from other sources such as institutional repositories for a multi-leveled branding and content display and search.

2. The second component is a cross-platform administrative dashboard that pulls activity and usage data from multiple platforms and offers reports that offer insight into an institution’s publishing program. 

The initial open source platforms that NGLP will seek to integrate will be OJS and Janeway for journal editorial and production support, and DSpace for institutional repository support. Additional platforms and tools may be added and combined with the commissioned new component builds. 

NGLP is now entering into a rapid requirements discovery phase for the two components mentioned above. We are interested in community participation in this effort and are holding work sessions in December with follow-up working groups in early 2021.

We invite all practitioners in library and campus-based publishing to sign up to participate.

Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (February 2021)

This report documents the design, methods, results, and recommendations of the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project team’s 2019-2021 study of library publishing infrastructure gaps and requirements:

• Library Publishing Infrastructure: Assembling New Solutions (Report)

This research was designed to accomplish two related goals:

1. to reveal and chronicle library publishing stakeholders’ current needs, interests, and desires regarding the tools and environments that support their publishing activities
2. to develop a meta-understanding of the open-source tools and environments available for publishing, how those tools and environments might be combined and built upon, and where gaps between them might be mitigated through standards, scripts, and documentation.

Based on our research interactions with more than 150 library publishing stakeholders, we have identified the remarkably consistent needs and desires of library publishers today, including the following: 

• Ways to integrate existing platforms and tools rather than building new ones 
• Unified web delivery and discovery options that work across those platforms 
• An administrative dashboard that can provide central control and reporting options  
• Choices among a range of hosted, turnkey solutions  
• Community-led, rather than commercial, modes of governance and sustainability for tools, platforms, and service providers

This report seeks to make all of our research findings available to and usable by other teams—including projects, tool developers, service providers, and communities of practice. We hope many can use this synthesis of our research to inform their understanding of the interests, needs, gaps, and opportunities in the growing library publishing field.

Community-based values and principles sit at the core of the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project, and members of our team have done extensive work over the past year researching and synthesizing the values and principles identified by individuals, organizations, and coalitions throughout the open knowledge community.

In the course of developing the project and creating resources such as the draft Values and Principles Framework & Assessment Checklist and Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field, we found and reviewed dozens of values and principles statements, manifestos, articles, and book chapters spanning the worlds of scholarly communications, open data, open science, and open source software. 

In addition to informing our work on the project, we think the annotated bibliography that we’ve built along the way might be of use to others on similar journeys. To enable others to dig deeply into the articles and values statements contained within this annotated bibliography now and in the future, we are releasing it now as a formal publication. We will continue to add to this resource through the end of the NGLP project in August, 2022. If you find an article or values statement that you think would benefit this project, please reach out to Brandon Locke (brandon@educopia.org) to suggest its inclusion:

• Living Our Values and Principles (Annotated Bibliography)

In the second year of the NGLP project (September 2020-August 2021), we delivered research findings based on extensive community engagement, produced specifications for technologies to unite and complement existing open source tools, progressed towards minimum viable products (MVPs), and initiated coordination of three pilot implementations of publishing solutions that represent different service use cases. We also produced, vetted, and refined the FOREST Framework (forthcoming 2022), a values and principles alignment mechanism that undergirds and supports the NGLP approach:

• Growing a FOREST: Values-Aligned Approaches to Transformative Scholarly Communication (March 2022)

Our second year work and outputs include: 

• Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue, SComCat (February 2021), a tool to assist stakeholders in making decisions about which technologies they will adopt by providing an overview of the functionality, organizational models, dependencies, use of standards, and levels of adoption of each.
• Living Our Values and Principles (October 2020), a white paper that examines varied “values and principles” efforts in scholarly communication, and that proposes a methodology for incentivizing stronger adherence to agreed-upon academic values and principles.
• “Library Publishing Infrastructure: Assembling New Solutions” (March 2021), a report that shares what we learned from our extensive research with more than 150 library publishing stakeholders and how it guides our work.
• Specifications for a Web Delivery Platform (WDP MVP) and an Administrative Dashboard (AD MVP) and their potential connections to existing open source platforms to facilitate end-to-end repository and publishing 
• Development on the WDP and AD components (with MVP completion in early 2022)
• Definition of three distinct publishing use cases with three pilot partners (pilots to launch April 2022)
• Attracted 40 library publishers to serve as user-group volunteers throughout the remainder of the project period

NGLP’s approach is grounded in values and principles. We seek to empower values-aligned organizations, center values-based practices in scholarly communication, and hold communities accountable to these values.

This full report provides a detailed account of NGLP’s second-year accomplishments, outputs, and increasing impact and describes in depth the values-based framework through which we approach our work.

This FOREST Framework is intended to help scholarly communication organizations and communities to demonstrate, evaluate, and ultimately improve their alignment with key values, including:

Financial and Organizational Sustainability
Openness
Representative Governance
Equity, Accessibility, and Anti-Oppression
Sharing of Knowledge
Transparency

These six core values have appeared in dozens of manifestos, open letters, and other statements issued by a broad range of academic stakeholders, including faculty, students, publishers, librarians, and open source tool developers. They were selected, defined, vetted publicly, and refined by the Next Generation Library Publishing team.

The FOREST Framework offers concrete mechanisms that communities can use to assess how their policies and practices align with these values and their associated principles. The framework has been designed to recognize growth and progress (rather than just results), identify strengths (rather than only deficits), and center aspirations (rather than descriptions of the current state). The framework therefore strives to account for differences in organizational maturity and mission, recognizing that these may influence the implementation of values and principles. Accountability assessment must strike a tough balance by providing enough structure and information to engender trust, guide investments, and incentivize alignment with shared principles and standards but not be so rigid as to create artificial barriers to entry into these marketplaces:

• FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication (May 2022)

Values and Principles Framework (draft issued for public review, August-September 2020)

Values and Principles Assessment Checklist (draft issued for public review, August-September 2020)

Encouraging Adherence to Values and Principles White Paper (March-April 2020)

• GoogleDoc version for comment (closed as of April 2020, but viewable)
• Values and Principles Matrix
• Annotated Bibliography